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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Will Murray on Dash(iell) and (Lester) Dent

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Will Murray on Dash(iell) and (Lester) Dent

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Frequent guest columnist, New Pulp maven Will Murray, is back with more speculation: this time linking about the two biggest names in Pulp. Was Dashiell Hammett a Lester Dent fan? Well, let’s find out! 

The so-called Pulp Jungle, as Frank Gruber once called it, was a densely populated wonderland, at least insofar the greatest concentration of pulp magazine writers lived in or in close proximity to New York City, where most of the publishers were established.

Late in life, Theodore Tinsley, a regular contributor to Black Mask, The Shadow, as well as numerous other top pulp titles, recalled:

“Pulpland seems a strange, purple-clouded island, in a warm sea somewhere far off, where some of the damnedest elves and goblins I ever met used to say and do strange things, especially when drunk.”

Thanks in part to the American Fiction Guild, a writer’s association which flourished during the 1930s, a great many of these writers and their editors convened for Friday luncheon gatherings at Rosoff’s restaurant on 43rd Street. They socialized, vacationed together, dated, and even married. It was virtually a subculture delineated and confined by a common vocational focus.

Others, scattered throughout the country, kept in touch by letter. But not everyone knew everyone else, except possibly by reputation.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Hammett & ‘The Girl with the Silver Eyes’ (My intro)

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Hammett & ‘The Girl with the Silver Eyes’ (My intro)

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“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

 

Pulp Fest took place last week in Pittsburgh. It’s a really cool event, and the Hilton Doubletree is a nice site. Steeger Books rolls out its summer line at this event. And for the second year in a row, there was a new Continental Op collection, with a brand new intro by yours truly. This is my sixth intro for Steeger, and getting to write about Dashiell Hammett is a definite thrill. It’s about four times as long as my Fast One Intro. I could dig into Hammett for months. Check out my intro to that Volume Two, and then check out the book itself. Hammett is regarded as the Master, for good reason.

The Complete Black Mask Cases of the Continental Op, Volume One: Zigzags of Treachery, ended with “The House in Turk Street.” That was the tenth Op story, and as I wrote in the introduction to that volume:

‘For me, it’s in “The House in Turk Street” (which was adapted for the 2002 Samuel L. Jackson movie, No Good Deed) where we really see the classic Hammett for the first time. The characters, the pace, the tension, the plot elements: he was moving from learning, to improving, to the verge of mastering.’

Hammett had been honing his craft, and “The House on Turk Street” really saw things come together. While that was the first Hammett story to appear under Phil Cody’s editorship, it was surely accepted by George Sutton.

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A Black (Gat) in the Hand: Will Murray on Dashiell Hammett’s Elusive Glass Key

A Black (Gat) in the Hand: Will Murray on Dashiell Hammett’s Elusive Glass Key

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Back in June, Will Murray donned his deerstalker and showed that Dashiell Hammett was not the author of “The Diamond Wager.” He’s back again this week with his magnifying glass out and looking into the origin of the title to Hammett’s novel, The Glass Key. Read on! And if you’ve not read The Glass Key (which is also a terrific movie starring Alan Ladd), you’re missing out on one of the best hardboiled novels written. The game is afoot (again)!

Back in the 1980s, I knew a pulp writer named Charles Spain Verral, who was perhaps best known for writing the Bill Barnes, Air Adventurer Magazine lead novels as George L. Eaton. Chuck told me an illuminating story about Dashiell Hammett that was circulating in the New York City literary scene during the 1930s.

Hammett needed an advance from Black Mask magazine, which editor Joe Shaw was willing to give on the basis of a title alone. Hammett came up with “The Glass Key.” And was stuck with it because in those days the magazine cover was printed a month or more in advance of the interior of the magazine, and The Glass Key was to be the cover story of the next scheduled issue. Compounding the problem, the serial was announced by that title in the issue preceding the one where it was cover-featured. Hammett was to write the novel in installments, with the first one appearing in print before he finished the work.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Ten Pulp Things I Think I Think (August 2023)

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Ten Pulp Things I Think I Think (August 2023)

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“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

Ten Things I Think I Think has become an occasional feature in my column here. I’m always up to my elbows in various reading, writing, gaming, TV/streaming, radio plays, and audiobooks.

So it’s probably no surprise I like the idea of picking one of those areas, and sharing my sorta-random thoughts on things. Similar to my What I’ve Been Watching/Reading posts. Because I like to use my column here at Black Gate to share things I like with folks, I’m usually pretty positive. But in talking about ten different topics, I’m bound to hit on some things I’m not as crazy about. So be it.

I wrapped up our Talking Tolkien series with a Tolkien-centric version a few weeks ago. It was fun. So, I figured why not do one for A (Black) Gat in the Hand as we get up to full steam.

Not making the list are recent items such as I re-watched a couple episodes of Powers Boothe’s Philip Marlowe series. It’s still really good. I also watched a few of Stacy Keach’s second-run as Mike Hammer. Those shows are my favorite version of Hammer, but  one or two at a time is enough. They seem a little cheesy – they didn’t age particularly well. But still fun to watch. Keach is my picture of Hammer.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Will Murray and The Diamond Wager Caper – Not Dashiell Hammett?

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Will Murray and The Diamond Wager Caper – Not Dashiell Hammett?

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“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

A (Black) Gat in the Hand makes its first-ever Friday appearance as Will Murray takes us down some Mean Streets never explored before. And he’s gonna need a blackjack and a roscoe in hand for this one. I’m not gonna spill the beans about Dashiell Hammett’s “The Diamond Wager”, but you’re definitely going to want to read on to find out the real truth behind that story. Take it away, Will!

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Recently, friend and fellow researcher Evan Lewis posted on Facebook the text of a story that first appeared in the October 19, 1929 issue of Detective Fiction Weekly entitled “The Diamond Wager.“ This was featured in a blogpost he originally posted in June, 2013.

The story ran under the byline of Samuel Dashiell. According to Evan, it is widely believed to be the work of Samuel Dashiell Hammett, and constitutes Hammett’s only contribution to Detective Fiction Weekly.

“The Diamond Wager” is a 7,600 word yarn of a gentleman thief set in Paris. For a tale purportedly written by the author of The Maltese Falcon, it’s underwhelming. Opinions on the story’s worth do not vary much. When compared to Hammett’s oeuvre, it’s an oddball outlier, a tongue-in-cheek relic of the Golden Age of mystery stories.

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Sam Spade and the Pursuit of Empty Dreams

Sam Spade and the Pursuit of Empty Dreams

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NOTE: The following article was first published on February 21, 2010. Thank you to John O’Neill for agreeing to reprint these early articles, so they are archived at Black Gate which has been my home for over 5 years and 250 articles now. Thank you to Deuce Richardson without whom I never would have found my way. Minor editorial changes have been made in some cases to the original text.

First FalconFalcon pbkMuch of what has been written about Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon focuses on the novel as groundbreaking in its realistic portrayal of detective work. More in-depth literary studies tend to focus on the significance of Hammett’s shift in protagonist from the incorruptible and nameless Continental Op of his earlier work to the jaded self-portrait of the author as Sam Spade. In my view, this transition is primarily noteworthy in that Hammett’s protagonist changed from an idealized conception of the man he might have become had he remained a Pinkerton Operative (the Continental Op is based on Hammett’s boss during his stint with the Pinkerton Agency) to a more self-reflective portrayal of a man mired in moral conflict. Hammett’s own moral crisis would color his fiction from this point until he resolved his dilemma and settled into a life alternating his celebrity status with reclusiveness – a life whose one constant was Hammett’s complete lack of creative output for his remaining 27 years.

Many have speculated why Hammett’s creativity dried up when he and his muse and mistress Lillian Hellman had settled comfortably into something approaching unwedded bliss as the Nick and Nora Charles of the real world. My own opinion has been that once freed of the conflict of whether or not to walk a path of integrity or give in to the encroaching corruption that constantly assailed his world, Hammett had nothing further to draw upon for inspiration. Resolution was tantamount to becoming a spent force and Hammett was finished as a writer. The fact that he realized this dilemma was inescapable lies at the heart of both The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key in their pursuit of empty dreams incapable of satisfying the characters whose lust is so great they are willing to die for or kill in their futile quests.

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Unearthing Solomon’s Vineyard

Unearthing Solomon’s Vineyard

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latimersolomonslatimer_solomons_vineyardJonathan Latimer is sadly forgotten today. There was a time when his screwball private eye series featuring the rarely sober Bill Crane were bestsellers and even made the transition to the silver screen in the late 1930s, courtesy of Universal Pictures, in a fun trio of B-movies. Latimer was a respected Hollywood screenwriter of the 1940s who crossed over to television from the 1950s through the early 1970s, writing for such series as Perry Mason and Columbo. He also achieved instant notoriety as the author of the hardboiled detective novel, Solomon’s Vineyard, which was banned almost upon publication in 1941 and remained unavailable in its original form in the U.S. for decades.

The general consensus is with Solomon’s Vineyard, Latimer turned up the heat on hardboiled detective fiction and blurred the line between pulp and pornography. Most critics will claim that even today, readers would be hard-pressed to find a tougher or more shocking private eye novel. While public domain copies riddled with typos are easy to come by, I finally tracked down an affordable copy of an earlier edition and read the book for myself. I was shocked as well, not by the content, but to learn the book is clearly intended as yet another of Latimer’s laugh-out-loud farces, despite its reputation.

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Of Joe Gores, Ace Atkins and Wrestling with Hammett’s Legend

Of Joe Gores, Ace Atkins and Wrestling with Hammett’s Legend

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4330071663_4e7a003ec4The recent passing of veteran mystery writer Joe Gores on the anniversary of Dashiell Hammett’s own death set me thinking about Hammett’s enduring legacy and continuing influence on detective fiction.

Gores was born too late to fight for a place in the Holy Trinity of hardboiled detective fiction alongside Hammett’s immediate heirs Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, but the influence of the man who did so much to transform hardboiled fiction was no less strong in Gores’ work.

While most commentators would agree that the DKA series was Gores’ crowning achievement, my own preference was for his 1975 novel, Hammett and his last book, 2009’s Spade & Archer.

Gores’ death led me to pick up Ace Atkins’ 2009 novel, Devil’s Garden. Atkins’ book is a semi-fictionalized account of Hammett’s real-life involvement as a Pinketeron operative gathering evidence for the scandalous Fatty Arbuckle trial in 1921.

devilsgardeninside-198x300Thirty-five years earlier, Gores had likewise fictionalized Hammett’s Pinkerton days when he immersed himself in real and imagined political corruption in Roaring Twenties San Francisco in his novel, Hammett.

When granted the honor of penning a prequel to The Maltese Falcon, Gores later drew heavily on Hammett’s own experiences as a Pinkerton to fill in Sam Spade’s back story. Atkins has much in common with Gores in that both men are natural writers who can easily make one envious of their prodigious talent and, at times, frustrated that they aren’t quite as perfect as you wish them to be.

No matter how many times I’ve read Hammett’s five novels and the posthumous collections of his short fiction, I never cease to be amazed at his perfection. Chandler’s remark that Hammett repeatedly wrote scenes that struck readers as wholly original is not mere hyperbole; it still rings true today despite the endless parodies and imitations. It is also what makes following in his footsteps so difficult.

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