Tough guy; the mystery of Dashiell Hammett.(Life and Letters)

At a party in Hollywood in the spring of 1935, Dashiell Hammett was asked by Gertrude Stein to solve a literary mystery. Why is it, she began, that in the nineteenth century men succeeded in writing about so many different varieties of men, and women were limited to creating heroines who were merely versions of themselves -- she mentioned Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot -- yet in the twentieth century this situation was reversed? Nowadays, Stein pointed out, it was the men who portrayed only themselves, and why should this be so? Stein reasonably assumed that Hammett, a hard-drinking ex-detective whose photograph had appeared on the cover of his latest novel, "The Thin Man," about a hard-drinking ex-detective, might be in a position to know.

The party that evening was given in Stein's honor, and Hammett was the one person in Hollywood she'd asked to meet. Although he had at first taken the invitation for an April Fools' joke, such tributes were no longer much of a surprise. Hammett had been "duh toast of duh intellectuals" (in Edmund Wilson's disgusted phrase) ever since "The Maltese Falcon," published in 1930, had introduced a new type of tough-guy hero in matching tough-guy prose: a tight-lipped, street-smart style, determinedly flat despite flickers of amusement and startlingly devoid of most of the familiar processes of consciousness. Readers were riveted, and critics were quick to announce the newest development in the creation of an American language. It was the kind of achievement that Stein and other literary radicals had been struggling for in their brave obscurities and their unread treatises, and it had emerged from the least likely source: cheap detective stories that large numbers of people actually liked to read, based on the real experience of a man on a job that just happened to involve unlimited amounts of violence, sexual intrigue, and moral devastation.

The Library of America's new Hammett collection, "Crime Stories and Other Writings," contains a poignant textual note explaining that one of the stories could not be taken from Hammett's original version because no copies of the magazine it appeared in still exist. Few are likely to mourn the January, 1928, issue of Mystery Stories, one of about seventy "pulps" then on the market -- "pulp" as a category denoted the low quality of the paper, and presumably also of the contents and the readership -- but the contrast of this rough extinction with the smooth, acid-free immortality of the volume at hand does point up the cultural irony of Hammett's career. (His first pulp story, actually called "Immortality," has disappeared without a trace.) But the contrast also points up the irony of the sweeping cultural mandate of the Library of America, for, as it turns out, the salvaged story -- "This King Business," printed from a later version -- is hardly worth the effort of reading once.

And it is far from the only disappointment here. Hammett produced about ninety stories (and five novels) in the dozen active years of his career, many of them for badly needed money -- he was capable of knocking out five thousand words a day -- and many clearly executed beneath the level of his engaged attention. Of course, he also produced whiz-bang tales that exhibit the best of what the pulps could offer, and a few that transcend formula in the strict music of Hammett's uniquely deadpan dialogue, or in the verbal loop-the-loop of lines like "Give me my rhino instead of lip and I'll pull my freight" (which in context makes perfect sense). Also beyond formula are occasional set pieces that suspend the action in an almost hallucinatory spell; these read like intrusions from a different genre or a darker mind, as when the detective in "The Tenth Clew" nearly drowns, and spends several pages succumbing to the lulling drag of going under. The current collection contains one perfect story -- "The Scorched Face," published in 1925 -- which demonstrates how imaginative wit can transform even the crudest material into an exquisite whirring toy, a rococo clock with cops chasing crooks in circles and tumbling forth to chime the hour.

But the most extraordinary aspect of these stories is their long and echoing influence: in the pulps, Hammett developed not just a literary style but the style of an era. The indelible characters that he went on to produce in his novels -- Sam Spade, Nick and Nora Charles, even Asta the schnauzer -- were resilient enough to launch careers in radio, comic strips, and, of course, movies, where Hammett's low-down glamour and stark masculine charm have been a distinctive force from the early thirties to last year's "The Score." In the long and fractured hall of American cultural mirrors, it is easy to lose track of the original image. Today, when Bob Dylan allows that his favorite film is Truffaut's "Shoot the Piano Player," in which Charles Aznavour replayed Humphrey Bogart playing Hammett's idea of the ultimate urban hero, we must realize that there is still a lot, for better and worse, that we owe him.

The quintessential masculine style was the work of a writer who grew up believing that being a man was a near guarantee of moral corruption. Samuel Dashiell Hammett was born in 1894 in southern Maryland, on land that could have passed for a farm if his father had not been preoccupied with drinking and women and looking for easier ways to make a living. His beloved mother, who suffered from tuberculosis, is reported to have held to the loudly voiced conviction that men were a no-good lot. Sam, her bright and curious middle child -- one biographer has him reading Kant at thirteen -- was given reasonable proof of her view when he was forced to leave school at fourteen to help with his father's latest failing business. There followed several years of predictable menial jobs, and predictable drinking and resentment, until he joined the Pinkerton Agency, becoming a detective at twenty-one. The job caught his imagination; for the rest of his life, he told different versions of a story about being asked to find a stolen Ferris wheel.

In June, 1918, longing to get away from home, Hammett enlisted in the Army, but he'd got no farther than a camp in Maryland when he contracted influenza; by the following spring, he had full-blown t.b. Most of his remaining time on base was spent in the hospital, and he was discharged with a small disability pension after less than a year of service. He was twenty-five, six feet one and a half inches tall, a hundred and forty pounds, and a physical ruin. And there was nowhere to go but home again, coughing like his mother now and drinking like his father.