Red harvest. (Book Talk).(Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett: 1921-1960)

Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett: 1921-1960 Edited by Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett Counterpoint Press, 650 pages, $25

In March of 1947, Dashiell Hammett, author of such classics of mystery fiction as The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man, wrote to his daughter, describing how his life had been consumed with political activism. He would start on a play or novel and inevitably get distracted because of his commitment to, as he wrote, the "Jews, Negroes, trade unionists, Communists, pseudo-Communists, suspected Communists, imaginary Communists, and god knows who all the Trumans, Tom Clarks, Tom Deweys, Vandenburgs, Bilbos, Rankins, Hoovers big and little, and other so-and-so's of the sort choose to jump on" Sequestered on a farm in Pleasantville, New York, Hammett planned to head for the big city to help organize a rally in Madison Square Garden protesting the anti-communist foreign policy of President Truman and to throw a dinner for Henry Wallace.

The portrait that emerges at the end of the Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett isn't one of an artiste dragged kicking and screaming into politics. And contrary to how Hammett has been depicted in biography and film--the talented victim of Red-baiters who left him helpless, ill, and destitute--his correspondence shows his story to be much more complicated. The letters give a much truer sense of the man and how he willingly let Stalinist politics dominate his life. Sadly for Hammett's readers, it was his unmaking, ending the career of one of the great crime writers of the twentieth century.

For a time, Hammett lived the American dream: He went from being a high-school dropout to having Alfred Knopf and John Huston knocking at his door. His greatest successes came during the Depression. It was then that Hammett almost single-handedly created the genre of hard-boiled detective fiction, making Sam Spade, Nick Charles, and the Continental Op legendary private dicks.

When he first pitched his detective stories, he traded on his brief career as an investigator for Pinkerton's National Detective Service. Corresponding with the editor of Black Mask, a pulp magazine that published some of his first pieces, Hammett described the art of detective work: "Even a clever criminal may be shadowed for weeks without suspecting it. I know one operative who shadowed a forger--a wily old hand--for more than three months without arousing his suspicion. I myself trailed one for six weeks, riding trains and making half a dozen small towns with him; and I'm not exactly inconspicuous--standing an inch or so over six feet."

Discovering that "there was more fun in writing about manhunting than in that hunting" he seems to have created a factory, writing to his editor at Knopf during the summer of 1929, "How soon will you want, or can you use, ...