HARD BOILED

America's much-vaunted principle of personal freedom has produced a combustible mix of the very best and the very worst that humankind is capable of. Dashiell Hammett, "the dean of hard-boiled detective fiction", was aware of this contradiction. In novels like Red Harvest (1929) and The Glass Key (1931), he places his 'anti-heroes' in the very centre of self-interested politics.

During the Interwar years, American cities were notorious for their dysfunction. Newspaper readers in the States and the rest of the industrialised world were familiar with the legislative failure of Prohibition. Gangster violence and police corruption seemed to be the natural condition of life in the land of the free.

In Red Harvest an unnamed operative for the Continental Detective Agency (San Francisco Branch) is sent to Pearsonville. The man who he is supposed to see is already dead. What follows is a process of civic cleansing by blood-bath.

Pearsonville is a dirty town, owned in every particular by the victim's father. The town's mine, smelter, bank, newspaper and police chief are all the 'property' of the "the old man". However, his absolute control is now being challenged by an assortment of criminal thugs that he had originally 'imported' to smash a workers' strike at the mine. Once arrived, these villains had decided the opportunities for making a dishonest buck were too good to leave.

Hammett's hero, "the Continental Op", is first commissioned to solve the son's murder but soon succeeds in tricking the old man into paying for a more thorough restitution. The Op's method of achieving justice is unorthodox. His unofficial accomplice, Dinah Brand, a fairly unprincipled 'good time girl' herself, is in awe of him.

     "So that's the way you scientific detectives work. My God! for a fat middle-aged, hard-boiled, pig-headed guy, you've got the vaguest way of doing things I ever heard of."

     "Plans are all right sometimes," the Op replies. "And sometimes just stirring things up is all right ― if you're tough enough to survive and keep your eyes open so you'll see what you want when it comes to the top."

The violence that follows is breath taking. The story is delivered in tight 'tommy-gun bursts' of action and the setting is fecund ground for a killing field. Pearsonville has speak-easies, bootleggers, numbers racketeers, and cops on the take. Rapid gunfire ensues, fuelled by betrayal and revenge, much of which is orchestrated by the Op. Midway through, even he is disturbed by the rising body-count. But he presses on. After all, what's to lose here? Bad guys killing bad guys is win-win; cheap for the city and who mourns crooks anyway?

Red Harvest had a couple of features recommending it to contemporary readers. It was the first of its kind that was well written, and it had an air of unflinching truth. Raymond Chandler, considered by many as Hammett's successor in the genre, has said as much in his critical essay The Simple Art of Murder.

     "Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley." He wrote for people who "were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street. Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not handwrought duelling pistols, curare and tropical fish."

     "The realist in murder writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities; in which hotels and apartment houses and celebrated restaurants are owned by men who made their money out of brothels, in which a screen star can be the finger man for a mob, and the nice man down the hall is a boss of the numbers racket...It is not a fragrant world, but it is the world you live in."

Chandler takes a step too far in his critical essay, advocating an ideal type for the detective in 'real murder fiction'. For "down those mean streets a man must go who is himself not mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid...He must be a complete man and a common man...He must be a man of honour, by instinct...without thought of it...He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world." 

Hammett has no patience for this sort of humbug. In The Glass Key, 'hero' Ned Beaumont is a chronic gambler and chief political fixer for a corrupt city boss called Paul Madvig. Throughout this book the reader is kept in the dark about his true intentions, not being sure whether Beaumont is doing what he is doing out of loyalty to Madvig, or to suit his own purposes.

When he discovers the body of a Senator's son lying dead in darkened street, he does not report it. Instead he holds his find close, waiting for the fallout before he commits himself. He is similarly economic with disclosure in the remainder of the story. This is often to the disadvantage of those around him. The welfare of the innocent or the complicit does not concern him as much as doing the job of investigation, and surviving while he does it.

Ned is as unethical as the rotten political machine he serves. He is at ease with a decision to accept a civic contract that leaves little skimming room, reasoning that there is always next year for recovering the amount of 'kickback' (temporarily) foregone. He has no complaints with being told to 'lean' on a party lieutenant who looks like failing to produce the required number of 'votes' in the upcoming election. Information wrongfully acquired from city files on an newspaper proprietor is only released when it can cause maximum damage to the man's reputation and marriage. He bullies the District Attorney (technically his employer) whose position is in the 'gift' of his actual employer Paul. Shrewd and cynical, there is little about the use and abuse of power that Ned is shy of. 

There is no doubt that Beaumont is determined, and tough too. When a poker player absconds with the 'bank' Ned tracks him to New York and retrieves the money with menaces, including firebombing a house. After enduring kidnapping and torture at the hands of a rival gang wanting replace the Madvig machine with their own, he leaves hospital early and goes back to confront them. Some knife-play and gunfire later, the ambitions of Rory and his psychotic enforcers are brought to a mortal close.

The only thing that really distinguishes Ned Beaumont from the rest of the venal characters in The Glass Key is that he is not compulsively greedy. There is a reserved quality to his personality that separates him somewhat. In relative terms, Ned exercises a degree of restraint and self-control, a measure of reasonable response, and perhaps the ability to still recognise decency in someone else. In the end, however, he leaves the unnamed city just as morally compromised as he found it.

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1st novel, Feb 1929,  Red Harvest,   <fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20170231>

2nd        , July 1929,  The Dain Curse,   <fadedpage.com/.....=20170127>

3rd         ,         1930, The Maltese Falcon,   <fadedpage.com/.....=20161221>

4th         , April 1931,  The Glass Key,   <fadedpage.com/......=20170222>

5th         , Jan  1934,  The Thin Man,   <fadedpage.com/.....=20161133>