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Stirring Things Up: Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

John S. Whitley
John S. Whitley
Affiliation:
John S. Whitley is Reader in American Studies at the University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QN. An earlier draft of this essay was read at the Jubilee Conference of the British Association for American Studies at the University of Lancaster in April 1980.
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Extract

Following the example of Steven Marcus, we may point to a number of features or incidents in Dashiell Hammett's novels which seem to break sharply with previous conventions of the detective story. I do not refer to the important changes of direction brought about by the “hard-boiled” school and instanced by such matters as the professional detective, organized crime, dark urban streets and a spare, colloquial, “tough” style. Rather, I wish to concentrate on features which are unexpected even in the context of “toughguy” writing and which occur unexpectedly in order deliberately and provocatively to remind the reader, in the midst of an easily-identifiable style, of other styles and methods of enquiry into human behaviour and, ultimately, of another and very different world-view which must be placed against the world-view of the rest of the novel. By adopting this technique, Hammett succeeds in drawing attention not only to the limitations of his particular kind of popular fiction but also to ways in which these very limitations can be used. The aspects of Hammett's novels to which I began by referring are not separated stylistically from the rest of the novel. But they nonetheless suggest to the reader that the first-person narrator might have to be viewed in a context other than that in which he normally presents himself for the reader's judgement (and, frequently, approval).

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , December 1980 , pp. 443 - 455
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

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References

1 Marcus, Steven, “Introduction,” Dashiel Hammett, The Continental Op (London: Pan Books, 1977), pp. 7–23Google Scholar.

2 Chandler, Raymond, “The Simple Art of Murder,” Pearls Are a Nuisance (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 195Google Scholar.

3 Whenever a page number follows a quotation in this paper it refers to The Dashiell Hammett Omnibus (London: Cassell, 1950)Google Scholar. This volume includes all five of Hammett's novels: Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon (1930), The Glass Key (1931), and The Thin Man (1934), as well as four short stories: “Dead Yellow Women,” “The Golden Horseshoe,” “House Dick,” and “Who Killed Bob Teal?”

4 Auden, W. H., “The Guilty Vicarage,” in The Dyer's Hand (London: Faber, 1948)Google Scholar.

5 Cawelti, John G., Adventure, Mystery and Romance (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1976), p. 172Google Scholar.

6 This can be usefully compared with the despair assumed by Lord Peter Wimsey in both Murder Must Advertise and Busman's Honeymoon at the necessity of his sending murderers to their doom and the great play on the fact that one of his family names is “Death.” However, the effect of this is surely to enforce the reader's support for Wimsey and produce a further collusion with the notion that only a nobleman could be both a detective and a gentleman.

7 It could be said that Gutman and Cairo share the “female” qualities which make Brigid so dangerous. Cairo's effeminacy is obvious, while Spade refers to Wilmer as Gutman's “gunsel,” a word meaning both “gunman” and “catamite.”

8 Hammett, Dashiell, The Big Knockover (New York: Dell Books, 1967), pp. 48–49Google Scholar.

9 Chandler, Raymond, Pearls are a Nuisance, p. 198Google Scholar.

10 Chandler, Raymond, The Big Sleep (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966), p. 153Google Scholar.

11 Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, ed. Macpherson, C. B. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 186Google Scholar.

12 Hammett, Dashiell, The Big Knockover, p. 174Google Scholar.