#156： Lost Detective - The Life and Times of Dashiell Hammett
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Summary
Dashel Hammett was a writer during the 1920s and 30s, and through the 40s. He was the man who created one of the most iconic masculine antiheroes, Sam Spade, who started off in a book later became a movie hero played by Humphrey Bogard in The Maltese Falcon. But dashel hammett was much more than that. He paved the way for the modern detective novel, and modern Americana detective television and cinema.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast well if you enjoy
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shows like the wire or true detective or law and order or if you enjoy film noir there's one guy
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you can thank for that his name is dashel hammett and he was a writer during the 1920s and 30s and
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through the 40s and he is the guy who created the modern detective he was the man who created
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one of the most iconic masculine antiheroes sam spade who uh started off in a book later became
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a movie hero played by humphrey bogard and the maltese falcon but dashel hammett he yeah he
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created uh he took the detective genre and brought it into the modern era and and the reason he was
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able to do that was that he himself was a detective before he became a writer he was a private eye
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for the pinkerton detective agency in his early days and a lot of the uh the stories that he he
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published and wrote were inspired by his own experience or the experiences of other pis that
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he knew and about but the thing is there's not that much out there about dashel's hammett time
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as a pinkerton detective um so my guest today he wanted to find out all about this career and what
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made dashel hammett dashel hammett and his name is nathan ward he wrote a book called the lost detective
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becoming dashel hammett and had to get on the podcast because i'm a huge dashel hammett fan i'm a huge
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detective novel fan from that time raymond chandler all those guys and today on the podcast we're going to
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discuss how dashel or dashiel we'll talk about that how you pronounce his name in a bit became
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dashel hammett and how his experience as a pinkerton detective paved the way for the modern american
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detective novel and modern america detective television and cinema if you love this sort of
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thing this genre of literature and movies or cinema you're going to love this podcast without further
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ado nathan ward the lost detective all right hey nathan ward welcome to the show thank you thank you
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good to be here well uh your your book is about it's called the lost detective it's a biography of
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dashel hammett and we just started having this interesting conversation uh before we got on here
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on how do you pronounce this i always pronounce it dashel um but there's controversy about that
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well it's not controversy so much as like the family says the shield he said the shield and it's
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originally a french name the shield who came over um in the 18th century on his mother's side but um
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i just grew up saying dashel saying it the wrong way and so i you know when i remember to if there's
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you know if his family's in the audience i'll say the shield but i normally i just say dashel like
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everyone else all right so yeah i'm gonna say dashel too i was like going into this thing that's fine
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we can dumb it down all right i like that i like your style all right so dashel hammett uh is one of
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the most influential american writers but a lot of people don't know who he is but they probably know
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who his creations are for example sam spade uh you know he wrote the malt he wrote the maltese
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falcon introduced sam spade to the american uh uh icons of american masculinity uh the thin man
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but the thing is he he's really highly influential but there's not that much out there about dashel
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hammett's life why is that well there are several uh full biographies uh one of which the official
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one by dan diane johnson was you know commissioned by uh lillian hellman his longtime companion uh
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and in that book which is the longest one um there was an agreement that lillian hellman herself had to
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appear pretty early in the book so poor diane johnson had to get to get him to his early 30s where he met
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lillian hellman in order for their life together to be take you know the rest of the book and so
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there's uh then there's a very very good book by richard layman that does his whole life but these
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are like they're like um i compare it to cross-country trains and uh his early life as a detective is just
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like one stop where you could get off and that's what i chose to do is is uh uh is to really get
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immerse myself in this early period of his life and see if there was anything uh still to be found
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out about what kind of detective he really was because that was potter his authenticity was
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that he had been an actual pinkerton detective before he became the consummate detective america
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writer well that's what separates him from all the other ones right none of the other really famous
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detective novelists weren't detectives themselves i'm thinking like raymond chandler or any of those other
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guys that's right but i mean it helps that those guys i mean he he wrote better better than most of
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them too i mean you wouldn't have heard of him if he was just a pinkerton who tried writing about his
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his uh pinkerton adventures and he couldn't write you know it's uh the the talent was there from
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somewhere else yeah so let's talk about this pinkerton agent because this is something that i've
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you know you've heard about the pinkertons i remember i mean i you talk about them and um you hear
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about them in when you study like labor unions and things like that in school and i remember the
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pinkerton showed up in butch cassidy and the sundance kid but i didn't know much about what
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they did why did the pinkerton agents detective agency exist i mean it seems like they took on cases
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that law enforcement should have done but why was it that pinkerton that did this well it wouldn't
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have been able to grow as it did uh in europe it uh alan pinkerton was a scottish immigrant
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came over here he was a barrel maker and uh one day he solved a smuggling ring i mean i broke a
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smuggling ring uh uh in illinois and the local merchants then i tried to hire him to solve other
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cases and he um eventually the chucked his his barrel making business for um starting his own agency
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he was the first american uh detective agency uh and it grew because you had all these
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emerging towns around you know rural america and one of the last things you can add is a real
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police department you might have a sheriff you might have a marshal who visits sometimes but you don't
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have a full uh police department as we now understand it um so that the pinkertons would would be hired
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to come to your town take care of this gang that was bothering the local businesses and they could
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they could follow them over uh city or state lines in a way that a that a local uh a local agency could
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not and that was a one once the towns uh you know along the west had to had established had grown up
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a little bit they didn't need the pinkertons as much for that kind of stuff and the pinkertons uh got
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into um railroad work um you know they would uh put a guy in your um the cafe car of your of your train
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and watch for pilferage among the employees and they got into that's when they got into more of the
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labor stuff um they would uh insert a guy secretly onto the strike committee at your factory and tell
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you what the plans were for the strike you know day by day uh and then increasingly that's where the
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they followed the money and that's where it got it where it was within the big corporate accounts
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like that uh strike breaking uh you know the the ugly uh world war one era stuff that people
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associate with the pinkertons now people usually know that the the strike breaking era stuff or they
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know it from butch cassidy but but the the earlier um uh the earlier uh rural kind of uh cases are less
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familiar and i was it was fun it was fun to go read through the pinkerton archives and you know they
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just have all the op reports um that they wanted you to see uh from the 19th century you can see them
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all the outlaw cases all the uh bank robber cases and that kind of stuff it's uh it's enormously fun
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to read yeah and why did the pinkertons go away was it because the fbi like national that didn't
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exist yet and yeah it didn't exist but that's what is that kind of what contributed to its demise
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well uh it i mean they didn't they didn't go away they they're they're sort of uh i think they're
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owned by a swedish company now and they just do sort of security work international corporate
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security work uh and they don't answer letters from scholars that's the two things i know about
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them you learned okay they've never acknowledged that that hammett worked for them uh and his his
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actual reports that he would have written as as an operative have never emerged anywhere and i mean
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they were written under aliases i mean uh not aliases uh you know you would be op number seven or op
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number 20 or you know uh and and i my theory is um i mean it's if it wasn't a fire which is what
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people always say when something disappears uh i think that uh the client was the owner of these
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reports in especially in your uh delicate labor cases and i'm sure uh that if he did that kind of work
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um this you know my secret hope is that his reports are in some corporate archive somewhere
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and nobody knows who wrote who wrote them uh but they wouldn't be still with the pinkertons that's
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what i'm that's what i'm trying to get at gotcha they would be the client yeah so i mean if there's
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if you weren't able to like access the reports that hammett uh wrote or and the pinkertons disavow that
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hammett ever worked for him i how did you research this well they yeah they won't say one way or the other
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they just won't confirm it i don't know legally why that's to their advantage but they just uh have
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left it uh i guess they can't prove it one way or the other that's maybe maybe why i mean they're
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the the the papers from the specific offices that he worked at the baltimore office the spokane office
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the seattle office um and the san francisco office uh those are not among the collected papers
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the national archives that they donated so it is very hard to um you know uh prove certain things
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that he said yeah so how did you what was the research involved how did you figure out that he
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worked in certain places was it just diary entries letters that hammett wrote uh how did you what was
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your research process like well there were there were letters but um he didn't save uh his letters
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the way you would want him to he moved a lot in his life uh and he lived in a lot of hotels and he
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pitched them you know so there's letters if someone kept the letters he wrote then that that's great
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and he there was a book of his letters um that you know his wife kept and various girlfriends kept
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and um that's good but you don't get a lot of correspondence back and forth uh
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uh the the surest way i had of knowing where he lived when was his um his army medical file because
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he got tuberculosis in the army um a nurse would have to come by and and um give him an examination
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every few months to determine his the amount of disability he should get so sometimes he's 40 percent
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disabled and sometimes he's 60 percent disabled so that you could see his health go up and down
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throughout um the 20s uh and you'd know that he was getting less money when when his uh when he was
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healthier and more money when he was uh near death and you could sort of track well if he claimed to
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have worked a certain uh very physical uh very physical case you could say well how could he have
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climbed uh the mast of a ship and found and recovered the stolen gold if he was you know 60 percent disabled
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and tubercular and so that i would get little you know indications of of what was possible when uh but
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i have to say uh he showed up at a lot of jobs for a guy who should have just been in bed for
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you know months and months at a time i mean he was really impressive the way he just kept
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trying to earn money for his family yeah that's what surprised me the most because you know when i
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imagine okay he's a pinkerton detective i thought okay he's gonna be this big kind of burly you know
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humphrey bogard type guy but he was actually not i mean yeah he said he had tuberculosis uh and then he was
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actually pretty small i think he weighed 130 pounds or something like that but when he was
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sick when he was sick he was 130 pounds yeah he should have been he should have been 150 160 he was
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you know six feet uh plus and uh but but rail rail thin as they say yeah so i mean how long did he
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work at the pinkertons um what's the time frame we're talking here well he he uh he started when he
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was 21 in 1915 and it's not a you know he didn't work straight through 1922 uh you know he he he uh
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he did a couple years then he entered the army right at the end of world war one at the end of 1917
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then he got the um uh tuberculosis in the army first the uh he got the influenza and then that weakened him
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and then he was in this uh you know hospital army hospital where all the cots were about two feet
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apart from each other and so he easily caught tuberculosis in there um and then he went back
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to part-time pinkerton work uh the northwest and then he went to a uh uh hospital for um for cases uh for
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for two to be cases and that's where he met his wife who was his nurse um then he moved to san francisco
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uh and he once he learned by letter that she was pregnant he asked her to come join him and uh get
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married in san francisco and then that's where he he that was his last um that's 1921 the fall of 1921 so
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the the the most influential part of his life would be the six to eight months he worked as a
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part-time pinkerton in san francisco that's where he learned the town that's where he created his first
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stories the the pink of the continental op stories and that's where ultimately you know he created sam
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spade and who lived in the apartment that he was living in as he wrote it yeah so i mean do we know
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anything about the type of work or missions i guess quote unquote mission we'll call them mission jobs
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he got like you mentioned the you know he found he said that he found the gold on top of a mast
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is that are we pretty safe to say that was a lot of fabrication he was embellishing the truth
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oh yeah people loved these stories later when he was he was known as an ex-detective you know
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the stories just got better and better because he would be surrounded by literary people who hadn't
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done anything like that and he would just be so they would eat it up uh and of course it helped you
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know um uh solidify his legend if that's possible as a verb and um uh and and made him more even more
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authentic uh and he liked telling stories that's what that's what he would fold fundamentally is he's a
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great great great storyteller there's a there's a school of thought that he has to have been
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the greatest detective ever in order to be as great a detective writer as he became and i don't
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believe that's true i think you have to have learned enough to exploit it masterfully which he did
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you know he doesn't have to have been the greatest detective of all time but i think he was a pretty
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good one and he was a very observant person and it it was the first job he had had that rewarded being
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an observant person um you know he he was fired from a whole lot of menial jobs before he entered
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the pinkertons uh and it was the first one that stuck uh then he uh he got tuberculosis and and once he
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finally was too uh sick to to you know even get to the office anymore uh he started sending out
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stories to make money the way the way i know that is because the nurses that visited him would file
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reports you know first of all that's how you know where he was living at certain months and at one point
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he bragged to the nurse that was visiting him that he was making uh some extra money as a short story
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writer and you know i don't think it was in his interest to say that because you know you want
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her to say that you should get the maximum uh disability right so he but he but he obviously
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was so uh giddy about his new success that he he told her about it and and and so there you could
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exactly date you know when he was writing what and uh and so on it was uh you know if i didn't have
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the the army medical file i really don't know how i could have done this book yeah so many gaps in his
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life and it's sort of like the biography of his illness so how did he decide writing was it just
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like it's the only thing i can do in bed in my house was that what the sort of necessity that he
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decided on that or he had an inclination for storytelling and that's what drew him to that
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well i mean i think he was a good storyteller in general uh there's no evidence before he entered the
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pinkertons that he wanted to be a writer um i think he had a mother who told him he could be whatever
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he wanted which helps um but i don't think she told him what what he should be in particular uh
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so when he but he spent he always was a big reader and i i think uh the the most true quote
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that is ascribed to him as he came he would he came back from the san francisco public library having
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read a bunch of uh pulp magazines in the reading room there and he said sort of contemptuously
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i could do that and meaning also that he would know what he was talking about unlike the people who
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were writing those those fanciful detection stories and uh it turned out that he could
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yeah well we'll talk about these pulp magazines in a bit here um because it's it's really i think
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it's a lost forgotten part of american literary history or overlooked um but talk about like what
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how did his experience as a pinkerton help him as a writer and i'm not just talking about he he was
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able to get he had some experiences that he could call upon to help his stories but you even make the
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case in the book that his the reports he had to write as a pinkerton op helped him develop the style
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of writing that he became famous for yes once i once i um learned more about how the pinkerton agency
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actually functioned work once you learned um where people would be assigned from around the country for
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particular cases and uh what kind of uh jobs your average op would be assigned to do um i got to reading the
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op reports of of the other uh other operatives um the ones that are surviving and there really was a
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certain literary style uh house style um starting with um not being judgmental in writing about um
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you know these uh street guys and and uh rogues that they were had to be interested in to um to solve
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these crimes and then the whole point of ellen pinkerton's approach as opposed to say you know the
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sherlock holmes approach uh was assimilation assimilation with with criminals and there is no
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better way to learn uh what he learned than uh having to pass yourself off among among uh among rough types
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uh and the discipline of writing up what you see every day for not just the client but the
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supervisors who would sometimes uh edit what you had written to the client's liking that experience
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it's i i saw it as as like a newspaper and i compared him to uh ernest hemingway at the same time working
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at the kansas city star uh those two institutions did not teach those guys how to write i mean they brought
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they came there with their gift but it was a place where their um their uh uh observing power and uh
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and and and and uh lyrical ability was rewarded day after day and it and it only could only have
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increased their confidence in what they were doing uh so that's that's that's uh that's how i looked at
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as opposed to um the you know the old way of trying to account for his style was you know these english
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professors would would strain themselves trying to prove that he must have read this hemingway story
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in the public library in 1923 and then that excited his imagination and to writing uh short clipped
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street dialogue you know i mean there was a certain amount of it that was in the air in america in
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general because people wanted to sound wised up because they'd been to the war and the war uh made
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people uh you know more cynical uh but i just don't i don't see it i don't see it just coming from
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reading although he'd read a lot i think it it was this experience um uh as a as a pinkachin op that um
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that really honed him so how did um are there any specific real experiences that he had as a pinkachin op
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that ended up in some of the stories that he he wrote well um oh let's see um
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there's um there's there are two things that that come up again and again and again in his stories and
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then one is uh uh his very first story uh uh was um was radical in that it starts with uh not a
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pinkachin op but a uh an operative for uh a fictional agency um on a river in burma and he's been chasing
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chasing this um thief for i don't know if it's two or three years um
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and uh since they were both in new york and uh and it opens with him uh he's he's he's cornered his man
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and you know in the the the contemporary stories of the time you know it would be you know he would be
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totally uh admirable and he would get his man and and bring him back and uh instead the story ends
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with him being offered this bribe if you come into the jungle with me i will share my rubies my stolen
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ruby uh collection with you and it ends with him thinking it over and that's the end of the story and
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and and and this i found um uh he he hammett himself uh was once um trailing a guy named insterwald
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uh from one state to another who was a who was accused of um uh stealing jewels and uh
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uh finally the guy came up to him uh on a park bench where hammett thought he was discreetly watching
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him in the park and said uh don't you look familiar so i know you're from somewhere and
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was because he'd been following him from state to state and so of course he was familiar uh and they
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got to talking and the guy started to offer him part of his uh his scam and hammett then uh turned him
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in and then he was arrested when he arrived where he was going uh that's not as as dramatic as what
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he made of it in his first story but you see it um throughout his his uh other stories where that
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where a woman will come up and try to seduce the detective who throws her over and then it you know
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he perfected and perfected it until the multi-falcon has the most famous example and in there
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uh it's loyalty to his his uh his dead partner that gives him the strength to to turn down the
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opera but uh i think there's you know events like that that he would just then refashion and refashion and
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uh and you know each time it wasn't perfect and he would do it again he had a lot of themes that he
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would he would return to until he had gotten it right whereas other people would be afraid they
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were repeating themselves he was sort of like perfecting it yeah and i guess you make the case
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too that uh some of the detectives that he worked with even some of the bosses he worked for uh ended
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up in some of his short stories uh as i guess they they inspired characters in the stories i guess the
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one thing he does the old man right in his continental law series yes the old man uh again in um the
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other biographical works there's this assumption that the old man was based on uh phil giac
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uh who uh who had been his uh supervisor in san francisco but when i looked into phil giac's actual
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biography and description he was like 40 years old and uh short and fat uh more like the continental
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op and uh but but hammett had said that at uh at some uh dinner and so people just believed it uh i think
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that his the old man who was described as having a you know white mustache and a and being a glowering
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older figure in his 70s much more uh resembled the most famous pinkerton um of all who wasn't an actual
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pinkerton family member um uh mcparland james mcparland who was the the uh the operative who who
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um who cracked the uh molly mcguire's rings gotcha all right so uh hammett broke he cut his teeth
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writing with these pulp fiction magazines and like i said it's often forgotten part of american
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literary history i mean what sort of stuff would people find in the pulps i mean what kind of stories
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besides the detective stuff i mean was it just sort of lowbrow originally they the um
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um they did everything you know they'd have horror they'd have um you know weird tales they'd have uh
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uh uh sort of erotica uh not like erotica now but um what they called there was a magazine called
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saucy tales um things like that you know and and uh uh and you and westerns westerns were were were big
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and and hammett loved westerns and there's a certain uh critical school that sees the detective
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story it's just the western come into the urban setting uh and there's you know there's there's
00:29:52.260
something to that uh which is why he would play jokes on that like when he has one where the
00:29:58.260
continental op leaves san francisco and he goes to arizona and he has to ride a horse around
00:30:03.540
as a wrestling gang and everything and he can't ride the horse and you know he he would make fun of
00:30:08.180
the genres he was writing about at the same time that's one of the great um misunderstood things
00:30:14.500
about him is you know how funny he is and it's you know it's okay to send up the thing that you are
00:30:20.580
also participating in at the same time and i think that makes some people uh uncomfortable like
00:30:26.660
is this serious or not he's like making fun of at the same time and uh he's just you know he was
00:30:32.500
always amusing himself his his his work is full of in jokes to himself just to amuse himself starting
00:30:38.980
with the continental uh agency which is his mythical uh version of the pinkerton agency because he first
00:30:47.700
worked in the continental building in baltimore that's where the pinkertons were gotcha yeah you
00:30:52.820
can really see his humor shine through in the thin man i think yes it's hilarious the back and
00:30:58.180
forth dialogue is amazing that book especially that one and that's where he sort of had uh he's
00:31:03.860
sort of given up on the the classic detective novel and then he's that's like a um it's hard to it's
00:31:11.140
hard to describe but you know the the protagonist is an ex-detective the writer is an ex-detective
00:31:17.940
and he's out of his element but um you know he's just there to have a good time and his wife keeps
00:31:24.020
telling him to go back to what he used to do to solve the crime it's a it's sort of it's a funny
00:31:30.340
uh uh self-referential thing so let's talk about uh sam spade because this is the most iconic
00:31:36.260
uh create character of dashnell hammond thanks to humphrey bogart where did sam spade come from that
00:31:42.900
have any did his pinkerton experience have any influence on the creation of sam spade i i really
00:31:48.420
don't think so i think sam spade is as he said he's a dream man he's what all the guys he used to
00:31:55.060
work with uh wished they could be or or thought they sometimes were that's how he described it uh
00:32:02.580
uh the thing about sam spade you can in pickerton terms you can see him as the absolute uh product
00:32:10.340
of assimilation i mean he's so assimilated with criminals that you really don't know what he's going to
00:32:18.020
do like is he crooked crooked or is he pretending to be crooked you know that's how he plays both
00:32:24.340
sides to do his job is that uh he's absolutely unpredictable except for his loyalty to the
00:32:32.820
client no matter how scummy he'll still take their money uh and and and uh and give it his all but you
00:32:41.380
don't know you don't know what he really thinks about anything except uh when he's pushed to it
00:32:50.500
as he says uh when a man's partner is killed he's supposed to do something about it so there's a
00:32:56.020
there's the buddy element in the end but this is the same guy who was sleeping with his partner's
00:33:02.340
wife before he was alive so he's not like your best friend but he does have a point he does have
00:33:09.780
but an outer limit yeah so he's um and because he's so unpredictable i just think he seems more
00:33:17.220
lifelike than all the uh the the copycat detectives that he inspired i just there's something about
00:33:25.300
sam spade who just he's so alive on the page in the way that nothing mickey spallane ever did uh
00:33:32.260
was you know is the same it's just um uh he's he's he's he did he's mercurial but he's fasting
00:33:41.300
and he has and he has no history there's no you know you don't find out about his childhood you
00:33:46.500
don't know his there's no inner monologues and yet everybody has an idea of what sam spade is about
00:33:54.580
yeah yeah well i mean the only thing we do know that uh that inspired sam spade or as part of the
00:34:02.740
character of sam spade is sam spade's apartment i thought that was really interesting so oh yeah
00:34:07.860
that's right can you talk a little bit about sam spade's apartment as um dashnell hammond's apartment
00:34:14.020
well um when he when he wrote that book and uh red harvest he was living in basically a 500 square
00:34:22.820
foot uh studio on post street uh uh which is still there in san francisco and uh he had originally
00:34:34.660
ended up there because his he'd have these flare-ups of his tuberculosis and the doctors said he had to
00:34:41.860
live apart from his young children uh because it's you know it's unhelpful uh and so he you know he
00:34:50.340
moved uh he moved around san francisco and sometimes he would come back and he um
00:34:58.100
uh he was living in this little apartment uh writing his brains out i mean it actually allowed him to
00:35:04.020
write the novels that he finally wrote um and uh the uh to me the most um uh the moving part of
00:35:15.060
writing this was there's this famous uh part of the book uh it's known as the the flitcraft uh
00:35:23.860
parable i mean he didn't call it that but that's what people call it and which sam spade tells his
00:35:29.380
story about a man named flitcraft who was on his lunch hour one day and a beam fell and just missed
00:35:38.340
killing him and hit the sidewalk sidewalk next to him and like a piece of cement hit his cheek uh and
00:35:45.700
he was so unnerved by this that he had to abandon his life as it was and um he you know he left his
00:35:53.300
wife and his child and what and went relocated to another town where he said he started up exactly the
00:36:00.340
same kind of life um so the point of the story is as spade tells it he adjusted to beams falling and
00:36:11.860
then he adjusted to them no longer falling in his new life and then spade is hired to go find him by
00:36:17.460
mrs flitcraft and he does but he leaves him alone rather than bring him back which you think would be
00:36:24.420
the spade like thing to do is like he's a bulldog uh if you're hired to go retrieve somebody for for
00:36:30.740
you know why doesn't he bring him back and i've always thought that was strange uh until i realized
00:36:38.420
at that moment that that hammett was writing it he was living apart from his family and he was
00:36:45.700
contemplating leaving san francisco altogether and going to new york uh to you know where his book was
00:36:53.540
going to come out and uh he was going to get some more movie money and then to start his life
00:36:59.620
apart from them uh and the flitcraft parable is is hammett really talking to himself about the this
00:37:07.860
decision uh and i just found that very moving because you know when you when you read these books about
00:37:16.740
an artist you are supposed to root at every point for them to move through their life to the part
00:37:25.380
where they become the great artist that you got interested in in the first place and at this point
00:37:29.780
i you know as a father and a writer i you know i felt some of the the uneasiness that he must have
00:37:40.820
felt you know he really made a choice and he what he did was he moved his wife and his daughters uh to
00:37:50.260
hollywood where they were supposed to just wait for him to become a success in hollywood and come back
00:37:57.860
and live with them well he never lived with them but he did visit them there and he did take care of
00:38:03.700
them uh but he lived the life that you associate with him um ever since you know the lillian hellman life
00:38:10.500
and then going to parties and um hanging around in hollywood and drinking too much yeah that's
00:38:15.860
that's where that started yeah he basically did the the whole scott fitzgerald thing just
00:38:21.620
write movies and drink a lot yes so what i think unlike unlike scott fitzgerald i think in hammett's case
00:38:33.620
he had come so close to death with tuberculosis that i really don't think
00:38:38.900
he expected to live very long i mean maybe uh you know years but not like years and years
00:38:45.220
and so the the miscalculation he made was that he would live as long as he did
00:38:52.340
you know that's the the mystery is always oh why did he stop
00:38:56.820
writing which actually he stopped publishing but didn't stop writing um i really think he he thought
00:39:03.140
he could you know he could still go um at any time yeah so what's uh i mean we've talked about
00:39:10.020
hammett in his days at pinkerton how it influenced his career but what's uh what's hammett's legacy
00:39:14.580
today i mean what authors did he influence and where can we see the fingerprints of hammett's and
00:39:20.340
and of hammett's and pop culture right now well i mean uh uh i think he's he's in uh most cop shows
00:39:34.100
uh the the what he what he what he started with the giving all the procedural background stuff
00:39:44.180
um you know then we drove over to here then we watched their house for a while then we uh
00:39:52.820
followed her into the supermarket things that before him would have been thought to be
00:39:58.580
dull and um no one wants to read that they just want a nice uh murder mystery set in an estate
00:40:07.060
you know and the and the you round up the swells who were at that that's a house that weekend and one
00:40:13.460
of them must have been the killer and what he did was uh with his his early op stories which were
00:40:21.140
you know it was like making literature out of the op reports that he had written before i mean it's the
00:40:27.140
same um uh format of of uh following the detective around and making literature out of the tedium of
00:40:36.580
investigation and so once he introduced that then it became like a competitive sport like who
00:40:43.620
would have the most authentic background and so uh then by the 40s you have uh detective movies where
00:40:53.540
they're talking about um the skeleton of the corpse and obviously she was less than 24 years old because
00:41:00.820
look at the development of the femur and you know that kind of stuff and all the way to csi i mean i think
00:41:06.900
that's he started that procedural um uh form and then or look at something like um uh the bone is it
00:41:19.700
what's the show with it uh well the any show where there's a like a man and a woman like flirting on
00:41:26.340
the crime scene solving crimes it's all from the thin man yeah um mcmillan and wife or uh castle
00:41:33.780
yeah but that's that's another trope of his uh i don't know that he'd love all those shows but i
00:41:40.740
think you can definitely um trace it directly to him uh true detective would be uh unthinkable without
00:41:49.380
him uh i don't think he would have liked this season but the first uh i don't know uh and he's
00:41:58.100
certainly in uh and uh you know michael connelly uh dennis lennon you know he's in he's in a lot of
00:42:05.220
a lot of stuff out there now yeah well cool hey well nathan people mix them up with with chandler
00:42:11.460
which is unfortunate yeah uh chandler was his biggest fan and uh they don't write the same i
00:42:19.300
think where it where it goes down what it back to is humphrey bogart playing both their heroes yeah
00:42:25.060
and people mix them up because humphrey bogart played both uh uh the same way um people mix up davy
00:42:32.900
crockett and daniel boone because fess parker played them both you know it's just it's they
00:42:37.940
don't they haven't always read the books so they uh they rely on the on the movies i've also noticed
00:42:42.820
that um when the multis falcon was uh uh chosen by the wall street journal as like the book of the
00:42:52.100
month for online discussions it was clobbered for sam's sexism which is like that you know i don't
00:43:03.220
know what they were expecting to read but i just couldn't imagine people having the same reaction
00:43:09.940
with an old movie there's somehow people are smarter now about film than they are about old novels which is
00:43:17.940
i think sad but i just i couldn't imagine uh people saying the same things about the film of the book
00:43:25.860
yeah uh that was just my that's just my impression i think he also he also um invented
00:43:33.700
uh what we call noir um with the multis falcon uh uh that whole um it's it's removed and then he he
00:43:43.940
zooms in on the ashtray on sam's desk and then uh sam rolls another cigarette and then it's so
00:43:52.420
atmospheric uh in a way that movies would not be for another 10 years then you know because the
00:43:58.900
the film the multis falcon was in was in 1941 and you know he wrote that in 1929 uh but you know all
00:44:06.980
the noir stuff in film was years after what the writers were doing in the black mask and the pulps
00:44:14.260
and true detective magazine it just took it took that much longer for the movie audience to be
00:44:22.580
wised up by uh uh the depression uh and world war ii to to to want that kind of film i don't know i mean
00:44:29.700
i can't really explain i'm not a cinema person but uh uh i definitely see uh what became film
00:44:37.620
noir in the multis falcon and not really before that well fascinating the book i'm i mean yeah yeah
00:44:45.460
well nathan war this has been a fascinating conversation where can people learn more about
00:44:48.740
the book just uh amazon uh amazon's good bloomsbury uh uh um you mean where else can i buy it yeah
00:44:57.780
yeah yeah amazon's as good as any yeah all right well nathan ward thank you so much for your time
00:45:04.100
it's been a pleasure all right well thank you my guest today was nathan ward he's the author of
00:45:08.900
the book the lost detective becoming dashiel hammett or dashel hammett and you can find that on amazon.com
00:45:15.460
or bookstores everywhere well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more
00:45:23.380
manly tips and advice make sure to check out the art of manliness website at artofmanliness.com
00:45:27.460
and if you enjoy this podcast as always i'd really appreciate it if you take the time to give us
00:45:30.900
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00:45:35.620
let the other people know about the podcast and as always thank you for your continued support of
00:45:39.940
the podcast and until next time this is brett mckay telling you to stay manly