The stock market crash of 1929 produced the most dramatic change in economic circumstance during the interwar period in the United States. The Great Depression pushed millions of Americans into unemployment and to (or over) the brink of starvation. Given these changes, it seemed natural for the tide of popularity to turn toward a hero a little less indestructible than Race Williams, less assured of success—and without a valet. His inexhaustible physical power and skill at taking down the enemy found a new home in the world of fantasy across movies and comic strips. It is no coincidence that the Depression era saw the rise of various superheroes: the Shadow and Dick Tracy (1931), Doc Savage (1932), Flash Gordon (1934), and the Green Hornet (1936). The end of the decade produced Superman (1938) and Batman (1939). And although the hard-boiled detective and comic strip hero shared many traits—both playing the part of the social savior—the American public did not want to see a real person glide above the worries of the world. They had that in Herbert Hoover and in an oblivious upper class whose speculations had caused the market to crash. The public needed someone consistently grounded in human reality, and Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op brought the character to a new, Depression-appropriate level.
Born in 1894 in southern Maryland, Dashiell Hammett left school at the age of fourteen and took up a series of jobs. At twenty-one, he joined the Pinkerton Detective Agency, where he worked for seven years, becoming the only hard-boiled writer who had worked as a detective himself. As Nolan recounts in his history of Black Mask, Hammett had run up against swindlers, safecrackers, forgers, blackmailers, and even murderers. As a Pinkerton operative, Hammett learned the vocabulary of the trade and wrote in the language of people with whom he had come in contact. He offered the audience two main characters, the Continental Op and Sam Spade. Sam Spade is the principal detective in Hammett’s third and best-known novel, The Maltese Falcon. The Continental Op is his most frequently recurring character, appearing in thirty-six stories between 1923 and 1930. Hammett revised four of those stories into his first novel, Red Harvest (1929), and four more into his second, The Dain Curse (1929). In many ways, Sam Spade is the most iconic of Hammett’s characters. Hammett himself felt that Falcon was “by far the best thing [he had] done so far,” and a 1941 film version featuring Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade made the novel’s fortunes. Hammett himself has been described as tall and elegantly dressed, and Sam Spade as looking “rather pleasantly like a blond Satan.” The Continental Op is much less camera-ready. Overweight and weary, he is an overworked, middle-aged detective living on hard liquor and no sleep. Spade’s story is narrated in the third person; the Op narrates his own. If Sam Spade is the star of the show, the nameless Op is the camera itself, the steady, disillusioned, but nonetheless reliable narrator of numerous unpleasant walks of life.
In November of 1927, when the first installment of Red Harvest was published in Black Mask, the stock market crash was still two years away, and the United States was on an economic and technological rise. Charles Lindbergh had made the first nonstop transatlantic flight. Talking pictures emerged with the debut of The Jazz Singer. The NBC radio network had twenty-four stations. Far from riding the ascendant wave, the Op acted as a sort of sardonic tour guide, pointing out people and places you would probably never get to meet or see and wouldn’t like very much if you did. Red Harvest opens with a searing and disheartening account of the detective’s assignment to clean up a corrupt city. “I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit. I didn’t think anything of what he had done to the city’s name. . . . A few years later I went to Personville and learned better.”
Americans were certainly aware of government corruption, but the idea of an entire city of schemers in murderous survival mode was a stretch even by Prohibition-era standards. Hammett had spent time in Butte, Montana, on which Poisonville was based, and had run into some of the unsavory sorts who populated his novel. He even claimed to have been himself hired to murder a union organizer in Butte, and although this account is prob ably untrue, he did encounter many shady people and circumstances. When he mentions the Big Ship—what Butte miners called the city’s largest boardinghouse—he is talking about a place he had seen as a Pinkerton operative.
Still, before 1929, cynicism and despair were the province of marginal characters, not the normal American condition. In the wake of the stock market crash, economic desperation and disillusionment became the broader American experience. During the last week of October 1929, the stock market lost 40 percent of its value. Individuals and businesses lost their investments, and this included account holders not even aware that banks had been investing their money. By 1933, the value of stock on the NYSE was less than one-fifth of what it had been at its peak in 1929. One-quarter of Americans were unemployed. The historically marginal experience of ongoing unemployment—a little more than 3 percent in 1929—ceased to be marginal. Whatshell shock had been to soldiers returning from World War I, unemployment and economic insecurity were to the Depression-era middle and working classes. Nearly 50 percent of children in the Great Depression were deprived of adequate food, clothing, shelter, education, and medical care. Soup kitchens multiplied. In a time of widespread poverty and unemployment, hardship and improvisation became a way of life.
In his 1944 article “The Simple Art of Murder,” Raymond Chandler praises Hammett for creating the realistic detective: “Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse. . . . He put these people down on paper as they are, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes. He had style, but his audience didn’t know it, because it was in a language not supposed to be capable of such refinements.” When Chandler writes “these people,” he acknowledges the class tensions of the Great Depression. Vigorous speculation and laissez-faire capitalism opened unimagined possibilities for wealth, tilted money into the hands of the rich, and ultimately sharpened income in equality. Indeed, by 1930 the richest 1 percent of Americans owned 40 percent of the nation’s wealth. (By comparison, in 2016, it was 35 percent.) So although the Great Depression made unemployment a common experience in the 1930s, the enrichment of the upper classes at the expense of the lower classes was not a new phenomenon. The rich in America lost money in the market crash, of course, but the fact remains that the upper classes suffered much less by comparison. What is more, many wealthy people who had been spared the ravages of the Depression did not hesitate to show it, dressing as ostentatiously in 1931 as they had in 1928. The lower class, understanding that the financial dealings of the rich had caused the crash in the first place, was resentful. And readers of Red Harvest and the subsequent Dain Curse understood this new, harsh, class-conscious reality. The fact that Hammett had left school at fourteen and moved around the country, and that his Op rode around the country solving cases with varying degrees of success, resonated with the itinerant existence that was commonplace during the Depression. The Op was no rail-riding hobo, but he did wander from one case to another, as weary and cynical as any of his real-life contemporaries.
The Continental Op was not good-looking, nor did he dress well. What he did provide the public was a model of cool survivalism.The Continental Op was not good-looking, nor did he dress well. What he did provide the public was a model of cool survivalism. He meets people and society on their own terms, solves the crime, collects his check, and shows up again the next day. He sets himself apart with words, elevating an entire class of muckers—Big Ship residents, miners, criminals, drunks, and get-over artists—to a sort of lyricism. In a language that was not supposed to “be capable of such refinements,” he demonstrates that there are things more important than elegance. Therein lay the stark poetry of the unrefined. Where Williams said “my ethics are my own,” the Op could demonstrate without saying it that his point of view was his own. In this sense the Op was in line with an American tradition of frontier narrators that began with James Fenimore Cooper. His particular brand of plain speaking read like a revindication of the poetry of the unsophisticated. As John Dos Passos put it in the prologue to his famous 1930s U.S.A. trilogy: “U.S.A. is a set of bigmouthed officials with too many bank accounts. U.S.A. is a lot of men in their uniforms buried in Arlington Cemetery. U.S.A. is the letters at the end of an address when you are away from home. But mostly U.S.A. is the speech of the people.” The upper classes may have had their criminals but none with such names as Bluepoint Vance, Spider Girrucci, Donkey Marr, and Happy Jim Hacker. These came directly from Hammett, who described himself as one of the few “moderately literate” people who took the detective story seriously and hoped that someone would make literature of it. This was a new phenomenon in detective fiction: making rough and improvisational existence seem privileged by perceiving and experiencing things other people couldn’t. So it is that in the very opening lines of Red Harvest, the Op—who claims no formal education—expresses dark amusement at words themselves. His jokes about Poisonville, his comments on the dictionary, and his coining of the term blood-simple (which lived on to become the title of the first Coen brothers movie in 1984) are as much a part of his legacy as the drink and the cigarette. And they became integral traits of the hard-boiled detective character.
Since the Op claimed no physical or emotional mastery of his environment, he relied on mental acuity and a resilient attitude. In Red Harvest, he admits, “This damn burg’s getting to me. If I don’t get away soon I’ll be going blood-simple like the natives.” But even if the burg is getting to him, he is always far enough ahead of it to come up with sentences like these. His mind is his own, and he takes the time to show that not only w ere marginal characters capable of a clever phrase; they were also capable of independent thought. Unlike Race Williams, who narrated without stopping and delivered such sound bites as “the opinions of others don’t interest me,” the Op paused to think and to say that he was thinking. Those moments were important because they showed that he had an inner life solid enough to withstand the onslaughts of the outside world. If your ethics being your own was not enough to put food on the t able, or if your house or pantry could not be your own, at least your mind, your thoughts, your imagination remained your own. The Op defended that independence. In The Dain Curse, when the morphine-addled Gabrielle recounts that she has a hard time thinking, that a “fog” gets between her and her thoughts, and that it happens again and again, the Op responds: “It sounds normal as hell to me. Nobody thinks clearly, no matter what they pretend. Thinking’s a dizzy business, a matter of catching as many of those foggy glimpses as you can and fitting them together the best you can. That’s why people hang on so tight to their beliefs and opinions; because, compared to the haphazard way in which they’re arrived at, even the goofiest opinion seems wonderfully clear, sane, and self-evident.” This musing lets us know that just making it through the day, with some combination of random invention and denial, was the way of the world, the way of all people. That sentiment was particularly sustaining during the Depression, when the outside world was beyond one’s control. Compared with Race Williams, who leapt from one action scene to another, narrating all the while, the Continental Op stories contain a lot of waiting. He waits in cars for the suspect to appear, in hotel lobbies for a guest to descend, in a bar with no one to talk to. While there, he thinks and observes. At a time in American history when waiting in breadlines and at soup kitchens had become a common experience, the Op’s ability to wait and be bored without losing face—and without losing his empathic, no-nonsense understanding of desperation—gained a new and enhanced currency.
During his 1928 campaign, Herbert Hoover had described America as needing to choose between “rugged individualism” and “paternalism and state socialism.” Like Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge before him, Hoover did not believe it was the job of the federal government to support the needy. He asked state governments to embark on public works and large companies to keep worker pay stable, but neither measure required compliance with his requests. He called Wall Street speculation “crazy and dangerous” but stopped short of demanding either the distribution of aid or even accountability. Individual responsibility sounded good in the abstract. It was part of the American fabric and was celebrated in the 1920s hard-boiled fiction much as it had been in the frontier stories of the nineteenth century. But it was impractical in the absence of reliable employment. With no reasonable means of supporting oneself, what good was individualism? Consider Race Williams’s statement “My ethics are my own,” which meant something in the era of Prohibition, gun-control laws, and police brutality. If Williams had been unemployed and struggling, “My ethics are my own” would amount to little more than an admission of desperation. In October of 1931, Hoover restated his resistance to government aid: “No governmental action, no economic doctrine, no economic plan or project can replace that God-imposed responsibility of the individual man and woman to their neighbors. That is a vital part of the very soul of a people.” This indirect criticism of socialism had subtly but crucially changed since Hoover first delivered a version of this message in 1928. He no longer claimed that individuals had no need of help. That would have been ridiculous in 1931. But he was determined that the government would not be the one to do the job. Rugged individualism was replaced by stoic neighborliness.
The Op was a good neighbor because unlike the wealthy who wore expensive clothes in the midst of others’ misfortune, he himself was never exempt from discomfort. The Depression brought with it a great deal of physical hardship, and the Op novels illustrated it. This went over well in the worst economic downturn in American history. The Op’s salient quality is not in living the dream or in doing what every reader would love to do but rather in the opposite—retaining his perspective while he does what the public doesn’t want to do but is forced to do. In The Dain Curse, he lumbers down a ravine in search of a body, “stumbling, sliding, sweating and swearing.” “Water squnched [sic] in my torn shoes. I hadn’t had any breakfast. My cigarettes had got wet.” And in “The Tenth Clew” (1924), after being knocked into the San Francisco Bay and almost drowning: “Half an hour later, shivering and shaking in my wet clothes, keeping my mouth clamped tight so that my teeth wouldn’t sound like a dice-game, I climbed into a taxi at the Ferry Building and went to my flat. There, I swallowed a half a pint of whiskey, rubbed myself with a coarse towel until my skin was sore, and, except for an enormous weariness and a worse headache, I felt almost human again.” The Op’s durability is hardly new. In “The Golden Horseshoe,” also from 1924, he recounts, “The fifteen years that had slid by since then had dulled my appetite for rough stuff.” If Race Williams had been an improbably enthusiastic tough guy, the Op is just tired, poorly dressed, and overweight. Yet there is no trace of self-pity in his words; he is still on top of his game, such as it is, and continues to solve crime.
What sets the Op apart from most other hard-boiled detectives—like Race Williams, Sam Spade, and Philip Marlowe—is that he is not his own boss. He has a nominal employer, the Continental Detective Agency, and an even more nominal boss, its director, the “Old Man.” In The Big Knockover, he says of the director, “Fifty years of crook-hunting for the Continental had emptied him of everything except brains and a soft-spoken, gently smiling shell of politeness that was the same whether things went good or bad—and meant as little at one time as another.” The company is more or less abstract and invisible. It’s not for nothing that the Op and the director remain nameless. Because of this, and because of the company’s complete moral neutrality, the entire Continental operation functions as a metaphor for daily life. It’s a metaphor, in other words, for doing what one has to do, fatigued and in ill-fitting shoes, once the promise of success through personality had fallen by the wayside. Yet the company does provide a consistent salary, always desirable and something of a dream during the Great Depression. Being part of a company also ensures the neighbors are watching out for you. You’re not completely isolated. In The House in Turk Street, when some bad actors have the Op tied up and talk about killing him, one man points out, “He is a Continental operative. Is it likely that his organization doesn’t know where he is? Don’t you think they know he was coming up here? And don’t they know as much about us—chances areas he does? There’s no use killing him. That would only make matters worse.” The Continental Op was an ideal hard-boiled detective for a historical era that had grown out of the self-sufficiency Hoover’s 1928 exhortation demanded. The masses had not yet met the New Deal that would rescue them. It wasn’t complete isolation and autonomy that made someone hard-boiled. It was the toughness and willingness to show up no matter how dire the circumstances. Ultimately, detectives did usually get themselves out of difficult situations, but they didn’t need to do it all alone. And on that score the Op managed to hold up a hard-boiled mirror to the entire country.
A middle-aged hero who did society’s dirty work on very little sleep, who showed up whether he wanted to or not, who was seemingly indifferent to solitude and the absence of support yet willing to pursue the rich and hold their feet to the fire—this wasn’t a person whose daily life Americans envied but someone they wanted on their side. And, as it turned out, it was the sort of person more and more Americans were forced to be. According to Hoover’s 1931 address, people should support each other, as well as themselves, even though the government would remain out of the picture. The American people ultimately took a dim view of this exclusion. In 1932, they elected Franklin Roosevelt, who promised to put the government in the role of world neighbor and, more importantly, in the role of shouldering the improvement of the country’s economic fortunes. In his inaugural address, Roosevelt was as clear about the glum state of the nation as Hammett had been about the corruption in 1920s Montana: “This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today,” he declared. He proclaimed that all we have to fear is fear itself but also admitted unequivocally that “a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.”
The same dark realities Roosevelt found in the country’s economy, the Continental Op found in Personville. But Roosevelt was president, able to be both neighbor and leader, to introduce the New Deal measures that would rescue the country from further prolonged economic disaster. Grouping the entire US population into one unit, he claimed, when accepting the Democratic nomination, that danger to one is danger to all and that credit groups are interrelated. Unlike Hoover, who had been content to let economic catastrophe trickle down to the lower classes, Roosevelt saw the entire country as implicated in the downturn. So, too, did the Op, who “faced the grim problem of existence” and the “dark realities of the moment” on a daily basis. He believed that prominent families w ere just as involved—perhaps more so—as street-level grifters. Cultural realities and the involvement of the upper classes became still grimmer and darker in the years just after Red Harvest was published as a novel. The Op couldn’t do much about the corruption and murders that surrounded him, but he could “speak the truth, frankly and boldly.” His reports from Personville were like fireside chats from someone who didn’t have a fireplace and wasn’t sure he’d ever get the chance to sit by one.
Hammett’s writing career was brilliant but short: the author more or less stopped writing in 1934, derailed by alcoholism and depression. The fact that his publications spanned the criminal 1920s and the postcrash years connected him in the American mind with that historical period and thus with American toughness. Straddling the Depression, the Op stories chronicled someone who made his own rules, drank a lot, and established networks around the country, facing enemies with no-nonsense resilience. Eminently practical, he was wittier than t hose ten times as rich as he. As the Depression lifted, and, more importantly, as America prepared to step onto the world stage, another author took Hammett’s place: Raymond Chandler.
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