TO MAKE A SHORT STORY LONG - THE PULP ROOTS OF THE MALTESE FALCON

By Jim Doherty

Back in the day, when pulp writers moved up to books, it was not unusual for them to draw on past material for inspiration. Perhaps Raymond Chandler is the writer who's best-known for expanding previously published pulp magazine stories into hard-cover novels. Indeed, the posthumously published short story collection Killer in the Rain and Other Stories (Houghton Mifflin, 1964) is comprised almost exclusively of yarns that Chandler later combined and expanded (“cannibalized” to use his own term for the process) into the novels The Big Sleep (Knopf, 1939), Farewell, My Lovely (Knopf, 1940), and The Lady in the Lake (Knopf, 1943).

This what, tradition I suppose you could call it, of crime writers expanding and/or combining short stories into novels continues to this day. Lawrence Block's When the Sacred Ginmill Closes (Arbor House, 1986), for example, is an expanded version of his Edgar-winning short story “By the Dawn's Early Light.” Bill Pronzini's Bleeders (Carroll & Graf, 2002) combined and expanded his short stories “The Big Bite” and “Home is the Place Where.” Max Allan Collins's fact-based historical thriller Butcher's Dozen (Bantam, 1988) in an extension of his story “The Strawberry Teardrop.”

Dashiell Hammett, who was Chandler's main inspiration, and, at least to a degree, the inspiration for all hard-boiled mystery writers who followed, also made use of his short fiction when he was constructing his lamentably short list of novels, but not in precisely the same way as Chandler and his successors. Rather than simply expanding a short story to novel length, or combining and expanding scenes from several short stories, Hammett took elements, themes, and plot devices that he had used in previously published short fiction, and reused them in new ways. So, where it's relatively easy to see how The Big Sleep derives from “Killer in the Rain” and “The Curtain,” or Farewell, My Lovely from “Try the Girl,” “Mandrin's Jade,” and “The Man Who Liked Dogs,” the short story roots of Hammett's most famous novel, The Maltese Falcon (Knopf, 1930) are a little harder to discern.

Even if you've never read this novel or seen the classic film based on it, most of you have probably heard of its protagonist, Sam Spade. Indeed, the name is virtually a synonym for “hard-boiled private eye.” And most of you have probably heard of Hammett's other famous detective, Nick Charles, who solved murders with his wife Nora. In fact, most people, even if they're not mystery fans, have, in all likelihood, at least heard of Spade and the Charleses.

How many of you have ever heard of the Continental Op?

Well, this is a mystery website, after all, and if you're logged onto this site, it's fairly safe to assume that you're a reasonably devoted mystery devotee. So probably most of you have at least heard of him. But few outside of mystery fandom, even if they know all about Spade or Nick and Nora, are familiar with the Op.

While that's not unusual, it is, when you know something about Hammett's work, kind of odd. After all, Spade only appeared in one novel and three short stories (and those short stories were kind of dashed off for a quick payday some years after Hammett had largely given up writing). Nick and Nora Charles appear in only one novel, The Thin Man (Knopf, 1934). Hammett also wrote a couple of original short screen treatments that were expanded into full scripts by others, and eventually filmed as After the Thin Man and Another Thin Man , the second and third movies to feature William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora. That's as much work as he ever did on those characters.

Hammett wasn't all that prolific, of course, and, perhaps, if he had written more than six novels, some of them might also have featured Spade or the Charleses. Or perhaps not. Reportedly, Hammett was growing tired of crime fiction by the time he wrote his last novel, and was anxious to branch out into other kinds of writing. In any case, six was all he wrote.

And of those six, three were about the Continental Op.

Moreover, the Op was also featured in twenty-seven short stories published in Black Mask and other magazines between 1923 and 1930. Twenty-seven out of some sixty-odd published. Half of his novels, and nearly half of his short stories. Virtually half of all the fiction the man credited with inventing the hard-boiled crime story ever wrote features a character comparatively few people are familiar with.

The Op, described as short, heavy-set, homely, around 35 in his earliest appearances and admitting to 40 in his last ones, is an operative, or “op,” for the San Francisco Office of the Continental Detective Agency, a fictionalized version of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, for which Hammett actually worked before and after his World War I military service. The Op tells his own stories in the first person, but never identifies himself by name. Hence the “Continental Op” sobriquet. Characters like Bill Pronzini's “Nameless Detective” and Thomas B. Dewey's Chicago private eye, known only by the generic nickname of “Mac,” seemed to have borrowed the idea of “first-person anonymity” from the Op.

Though they're both professional private eyes, the Op is different from Spade in a lot of ways. A bit older, less obviously attractive to women than the tall, slender, chisel-featured Spade, he tells his own stories in a direct, straight-forward first-person style, where Spade's is told by a ruthlessly objective third person narrator. Most importantly, the Op's a paid employee of a large company, while Spade owns and operates his own small but successful business. Nevertheless, they have a lot in common, too.

It's said that Hammett modeled the Op on his old boss, Jim Wright, the superintendent of the Pinkertons' Baltimore office, where Hammett started his private eye career. And, physically, at least, this is probably true. But ultimately, whether Hammett was aware of it or not, the Op was, in many ways, a self-portrait. He reflects the kind of experiences Hammett had as a Pinkerton op, and the kind of attitude and professional approach he took to detective work during that period of his life.

Indeed, all of Hammett's protagonists were largely based on himself, to one degree or another. The Op was an employee of a large detective agency, as Hammett once was, and worked in San Francisco , as Hammett had.

Spade's physical description, tall, slim, blond, with chiseled features that put one in mind of a group of variously sized v's fitted together, is one that could easily fit Hammett, too, and he shares a first name with his creator, who was baptized Samuel Dashiell Hammett.

Ned Beaumont, in The Glass Key (Knopf, 1930), is tubercular, as Hammett was after his stint of military service, and, like Hammett, is addicted to gambling and alcohol.

Nick Charles is a former private detective who drinks way too much, has become suddenly wealthy without really adjusting to his financial success, who finds it hard to work up any real enthusiasm for anything. A character, in other words, with a background similar to Hammett's, who is, psychologically, in much the same place Hammett was at that point in his life. Nick's wife, Nora, was said to be based on Lillian Hellman, Hammett's paramour.

If the Op was Hammett as he once was, Spade was probably who he wished he was. Indeed, in the introduction to a special edition of The Maltese Falcon for Modern Library, Hammett said that Spade was designed to be the kind of character that most professional private detectives in his acquaintance (including, presumably, himself) aspired to be.

Beaumont and Charles? They were, perhaps, who he feared he had become.

Despite the differences in physical description, the Op has become so identified with his creator in the minds of many Hammett fans, that when a TV-movie was made of the final Op novel, The Dain Curse (Knopf, 1929), instead of hiring an actor who fit the description of Hammett's character, the filmmakers hired James Coburn, tall, slender, silver-haired, and mustachioed, because he fit the description of Hammett himself, and then, to reinforce the identification, gave him the phonetically similar name of “Hamilton Nash,” which is, I guess, “Dashiell Hammett” spelled . . . well . . . sideways. Sort of.

Before he tried his hand at novels, Hammett spent the better part of a decade as a short story writer. Going from writing short stories to writing novels is, even today, still regarded as the accepted way for a professional fiction writer to apprentice, and it was even more the case in Hammett's day, when there were so many more markets for short fiction.

What I'd like to do here is examine several of Hammett's Continental Op short stories and show how they contain the roots of his most famous, and probably best, novel.

Nearly all of the Op short stories , including the five stories I'm going to talk about in this column, can be found in one or more of the following posthumously published short story collections, The Big Knockover and Other Stories (Random House, 1966), The Continental Op (Random House, 1974), Nightmare Town and Other Stories (Knopf, 1999), and Crime Stories and Other Writings (Library of America, 2001). All of these are available in contemporary editions, and you should make a point of seeking them out.

A warning, though. In order to talk intelligently about the way these early stories influence Falcon , it's necessary to give away endings. I think I can confidently state that, even with the surprise twists revealed ahead of time, you won't find that any of these stories have been “spoiled.” Nevertheless, it's rightly regarded as a cardinal sin to reveal the ending of a mystery story, so, to avoid that, the five stories I'll be talking about are “The House on Turk Street,” “The Girl with the Silver Eyes,” “Who Killed Bob Teal?,” “The Whosis Kid,” and “The Gutting of Couffignal.” If you haven't read any of them, and/or you haven't read (or seen) The Maltese Falcon , then go no further. Go read the material first, and then come back to see what I have to say about it.

Still here? Okay. Don't say I didn't warn you.

“The House on Turk Street” ( Black Mask , 15 April 1924, reprinted in The Continental Op and Crime Stories ), takes place in a single room in a building in San Francisco, much as the final chapters of Falcon take place in the enclosed space of Spade's San Francisco apartment. The characters include Tai, a fat gentleman with a cultured British accent who fancies himself, not without some justification, as a master criminal, and a character who, despite his Chinese ancestry, obviously prefigures Casper Gutman; Elvira, a treacherous female criminal, a beautiful redhead who is an embryonic version of Brigid; and a murderous gunman named “Hook.” The Macguffin in this story is a collection of stolen bonds that each of the criminals is contending for. Stolen bonds, of course, can't be given the same kind of romantic Grail-like backstory that the novel's “glorious golden falcon” has, but they serve much the same function in the plot of “Turk Street,” that the legendary statuette does in Falcon , as the Op, though captured and in the clutches of the villains, manages to gain sole control of the bonds, a situation that Hammett will use again in the final (“You may have the falcon, Mr. Spade, but we have you”) chapters of Falcon . It ends with the Op gaining his freedom, catching or killing most of the criminals, and recovering the stolen bonds. But Elvira, arguably the most formidable member of the gang, manages to escape.

Two months later, Hammett followed up with a sequel to “ Turk Street ,” “The Girl with the Silver Eyes” ( Black Mask , June 1924, reprinted in The Continental Op and Crime Stories ), in which the Op finally catches up with the “one who got away.” Hired to find the missing fiancée of the scion of a wealthy family, the Op traces her to Half Moon Bay , a Pacific Coast community in the suburban Peninsula area south of San Francisco , where he discovers that the missing fiancée is none other than Elvira, now going by the name of Jeanne Delano. When she is unable to escape a second time, she comes on to the Op, hoping that, as has always been the case to this point, her feminine charms will persuade a man to do what she wants. Of course, the Op, though tempted, is having none of that, and it's easy to see, in this penultimate scene of the story, a dry run for the renunciation scene between Spade and Brigid in the last chapter of Falcon .

Later that year, Hammett received a shock when his editor at Black Mask , Joseph T. Shaw, rejected one of his Op stories, asking for revisions. Hammett wrote a letter to Shaw, which Shaw printed in the magazine, to the effect that Shaw was right to reject the submission, because it clearly wasn't up to snuff. However there's reason to believe that Hammett didn't actually take the rejection very well at all. And as for revising the rejected story, “Who Killed Bob Teal?,” all he did was insert one single paragraph close to the beginning:

“Those who remember this affair will know that the city, the detective agency, and the people involved all had names different from the ones I have given them. But they will also know that I have kept the facts true.”

Then, having made that insertion, he resubmitted “Bob Teal” as a “fact crime” article to the dean of fact crime magazines, True Detective , which promptly bought it and published it in their November 1924 issue (reprinted in Nightmare Town ). Publicly, he may have been applauding Shaw's editorial acumen, but privately he was letting Shaw know that Black Mask wasn't the only market available to him, and moreover, that, with his professional background, he could even sell his fiction as fact and get away with it.

Of course, it's altogether possible that Hammett may have based the story on some actual experience, or experiences, he had during his Pinkerton days, or on the experience of some other Pinkerton operative he'd worked with or heard of. And if that's the case, as we'll see, it means that The Maltese Falcon has a basis in fact as well.

In “Who Killed Bob Teal?,” Hammett did something rather unusual, if not altogether unprecedented. He killed off a popular supporting character in an established series. Bob Teal, a rookie operative for the Continental Agency, had been introduced in earlier stories as a promising young detective who, under the Op's tutelage, was turning into a first-class investigator. He'd figured in a few stories to that point, and it was clear that the Op was taking an almost fatherly interest in him.

The story opens with the Old Man, the boss of the Continental's San Francisco office, informing the Op that Teal has been murdered, and that the Op's been assigned to help the police find the murderer. The Op, of course, has a personal stake, but aside from that, it's his job.

Teal, had been assigned to a tail a possible embezzler named Whitacre, who was suspected by his business partner, Ogburn, of stealing funds from the firm. Ogburn had hired the Continental Agency to prove or disprove that suspicion. Teal's body has been found behind a row of billboards. He was shot with a medium caliber gun at very close range. His own gun was still holstered.

So here we have a situation prefiguring one of the central elements of Falcon . The hero's partner has been murdered. The hero is duty-bound to catch the killer. The body of the victim, a detective known to be very good at his job, has been found in a remote area, shot at close range, his gun still in its holster. At first the police suspect Whitacre, the man Teal was tailing, but the Op isn't so sure. Reasoning from essentially the same set of clues that will be available to Spade in Falcon , the Op comes to essentially the same conclusion. Teal was too sharp a detective to be caught in a secluded spot with empty hands by the very man he was shadowing. But he'd have gone there with someone he trusted. He'd have gone there with the Agency's client. In the end, the Op arrests Ogburn, who'd been framing Whitacre in order to have full access to both the proceeds of their business, and to Whitacre's wife.

A final note on “Who Killed Bob Teal?” Just to reinforce the identification of author and character, True Detective bylined the story “by Dashiell Hammett of the Continental Detective Agency.”

“The House in Turk Street ” introduced Tai and Elvira, characters who would become prototypes for Casper Gutman and Brigid O'Shaugnessy. But “Hook,” the gunman from that story, was just a generic thug, with neither the effeminate fastidiousness of Joel Cairo nor the youthful bravado of Wilmer Cook. We can find the embryonic versions of those characters in “The Whosis Kid” ( Black Mask , March 1925, reprinted in The Continental Op and Crime Stories ).

On his first night off in weeks, the Op attends a prize fight, where he spots a known armed robber named either Arthur Carey or Arthur Cory, but, in any case, best-known by his underworld monicker, the “Whosis Kid.” Years earlier, the Kid had been pointed out to the Op by a Boston policeman who described him as a particularly dangerous gunman despite his youth and baby-faced appearance. Though it's his night off, the Op decides to follow the Kid. Along the way, he finds out that the Kid was involved in a jewel robbery in Boston a few weeks earlier. But circumstances, like the Op's witnessing someone trying to kill the Kid in a drive-by shooting, lead the detective to conclude that something's gone wrong with the split.

The story winds up, as it did in “ Turk Street ” and will in Falcon , with all the parties gathered together in an enclosed space, condemning each other as double-crossers, and contending for the missing gemstones. Except for the fact that the Op doesn't have control of the Macguffin, as he did in “ Turk Street ” and as Spade would in Falcon , the parallels are obvious. The members of the gang have worked together to get the loot, have double-crossed each other, but have, at least temporarily, come to an uneasy truce in order to find the jewels. The girl responsible for most of the double-crossing, is strip-searched, as Brigid would be in Falcon . One of the other gang members, a Frenchman named Maurois, has the same sort of finicky mannerisms, and the same sort of exotic foreignness that will mark Joel Cairo. And, in the titular villain, we have the obvious prototype for Wilmer Cook, the baby-faced “gunsel” with the “gaudy line of patter.” Though none of the gemstones has any kind of legend surrounding any of them, making the Macguffin a collection of items of sparkling beauty rather than sheets of dry, dull, albeit valuable paper, is a step toward the fascinating Grail object that Hammett will create in his novel.

The Maltese Falcon is, not just the most famous novel Hammett ever wrote. It's the most famous private eye novel anyone ever wrote. And a lot of people, myself included, think it's not just the most famous, but the best of all private eye novels. And the last Op yarn I'm going to talk about is, as far as I'm concerned, the best of all private eye short stories.

It's called “The Gutting of Couffignal” ( Black Mask , December 1925, reprinted in The Big Knockover and Crime Stories ). The Op has been sent to Couffignal, a swanky island community just off the Bayside coast of suburban Marin County . He's been assigned to a boring security detail, guarding the presents at a society wedding. Late that night, after the newly married couple has departed on their honeymoon, the reception has broken up, and the detective's last job is just to stay awake for the rest of the night in a room full of extravagantly costly gifts, all hell breaks loose.

A well-organized gang of robbers has struck with military precision. They've set off a bomb that's demolished the bridge that connects the island with the mainland, cutting Couffignal off from outside help. They've killed the police chief (which, effectively, means they've killed the whole police force), they've robbed the bank, and they're about to plunder everything else on the island. At the same time a tremendous rainstorm has struck, drenching the island and, incidentally, causing a whole lot of really neat noir-ish atmospheric effects (if you've got the imagination to see them in your mind's eye). The Op is the only man who stands between the gang and success.

In some of the best action scenes Hammett ever wrote, the Op holds the line single-handed for the rest of the night until, bloodied, limping badly on a twisted ankle (badly enough twisted that, in desperation, he's stolen a crutch from a handicapped paper boy so he can continue to get around and fight the bad guys), he's joined by a detail of San Francisco Harbor Patrol cops and a detachment of Marines from a nearby Naval base. Now, with most of the gang captured, he's got one last thing to do, confront the mastermind behind the job and recover the stolen loot.

That mastermind turns out to be Sonya Zhukovski, a beautiful Russian princess who planned the whole thing in hopes that she and her compatriots could use the plunder to restore the fortunes lost to them after the Red Revolution.

And in Hammett's last dress rehearsal for the renunciation scene between Sam and Brigid, the princess makes a play for the Op, but the he's having none of it.

“You think that I'm a man and you're a woman,” the Op says. “That's wrong. I'm a manhunter and you're something that has been running in front of me.”

But the princess has one last card to play. She contrives to deprive the Op of his stolen crutch. Knowing that his ankle has gotten painful enough that he won't be able to follow her without it, she'll simply walk away confident that, despite his gruff demeanor, he's too chivalrous to shoot her unless she's actually attacking him.

Before she's halfway through the door, the Op caps her in the leg.

“You ought to have known I'd do it,” he tells her. “Didn't I steal a crutch from a cripple?”

The Maltese Falcon , like most masterpieces, was built on a foundation made up partly of superlative talent, partly of a lot of hard work, not just on that novel, but on all the writing that preceded that novel, and partly, as we've seen, on the judicious recycling of great ideas. If you've never read any of Hammett's short fiction, you owe it to yourself to try it. And if, as I have assumed, you've ever read The Maltese Falcon , you really ought to check out the five stories I've cited in this column to see how the ideas he eventually brought to full, mature fruition in his novel, worked almost as well during his earlier apprenticeship.