When Hard-Nosed Detectives Ruled The Roost-Dashiell Hammett’s Nightmare Town

Book Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

Nightmare Town, Dashiell Hammett, Vintage, New York, 2000   

  

Over the past several years I have had occasion to review many books and film adaptations of the works of the two classic crime novel writers who are legitimately the forebears for all kinds of action-oriented hard-nosed fictional detectives today, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. I am at it again here with this review of a treasure trove of Hammett’s shorter works which were published in Black Mask and other crime magazines, Nightmare Town. And again I am astounded by the sparse, rough, flowing language that Hammett’s brought to the early hard-boiled detective novel with seems to be clearly in line with Ernest Hemingway’s modernist usage. That was a time when he and Chandler broke out of the parlor pink type stories and gave them some punch, gave their guys and gals some swagger, made their detectives jump more than a few hoops before they caught the bad guys (and in a couple of stories here  gals) flat-footed. No wonder writers like Ernest Hemingway tipped their hats to Hammett and Chandler. No wonder as well that the reader of publications like Black Mask waited impatiently for the next issue.    

This book contains twenty-two of Hammett’s short crime sketches a few that have been seen in other collected works like The Big Knock-Over. Naturally not all the works are equally good although all show the wicked bent of Hammett’s mind in constructing plot-lines and distributing clues. Three story lines stick out; the title piece Nightmare Town, the four Sam Spade pieces (yes, there was a Samuel Spade sans millstone Miles Archer before he ran up against the cutthroats and dangerous femme in The Maltese Falcon), and the first draft of The Thin Man (and yes again there was a thin man before Nick and Nora Charles, and Asta, and wangled their ways into the story line looking for that very elusive eccentric thin man).

Nighmare Town is a classic hard guys tale out of the Old West. No, not the Old West of Billy the Kid and honorable killings done to stake a claim out to land and manhood there in the days before civilization and the end of the frontier (end of land really unless you wanted to swim the Japan seas) clapped down and leave the wild boys in the towns with nothing but time on their hands. But then along came Prohibition and every guy who had a crooked thought, some bravado, and a fairly quick trigger was trying to jump onto easy street since they all instinctively knew that people were still going to need their booze, and plenty of it, no matter the cost.  That premise drives the hard to figure otherwise action as the protagonist gets more, much more, that he bargained for by staying in that created out of nothing Western town which fronted for a huge illegal liquor operation.

The four Sam Spade stories are interesting for what they are, which is cleverly plotted detective stories of the conventional sort where Sam, along with the police, smart boy, and without any female distraction, again smart boy, solves what seem to be impossible crimes, for example, how the thief, or thieves got away (for a while) with jewelry store robbery when it looked like the who thing went up in smoke. The “what not” part of the stories is, take either a look at the film or a read of the book, that the lack of that female distraction, that femme Bridget or whatever her name was, as a formidable foil makes this Sam a little less romantic, a little less hard-boiled, and little left nifty since he is not tilting at windmills to bring a little rough justice into this wicked old world that the fully formed detective in The Maltese Falcon.  

The First Draft of the Thin Man suffers as well from the absence of the two, well, suave, debonair, and witty detectives which Hammett created later, Nick and Nora Charles (oh, alright and Asta too) when he reworked this piece. The story line here moreover sort of gets run over at the end when the plot ran out of steam after one of the main seen character winds up dead, very dead and the thin man is still out there somewhere. But if you want to see how a master writer wrote when writers wrote read this one to see how a work progresses. Hell read the whole  book to see how crime novel writers wrote in the old days.