Nightmare Town (Dashiell Hammett, 1948)

Last week marked the 60th anniversary of Hammett's death, so a quick tribute post is more than appropriate. After all, the guy can easily be considered the godfather to 90% of the authors featured on this blog.

A nice collection of three novelettes and one tiny, not even four pages long, story titled Albert Pastor at Home. Amusing (obviously) quick read, published in Esquire magazine in 1933. But even more funny is the anecdote about its origin provided by Ellery Queen in his warm introduction. Apparently, Hammett's agent had sold one story "exclusively" to two magazines, and Dashiell just penned this one quickly to solve the dispute! Oh, the good ol' days...

Two of the stories feature Continental Op. Scorched Face and Corkscrew were both published in 1925, and this is evident in their heavy influence by the Western genre. Especially the latter one, which is a decent take on the Yojimbo Red Harvest theme of the two gangs in a town not big enough for both of them. 

Good stuff, but I liked the Scorched Face better. A terrific plot, snappy street-wise dialogue, loads of action, and authenticity in describing the machinery of a big detective agency. Additionally, our Op hero has never been more determined to break the case. What spoiled it a bit for me was this totally over-the-top raid and shootout at the end. I prefer my detectives to be a bit subtler.

But the real prize of this collection is the titular Nightmare Town. Written in 1924, it precedes Hammett's hard-boiled bible, Red Harvest, for a few years. They are similar thematically, but this one is cruder and much crazier. It's like watching a 70s Italian Giallo where nothing really makes sense, but you don't mind all that much because everything is so stylish, and all the women are beautiful (and usually beautifully murdered). But the confusion here is created intentionally, and our hero is as lost amid all the WTFs as we are:

Was there never to be an end to this piling of mystery upon mystery, of violence upon violence? He had the sensation of being caught in a monstrous net – a net without beginning or end, and whose meshes were slimy with blood. Nausea – spiritual and physical – gripped him, held him impotent.

Mystery does get resolved, and this resolution is what makes Nightmare Town memorable. It's so preposterous and bonkers that, after the initial amazement, it actually makes sense. At least it made sense to me. If you like the final act of Jim Thompson's The Getaway, there's no way you won't like this one. And, for the record, I fucking love The Getaway!

Speaking of closing acts, this one also concludes in a somewhat surreal manner. To draw an analogy with movies once again, it reminded me of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with our surviving couple fleeing the chaos (corruption?) behind them. Again, maybe not. Maybe it's not symbolic at all, and I only saw what I wanted to see. But in any case, it's brilliant stuff.

The beginning of the year is a time for resolutions, so here's mine. No, I will not stop smoking. Instead, I'll complete my Hammett's Dell collection. One down, five to go! If you have any spare copies that you're willing to trade or sell, please feel free to send me a message.

4/5

Facts:

Hero: 

2 x Continental Op

1 x Steve Threefall:

"Is that your real name?" the marshal asked.

"Of course it is," the justice snapped. "You don't think anybody'd be damn fool enough to give a name like that unless it was his, do you?"

Dames: 

These are all tough, masculine stories with no strong female characters. It has to be said, though, that the guys are not testosterone-fueled machos, and gals are not dumb blond bimbos in need of rescue. 

I'm pretty sure that Clio Landes from Corkscrew would be fun to hang out with: 

A thin girl of maybe twenty-five, with too-bright dark eyes, dark, short hair, and a sharp prettiness that was the mark of a larger settlement than this. You've seen her, or her sisters, in the larger cities, in the places that get going after the theaters let out.

Location:

See the Dell map for details.

"A tough town, is it?" Steve asked.

"Couldn't help being! It's only three years old – and a desert boom town draws the tough boys."

The town – I can't get accustomed to it. It's so bleak. No children play in the streets. The people are different from those I've! Known – cruder, more brutal. Even the houses – street after street of them without curtains in the windows, without flowers. No grass in the yards, No trees.

There's a hundred corporations in Izzard that are nothing but addresses on letterheads – but stock certificates and bonds have been sold in them from one end of these United States to the other.

The last one is indeed quite prophetic. And since this post has several movie references, I'll give you another one. Louise-Michel from Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern takes the piss out of these tax "optimizing" letterbox companies in a really smart and funny way. I like everything that these two guys have been doing, and Louise-Michel ranks among the top 3 of their movies. Highly recommended!

Body count:

5 + 5 + 0 + 8 (excluding the pony) = 18

Blackouts:

There's one in Corkscrew after our hero is wounded in a duel:

I missed whatever else he said. The numbness was leaving my side, and the feeling that came in its place wasn't pleasant. Everything stirred inside me...

Title:

See 'Location' section

Edition:

Dell #379

In his introduction, Ellery Queen mentions that Nightmare Town appears in print for the first time since it was published in Argosy All-Story Weekly twenty-six years ago. According to Wikipedia, this was in 1924. There is no printing date information, but it's reasonably safe to assume it's from 1950 at the earliest. 

Cover:

By Robert Stanley. Very noir-ish, it blends nicely into the nightmarish atmosphere of Nightmare Town.

Cool lines:

A sleek-haired young man whose very nice manners and clothes completely hid anything else - brains for instance - he might have had. He was very willing to help me, and he knew nothing. It took him a long time to tell me so. A nice boy.

That was nice. The crazier the people you are sleuthing act, as a rule, the nearer you are to an ending of your troubles.

For answer to that I got a lot of information about myself, my habits, my ancestors. None of it happened to be truth, but it was colorful.

The Continental Op (Dashiell Hammett, 1923 - 1930)

A collection of seven short stories about a nameless detective working for the Continental Op agency by one of the greatest crime writers.

Masterpieces, all of them. Superb, stunning stuff and a lesson in writing. For me, this is the foundation of the crime genre and urban literature altogether. Tough guys, asphalt jungle, no messing around, no rules, no sentimentality...

Over the years, it hasn't aged one bit. The second collection, titled "The Big Knockover", is already waiting on my shelf.

The Tenth Clew

Murder has been committed and our favorite nameless investigator together with his cop friend O’Gar (a bullet-headed detective-sergeant who dresses like a village constable in movie) is left with a few suspects and with a bunch of clues. Nine of them, to be exact, and they are all as typical/predictable/standard as possible. And when you start to wonder how the hell Hammett will be able to solve this complicated mess within a 40-page story, everything unravels pretty quickly. Because our lucid PI finds these clues far too obvious, and therefore the 10th clue (clew?) is essentially that the rest of them were planted, so he should look for the culprit in precisely the opposite way they are pointing. Pretty clever, wouldn’t you say? 

The Golden Horseshoe

Like The Tenth Clew, this one also opens with a line of dialogue, which is a nice touch, and I like it. In this particular case, Nameless is instructed by a lawyer to find a missing person. This individual is not a criminal, so the case seems somewhat uninteresting, and the lawyer even apologises for it. But we know better, of course, because during the briefing, murder and drugs are mentioned. Right after this mandatory introduction, the story and its narration switch into “extreme hard-boiled mode”.

Nameless goes into the underworld of drug addicts and must use all his skills and resources provided by the agency to track down his man to the Golden Horseshoe joint in Tijuana, where the story reaches its climax with a classical twist of exchanged identities. Oh yeah – mustn’t forget to mention home invasion bloodbath. As hard-boiled as they come!

The House in Turk Street
Completely different compared to the first two. Here, the trouble finds our nameless hero and not the other way around. By pure chance, he stumbles into an apartment where some pretty unusual gang is about to divide the loot. And since there’s really no such thing as a “usual gang”, let me just quickly go through its members: there’s a Chinese mastermind, a femme fatale, a muscular hood without much of a brain and an elderly couple. So these characters quickly subdue Nameless, and then he begins the game of cat and mouse. Because very soon, everyone tries to cheat everyone else to get the loot and/or simply stay alive. The story is full of twists, and tension is masterfully built, as everything unfolds over a single night, allowing the narration to be essentially done in real time. Superb stuff, someone should write a play based on this!

Another novelty is a strong female character, which is, of course, most welcome! Elvira is a prototype of born-to-be-bad scheming femme fatale (Beautiful as the devil, and twice as dangerous!), and Hammett seems to like her a lot. For one thing, he dedicates a hefty paragraph to her introductory appearance and also lets her go free at the end. But Nameless promises himself that “one day…”.

The Girl with the Silver Eyes
Another missing person case - this time, Nameless is hired by a lovesick poet to find his fiancée. He soon suspects foul play because it turns out that the poet’s uncle is a respectable millionaire, and there’s also a case of a forged 20 grand check. Which of course is more than enough dough for some crooks to get their hands on.

Again, hard-boiled to the max with a violent ending, but this time it is also considerably darker. With this story being a bit longer than the rest, there’s enough time to develop some drama and family tragedy. Plus, the good guy gets killed, and I also felt sympathy for Porky Grout, who’s an interesting character. He’s “a liar, thief, hop-head, traitor to his kind and the biggest coward on the west Coast”, but he’s kind of likeable and you feel sorry for him at the end.

And let’s not forget the central character – the poor, spoiled poet’s fiancé. Without giving too much away, I’ll just say that Nameless’ “one day” promise from House in Turk Street has been fulfilled. 

The Whosis Kid
Once again, Nameless is not working on any specific job when he gets pulled into trouble. But this time it’s not by accident because he smells foul play after spotting the Whosis Kid at the boxing match. He’s an old acquaintance from his Boston days. “His racket used to be stick-up, gunman” and since “He could shoot and was plan crazy” he decides to follow him on his own initiative. Whosis Kid presence in Frisco indicates that some job is underway in which insurance companies – main clients of Continental Op – might be interested. Because you see, “Stick-ups are always in demand”!

This stick-up involves diamonds, pearls, and another motley crew of criminals. Once again, assembly is international as bad guy Maurosis is French, dame Ines is Spanish, and the Whosis Kid is "Boston American". Ines is the most interesting character in the story because she is a mix between a femme fatale and a damsel in distress. And she's not very likeable; the first time she appears, she kicks her dog sharply with the pointed toe of her slipper! Nasty bitch she is indeed! But also "Appealing, and pathetic, and anything else you like – including dangerous."

The Main’s Death
With 25 pages, this one is the shortest of the collection. It has a simply marvellous opening. Nameless is briefed by the two police officers about the murder of a dude called Main, so we get all the details straight away in a very condensed way. This briefing requires multiple readings because it's simply hilarious, undoubtedly one of the best parts of the whole book. Told entirely in slang by these two police sleuths, one of them being "freckled heavyweight, as friendly as a Saint Bernard puppy, but less intelligent".

The story is cool and pretty complicated, of course. $20,000 is stolen during a home robbery that goes wrong, and our hero is hired by a small and somewhat eccentric antique dealer to retrieve the missing cash. But the job is really just a pretext for him to find some dirt on his young cheating (?) wife. Needless to say, most of the money will be successfully retrieved (including 4 stamps worth 8 cents!) and the lady's honour will remain intact. Only one corpse in this one, though, but still great stuff!

Farewell Murder 
This one resembles a classical detective story, Sherlock Holmes type of shit, and maybe because of that, it is my least favourite of all. It's not bad by any means, but I've found others much better.

It starts in some remote village called Farewell, where this asshole Kavalov lives with his daughter Miriam (Her face had Asia in it. It was pretty, passive, unintelligent) and her husband. Kavalov had received death threats from his former associate, Captain Sherry, whom he had fucked over in a business matter, and who had now returned from Cairo with his black servant, Marcus. What follows is a pretty standard tale of greed, betrayal, revenge, and phoney alibis.

5/5

Facts:

Hero:
Nameless detective, 35 years, 180 pounds, a bit fat (so we can assume he's not very tall). Uses fake names Parker, Tracy or Jerry Young, the bootlegger. Been with the agency for 15 years. He had left the Boston branch to try army life, and after the war was finished, he returned to the Agency payroll in Chicago. Stayed there for a couple of years and then got transferred to San Francisco.

Location: 
San Francisco, briefly Tijuana and San Diego in the second story. Farewell in the last one.

Body counts:  
1 (+guilty party hanged), 6, 3 (+bad guy going to the gallows), 4, 5, 1, 2 (+guilty party hanged + one dog), making a grand total of 22 (+3 hangings + one dog).

Blackouts: 
My head filled up with funny notions. There wasn’t any room. There wasn’t any darkness. There wasn’t anything…

The entire back of my head burned with sudden fire … tiny points of light glittered in the blackness before me … grew larger … came rushing toward me ...”  

Cover: 
All recent Orion reprints have great illustrations on their covers, but this one is my favourite.  

Cool lines:  
Gooseneck stopped shooting and tried to speak. The brown heft of the girl’s knife stuck out of his yellow throat. He couldn’t get his words past the blade.

Physically he hadn’t gone to the dogs, but he had had his taste of the gutter and seemed to like it.

I knew that he’d have been better off playing with a gallon of nitro than with this baby. She was dangerous!

Once more Tai ran true to racial form. When a Chinese shoots he keeps on until his gun is empty.

What put an edge to this conversation was that both men were talking over their guns.

He looked dead, and he had enough bullet holes in him to make death a good guess. [The Coolest!]


You're as wrong as Prohibition. [The Coolest!]

Plus some great slang:

“Vag, hell!” he snarled.“I got five hundred smacks in my kick.” (vag = vagrancy, smack = buck, kick = ?)

I don’t blame Fag. He acted according to his code. Fag was square. If I had told him that I was ribbing Burke up for a trimming, Fag would leave me alone. But when I told him I was through with a graft, had gone queer, that made me his meat. [The Coolest!]