Dashiell Hamnett was a mystery writer who knew what he was talking about.
Before picking up his pen to write "The Maltese Falcon," ''The Red Harvest" or any of the pieces in this collection of previously unavailable stories, Hammett spent years as an operative for the Pinkerton Detective Agency, ranging across the country doing exactly the sort of case cracking associated with Sam Spade, his most enduring protagonist. In fact the Hammett hero he used more often was the nameless Continental Op, which was exactly the job the author himself had held at Pinkerton.
But Hammett brought more to his work than his corpus of knowledge on -- among other details of the private dick trade -- corpse knowledge. He was a genuine prose artist, a master of careful, angular description and, most importantly, well-timed and artfully deployed suspense. Many of the stories in "Nightmare Town" are Sherlock Holmes-ian: Like the famed British sleuth, Hammett's protagonists gather all the clues, weigh the possibilities in a split second or two, and deliver the unerring truth of the dark matter, to the envy of the local cops and the frustration of the perpetrator. "This is how I doped it," says the hotel detective of "House Dick," one of the most satisfying stories in the collection. "And I reckon it's about right."
Unlike old Sherlock, however, the Continental Op or Sam Spade is typically on the scene when the bad stuff goes down, arriving not after the fact but either in the thick of or just antecedent to the crimes. Hammett allows his heroes full immersion in the unfolding tale; In "They Can Only Hang You Once" there's the sly and chilling suggestion that Spade sets the butler up to be killed to confirm his suspicion about who's doing the killings.
The menace factor is heightened because we're never sure if the killing is over yet, not until the last word of the confession.
In a collection of twenty such stories, the cumulative effect is bound to become almost repetitious: As each tale begins, we know that someone is going to wind up dead, and that one of the principals we've met and heard described in Hammett's trademark terse physical detail ("burly dark man in wrinkled dark clothes") is going to be guilty. There are some nice surprises, particularly the great "The Man Who Killed Dan Odam," a detective-less story narrated by the titular prison escapee.
What makes "Nightmare Town" such fun reading is the joy of recovering a style of storytelling now more often parodied than taken at face-value: The spare, pragmatic, hardboiled gut-level prose of which Hammett was a master.
(Ben Winters)
"Nightmare Town"
by Dashiell Hammett
Knopf, $25, 396 pages
copyright 1999 New City Communications, Inc.