Motives and Methods of Hardboiled Fiction Part 6:
Concluding Unhardboiled Postscript

To anyone who has checked out the shelves of a book store, it is obvious that works in the hardboiled style I’ve described are almost non-existent. There are a few simple, but compelling, reasons for this: 1) it’s hard - hard to write and hard to read, 2) the stories it can tell may be infinite, but there is also an infinite number of stories it can’t tell, and 3) there are more readers for the infinity of stories that hardboiled can’t tell than there are for for those it can.

Most readers choose their fiction for the story or the author. The style in which the story is presented is rarely a deciding factor, though it is often considered a significant aspect of the author’s work. Most would find the limitations of hardboiled (the prohibitions of speculation, motivation, summarization, mind-reading etc.) puzzling. If there are things you can’t say in the telling of a story, then that limits the content of the story right there. Why would any author want to take on these restrictions in the pursuit of something as nebulous as “style?”

The answer is that most authors would not. Mickey Spillane, John D. MacDonald and Ian Fleming borrowed freely from the mythology of hardboiled but ignored the style. Their novels were immensely popular, and their readers did not miss the restricted hardboiled narration. Those novels may seem hopelessly dated now, but their popularity probably did as much to drive the evolution of the mystery genre as Hammett’s did in his day. I’ve called this hybrid “half-assed hardboiled,” another stupid value judgement, though the “half hardboiled” part is accurate enough. The important point is that this hybrid evolved from elements of hardboiled that Hammett exploited and, in some cases helped to create, and it is possible to see some of the directions taken in that evolution foreshadowed in Hammett’s own body of work.

The Appeal of Hardboiled

In both its style and content, hardboiled celebrates the individual and demonizes the collective. In the wide world, these are considered peculiarly American ideals - our “rugged individualism,” but they have broad appeal to anyone who has ever been the victim of a faceless and unaccountable bureaucracy, any form of prejudice, the economic might of corporations, the will of the majority, the betrayal of a trusted friend, the failure of love, and on and on - a very substantial group, in fact, everyone. On the other hand, hardboiled is not an effective vehicle to express (except by their absence) the values of true love, faithful friendship, political solidarity, productive enterprise, social harmony, effective and efficient administration, etc. And it would be willful ignorance to deny that such values exist. There are clearly two sides to this coin, and no one gets through life without seeing both of them. Hardboiled is not fundamentally false in its worldview, nor is it universally correct. Every expression has its focus and emphasis, the choices made on “what to leave in and what to leave out” (Bob Seger, "Against the Wind"). The focus of hardboiled is dysfunction. It appeals to those who seek a voice for their own frustration and loneliness.

Hardboiled is supposed to be objective, and in its presentation of fact it is. But the selection of objective, perceptible facts presented over the course of a hardboiled novel is certainly capable of conveying theme and tone. Theme and tone are not objective; they are slanted, representative of the author’s and/or narrator’s point of view. Theme and tone are the point at which style and content intersect. Theme might be defined as the conceptual implication of the events that form the story, and tone can be seen as the emotional residue of the words that present it. I’ve suggested that the characteristic tone of hardboiled is the disappointment and bitterness born of our universal struggle to find meaning and human connection, a struggle doomed to failure by the stubbornly intractable nature of man and the vast, yawning indifference of the cosmos. It is in this sense of the human condition that style and content intersect. In hardboiled fiction, the characters and their actions live out this vision, and the words that present them are meant to harmonize with it.

But the same myth, and the themes that arise from it, can be presented from many perspectives, each with its own characteristic tone. Noir, for instance, is a shading of hardboiled bitterness, a shading that edges into horror. The tone of noir reflects the individual’s horror at the discovery of his or her own lonely impotence in the empty universe. The hardboiled myth rejects that horror and escapes into the absurd where the individual constructs his or her own meaning and sense of connection through his or her participation in the struggle to maintain it. Sam Spade is good example. He has constructed his self to function in his world, and he protects that self absurdly but doggedly through his actions and words. The tone of the book echoes that absurdity and Spade’s bitter resignation to it. This is hardly commercial pablum, and it raises the question of how and why the novel became so popular and how that popularity shaped the evolution of American crime fiction.

Entertainment

As with all genre and much of literary fiction, people read crime novels for entertainment. Crime fiction can have many goals, but entertainment will always be one of them, usually at the top of the list and overshadowing all others except money. But entertainment is a very broad goal. It is whatever the reader thinks it is. There is nothing in the hardboiled style, bitter and impersonal as it is, to preclude entertainment. In fact, the style seeks that goal through the satisfactions of a vivid visualization of a fictional reality.

But there are reasons the hardboiled style has rarely appeared in its purest form, reasons why few writers have taken up the discipline that Hammett handed down, reasons for the bastardized versions of John D. MacDonald and Mickey Spillane. The first is that not all readers wish to put in the effort of visualization. Visualization requires concentration, imagination, participation, trust, etc. Some readers at all times and all readers at some times will find those demands tiresome and odious rather than entertaining. The other issue is the work that must be done to produce a feasible story in the hardboiled style. It is much easier to tell a story with narrative insight into any and all things than it is to frame it within the constraints of hardboiled, entirely out of dialogue, action and objective description. It is more work for the author to pound his story into a shining hardboiled nugget and more work for the reader to dig into his own mind and emotions to mine that gold. Half-assed hardboiled is a compromise that reduces the work for both. The question of the last post in this series was: what is the significance of the MacDonald/Spillane formula, which uses the hardboiled myth and ignores the style? Their popularity conclusively demonstrates the entertainment value of the myth served up in a thick sauce of heroic personal reflection – a very non-hardboiled style. But the crime novel did not get from The Maltese Falcon to I, the Jury in a single leap. It evolved through almost two decades and thousands of writers, from hack to Nobel Prize winners. To trace that evolution, it might be useful to start with the directions Hammett’s writing took after The Maltese Falcon. Where did he go with The Glass Key and The Thin Man?

The Progression

The restrictions of hardboiled leave the drama of The Glass Key obscure and unresolved, an opinion that is not inconsistent with much of the critical appraisal of the book. Yet Hammett said he believed it to be his best work. Despite their prominence in the New Yorker, stories that have no resolution generally have limited entertainment value. The Glass Key is an obvious exception. Immediately following its publication, it was even more popular than The Maltese Falcon. Even today, there are readers and critics who agree with Hammett’s assessment that it is his best. Some appreciate its open-ended ambiguity, finding in it a direction that leads to noir and the existentialists.

Hammett experimented with the hardboiled style his entire career. Despite Chandler’s dismissal of his artistic intent, it would be foolish to assume that The Glass Key and The Thin Man are not meaningful steps in that experimentation. Hammett may well have seen The Glass Key as the best representation of his style ideal. The restrictions are adhered to just as strictly, and it is purer than The Maltese Falcon in that it does not contain the explicit rationalization of the events of the story that is provided in Spade’s final explanation to Brigid. But this also means that the self of the protagonist is never revealed.

It seems likely that the ambiguity of Ned Beaumont was at least as apparent to Hammett as it is to his readers. I have no idea if that ambiguity was intended or was simply a by-product of the style, and beyond that, I have no idea if it pleased Hammett or depressed him. It is tempting to speculate that perfecting his style goal in The Glass Key exhausted or frustrated him, turning him toward something new and different – The Thin Man.

The Glass Key

In The Glass Key, the big mystery is what is Ned Beaumont’s problem? Why is he so angry all the time? The fact of his friendship with Paul Madvig is made clear, if not by their truncated fight, then by the dinner with Madvig’s mom. But it isn’t really clear why or how they became friends in the first place and why they’re fighting now. And the trip to New York after Bernie Despain – what’s that about? The novel leaves other questions, but these two are enough to call it confusion, which for most people is not a desirable element of entertainment.

The big difference between Ned Beaumont and Sam Spade is that Spade’s actions don’t require explanation like Beaumont’s do. I’ve noted the “dissonance” between Spade’s actions and his words, but it is background noise that probably goes unnoticed in a casual reading. The questions raised by Ned Beaumont’s actions and words cry out for resolution from the beginning. Spade’s long explanation to Brigid at the end of The Maltese Falcon is doubly satisfying in that it not only raises the dissonance to the reader’s consciousness but resolves it at the same time. That doesn’t happen with Ned Beaumont. The mystery of his anger remains distracting and unsatisfying in the sequence of conversations and events that lead to the story’s resolution, and most importantly, in the “resolution” itself.

Several aspects of Ned Beaumont’s anger are clear: 1) Much of it is directed at Paul and shows in his disdain for Paul’s lack of strategic sense and his awkward attempt to climb into polite society with the Senator’s family. 2) It is complicated by his unshakeable allegiance to Paul. He won’t give Shad O’Rory anything to use on Paul, not for $10,000, not for the promise of a gambling house to run after the election or to stop the endless and brutal beating Jeff seems to enjoy giving him. 3) Another large measure of Ned Beaumont’s anger is directed at himself. There is no way to miss the masochism in his voluntarily walking into Shad’s place knowing the likely outcome or his intentionally provoking a fresh beating every time he regains consciousness. The hardboiled text makes these facts apparent, but does not answer the main question: where does this complex and consuming rage come from? The narrator cannot explain it directly, and Ned Beaumont won’t say. Is this another instance of the distracting question of the Continental Op?

There are differences in the treatment of the Op, Spade and Ned Beaumont. The Op is a first person narrator whose lack of emotional engagement focuses the reader back on the characters and actions of the case but leaves unanswered the distracting question of who he is. This ambiguity seems unintended, since the narrator is not the subject of the book and is in fact meant to disappear. Spade is followed in the third person, and while the pursuit of the falcon is drawing the reader’s attention, Spade’s actions and words are slowly and subliminally accreting to form the question about who he is, which, unlike the Op stories, is the real focus of the book. But, just as the reader is recognizing that this is the fundamental question, it is answered in his explanation to Brigid, an answer that reflects back on all the words and actions of the book dramatizing and enriching them in retrospect. With Ned Beaumont, the question of his motives and thought processes is front and center right from the start, and it is also clear that, like Spade, he is the central focus. If the question is to be answered in the rigidly hardboiled style that Hammett insists upon, it must come (most likely) from the words and deeds of Ned Beaumont himself or (much less likely, and probably less satisfying) from one or more of the characters around him. The big difference between The Glass Key and The Maltese Falcon is the point at which the question is raised and the degree to which it is answered.

The progression from the Continental Op stories to The Maltese Falcon to The Glass Key can be explained as Hammett’s attempt to perfect the application of his style by marrying it to the proper point of view and story. If Hammett was dissatisfied with the distraction of the unintended and unanswered question of the Op stories, then the third person narration of The Maltese Falcon can easily be seen as a remedy. The nature of Spade is the fundamental question of the book, but it is so subtly presented that it does not distract from the intrinsically exciting and entertaining falcon plot as it unfolds and is answered as soon as it rises to the reader’s consciousness. The step from The Maltese Falcon to The Glass Key is a little more speculative. If Hammett was seeking a stricter adherence to the rules of his style, he may have considered Spade’s long and very direct explanation of his thought process, in dialogue with Brigid, to be a violation, if not in law, at least in spirit, and The Glass Key might have been an attempt to purify the narrative of this violation. Ned Beaumont is the focal character, the question of his inner workings is urgently apparent from the start, but as with the Op, the question is never answered.

When Janet Henry visits him in his hospital room, Ned Beaumont tells her that Paul pulled him out of the gutter a year before. It is a small admission of his motivation, but it isn’t entirely clear that it is even true. He is doing his best to explain why he took the beating for Paul, and the reader knows he’s capable of lying or shading the truth to suit his own murky purposes. He also says he went with Whisky to the Dog House to try to trap O’Rory, but it isn’t clear that he ever did or said anything in his visit to pursue that end.

In the course of the story, several subsidiary questions (beyond his contentious relationship with Paul) are raised: 1) why did he go to New York to confront Bernie Despain? 2) Why did he first plan to go back to New York? 3) Why did he go with Whisky? 4) Why did he go to Mathews’ country hideaway? 5) Why does he reject Janet Henry’s friendship? 6) Why did he go to Tim Walker’s place looking for Shad O’Rory? To get beat up again, the “masocrist”? (And is the “crist” part of this mispronunciation a hint of character or thematic significance?) 7) Why does he take Janet Henry with him to New York? 8) Why does he make such a final and complete break with Paul? The answers to these specific questions are wrapped up in some of the mysterious aspects of Ned Beaumont’s character: his relationship with Paul, his talent for intrigue, his taste and/or distaste for it, his anger toward himself and/or self-destructive urge, his feelings, if any, for Janet Henry. It is only with a clearer picture of what makes Ned Beaumont tick that the reader could begin to understand his actions. But that clearer picture never develops.

Hammett’s basic narrative style stays pretty much the same (except for the switch from 1st person to 3rd) from the Op through The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key but there are some interesting touches that may have significance in The Glass Key. The fact that the narrator always refers to Ned Beaumont as “Ned Beaumont” rather than simply “Ned” or “Beaumont” and Janet Henry as “Janet Henry.” Similarly, there are awkward, even over wordy, constructions that could easily be streamlined. These choices seem intentional, as if they have some concept behind them. One theory might suggest the same motivation as that which took Hammett from the revelation of Spade to the enigma of Ned Beaumont – an attempt to perfect the style or, at least, to make it more apparent. The use of the formal full name to refer to two of the main characters could serve as star billing, explicitly pointing the reader to them as focal characters (although why Janet Henry would be any more important than Paul Madvig, for instance, is not at all clear). At the same time, it serves to distance the narrator from them, suggesting the impersonal relationship that must be maintained in hardboiled. The awkward, often choppy constructions might be intended to remind the reader of their objectivity, like the geometric description of Spade’s face at the beginning of The Maltese Falcon. They are not part of a broad, general impression. They are discrete facts. The reader is free to construct them as he or she chooses. All of this might be read as Hammett’s attempt to take hardboiled to its logical extreme. Hammett seems to push the style into the reader’s face, even when it isn’t necessary and may even be disruptive to the narrative flow. Maybe it is because he does it more insistently and obviously in The Glass Key that he prefers it to his other work. From what I’ve read of him as a person, Hammett appears to have had a very crusty, opinionated and contentious side, a fact that fits nicely with this interpretation.

The two dreams reported by Janet Henry and Ned Beaumont seem intended to fulfill the same function as Spade’s explanation at the end of The Maltese Falcon but with more properly hardboiled indirection. They are a hardboiled method of showing the motivations that the style has hidden among the words and actions of the characters, stories within the broader story that reflect back on and shed light on the meaning of the main story. Unfortunately, the dreams have the same ambiguity that fogs the novel. Their enigmatic and digressive quality might be akin to the Flitcraft parable, but they do not really contribute to the drama and do nothing to illuminate the characters’ characters. For all their symbolism, all they say about the motivations of the pair are that Janet Henry is afraid of the ugliness of the truth, and Ned Beaumont recognizes that he cannot trust her to honestly pursue it. These revelations don’t really answer any of the questions that the novel has raised. They cannot elucidate Ned Beaumont’s character and motivation or his relationship with Paul. In effect, the dreams leave Ned Beaumont just about as unknown as the Op and the question just about as distracting. Unlike the Continental Op, however, The Glass Key is more like The Maltese Falcon in that it is focused squarely on the character of Ned Beaumont. If Hammett considered The Glass Key his best work for its adherence to his stylistic ideals, it must also be considered a failure and a demonstration of the limits of those ideals, since it fails in its primary dramatic goal of revealing the focal character.

Another opportunity to understand Ned Beaumont is through his relationship with Janet Henry, but it is an opportunity that Hammett chooses to ignore. She makes her motivation clear in her efforts to get Paul arrested. She hates him, either for his role as the john to whom her father pimps her out or because she really believes he killed her brother or both. But she has little love for her father – she’s contented to let him pay for his crime when Ned Beaumont demonstrates his guilt – and there is little indication that she was particularly close to her brother. So, the hate is clear, but the source of it is not. She enlists Ned Beaumont’s help going after Paul based on that hate, but then asks him to take her away for reasons that are obscure at best. If the use of her full name is meant to suggest her importance to the dramatic core of the book, her actual role does not fulfill its promise. She is more of a plot device than a fully fleshed out person, capable of engaging with a fully fleshed Ned Beaumont. Their relationship does little to reveal anything of either of them.

It is hard to believe that Hammett saw The Glass Key as a failure. It was, in many ways, the fulfillment of his artistic intent, a perfectly hardboiled crime story. If he felt that Spade’s final explanation to Brigid violated the rules or spirit of the style, he could see The Glass Key as the more perfect exemplar. That it left some of the most important aspects of the story – characters, drama, theme – ambiguous and unresolved, may or may not have troubled him. Readers and critics have both praised (“premodern”) and damned the ambiguity. It seems to fly in the face of the call for clarity, but it’s impossible to say whether, or how much, Hammett valued that objective. What is not ambiguous is the fact that his writing, from that point, took a different direction.

The Thin Man

The Thin Man was possibly even more popular than The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key. Hammett had established himself as a star of American crime writing, and the public was hungry for whatever he produced, but the proliferation of sequels, spin-offs, movie and radio adaptations clearly shows they were not disappointed with The Thin Man. Whether Hammett felt the same, is less clear.

It seems plausible that the title of The Thin Man, which is often thought to refer to the missing mad inventor, Claude Wynant, may actually refer to Nick Charles, or even Hammett himself. Where The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key are third person narratives clearly focused on their protagonists, both richly (if ambiguously in the case of Ned Beaumont) characterised, The Thin Man is a first person narration by a protagonist that is thin in the sense that there’s not much to him. Far from seeing his role in solving the mystery as an existential quest, Nick Charles sees it as an annoying and meaningless task, thrust on him by others, that is keeping him from his drinking. As a character, he is very thin (exactly the term Ross Macdonald uses to describe his detective protagonist/narrator, Lew Archer). The role Nick Charles plays in the mystery is clearly more Holmesian than Spadish. But there is no sense in which Nick is a hero. He has quite consciously let his life dwindle down to a somewhat empty retirement consisting of drink, socializing with people he doesn’t much care for, trading wit with Nora, and scratching Asta behind the ears. His portrayal, which many found entertaining, could just as easily be read as satire or even condemnation, the portrait of an appallingly thin man. The drama, if there is one, is within the Wynant/Jorgensen family, and it is not the centerpiece of the book. Nick’s (and Nora’s) witty banter is certainly more important to the book’s appeal than any drama it might contain or even the mystery – hence the appropriate connection with screwball comedy.

What is most interesting is the application of the techniques of hardboiled to the decidedly non-hardboiled content of the story. Many of the specific prohibitions of the hardboiled style are observed. Nick Charles is a first person narrator who, without his wit, would be almost thin enough to disappear. He offers little commentary in narration, keeping most of the speculation, motivation, summarization, etc. in dialogue, where Nora comes in very handy. Where it veers from Hammett’s two preceding novels is in the return to a focus on something other than the personality of the main character. In this, it harks back to the British mystery and the Continental Op. But, even the mystery must take a back seat to the comic wit of the protagonist/narrator. That screwball wit is an adaptation of the witty banter of the tough characters in the previous novels, but to make it the highest value of the novel is far from Hammett’s original concept of hardboiled. It sets the tone as well, a light comic tone that effectively removes The Thin Man from the realm of hardboiled.

At the same time, The Thin Man shows how well Hammett was in tune with his time. Screwball comedy is commonly seen as a response to the dreary atmosphere of the Great Depression, an escape into a light froth of fun. The Thin Man was published in 1934, and the story takes place during a couple weeks around Christmas of 1932. Screwball comedy was just being introduced in this time frame, and it is interesting to speculate on the degree to which Hammett was involved in that introduction and/or the degree to which it influenced him. In any case, it is clear that The Thin Man tapped into the widespread need for escapist entertainment.

That Nick Charles in The Thin Man has some characteristics of Hammett himself, gives the novel a plausible reading as highly fictionalized autobiography. It makes you wonder if Nick’s disdain for the business of detecting and just about everything else except his whiskey and Nora is self-referential. Does Nick’s attitude reflect Hammett’s disdain for his own career doing and writing about detective work, his own love of whiskey and Lillian Hellman. If it does, it might help to explain why this is his last novel.

The Fantastic in Crime

Concerning his style of writing, it has been said that Hammett was looking for the dry objectivity and factualism of a working private investigator’s report. I’m almost certain I read this somewhere, but I’ve looked for the source and can’t find it. Whether it was said by him or about him is another important piece of the background to this observation that I don’t remember. What I’m (almost) certain of is that, although I’d love to take credit for it, it did not originate with me. But in my (not so) humble opinion, it is probably the most important insight into Hammett’s style goals that I’ve ever seen. What he found was a style that achieved that rigorous objectivity and used it to present stories that were far from realistic. To counterbalance this dry, factual method of storytelling, he needed a story that was as wild and implausible as a cartoon.

The Maltese Falcon is that kind of story. It is literally fantastic, and it is appropriate that Hammett called Spade a “dream man.” Nothing like this happens in the real world, though in theory I suppose it could. Such characters as Brigid, Cairo, Wilmer and Gutman are plausible individually, but the collection of all these snakes writhing in one basket seems a stretch. Then there is the relentless inventiveness of their efforts to defeat each other and take what they want, an excellent characterization of the human spirit, but far more single minded than occurs in the real world. And with his consistently clever insights and steadfast commitment to a unique and personal sense of his place in the world, Sam Spade is literally a “dream man”, a comic book hero.

This was the formula that Hammett devised – a narrative as dry, efficient and objective as a detective’s report concerning cases that are at or beyond the farthest fringe of human behavior. The hardboiled objective of realism apparently applies only to style – not content. The style lends realism to the story, and the story lends excitement and imagination to the narrative. Perhaps such a balance is required by the nature of each. A dry, objective, impersonal and understated style needs a story that is not only rich with colorful characters and their equally colorful vernacular but also a set of circumstances and actions that depart fantastically from the mundane world we know. This same point is just as true for the Continental Op stories as it is for The Maltese Falcon. The Op’s narration conforms well to the style parameters of hardboiled, and the circumstances and cases he works are as fanciful as The Maltese Falcon. It was a formula that Hammett consistently honed throughout his writing career right up to The Thin Man.

Moving On

As I see it, Hammett’s writing shows a remarkably consistent effort to develop and perfect hardboiled in both style and content. His audience ate it up, but I don’t think he shared their enthusiasm. With the crime-reading public, The Maltese Falcon was a rousing success, an exciting story told in a near perfect hardboiled style. But, it is possible that Hammett felt the long explanation to Brigid was a violation, of his hardboiled ideal. In this case, it is easy to see The Glass Key as his attempt to correct that mistake and take hardboiled to the limit. That it left Ned Beaumont’s character obscure seems to me a clear weakness of the novel and might have been a source of frustration for Hammett, a failure so demoralizing he effectively gave up on hardboiled. Alternatively he may have felt that The Glass Key was such a complete and perfect expression of his stylistic ideals that he’d done all he could do to fulfill his goals. Or both. In any case, it is easy to think of The Thin Man as an expression of self-reproach for his drinking and his turning away from the serious artistic and philosophical explorations of The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key in favor of the superficiality of Nick Charles and his screwball wit. In this case, The Thin Man can be seen as Hammett’s bitter farewell to his career-long interest in the hardboiled crime drama, a quest that had sustained his creative fire and left no purpose to his writing when it went out.

Its reception proves that, even if The Thin Man contains a darker undercurrent of self-reproach, it tapped into the popular taste. Hammett’s commercial success with his last three novels drew imitators, and it is fairly easy to see how some of their major characteristics evolved into the hybrid exemplified by Spillane and MacDonald. Hammett’s primary focus on the protagonist heroes of The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key was clearly carried forward to Mike Hammer and Travis McGee. The half-assed hardboiled hero contending alone, without institutional support, against well organized criminal conspiracies is consistent with Hammett’s recurring hardboiled myth. Though no one would call the tone of the Mike Hammer and Travis McGee novels light, it isn’t serious, either. If anything, it was more akin to the escapist tone of The Thin Man. The witty banter that set the tone of Nick Charles’s narration became the angry hatred of Mike Hammer and the dime store liberal philosophy of Travis McGee. I wouldn’t credit Hammett with starting this evolution, but he is clearly a participant, and an important one at that. What didn’t survive the evolution was the creation that was truly and uncontestably Hammett’s, the rigorous hardboiled style. By the time he wrote his last published novel, even Hammett had given it up. It was up to his imitators and students to take up elements of his work and carry them forward. One of the early students, and probably the most influential, was Raymond Chandler.