The wisest and meanest man

“The Wisest and Meanest Man West of the Mississippi River”: Dashiell Hammett as a Western Writer Jesús Ángel González, The very existence of this volume is a powerful argument to demonstrate the permeability of the borders of the American Literature of the West without too much effort. But the contemporary “remapping” of US regional criticism (Kollin 514) should not make us forget that the American West has never been an enclosed territory with very definite borders, or, as Neil Campbell said in The Rhizomatic West, it “has never been simply a geographical region contained by traditions and customs” (42). In fact, it is not only the geographical borders of the West that can be questioned, but its generic borders as well, as this article attempts to demonstrate by paying attention to the relationship between hard-boiled detective fiction and Westerns, and by focusing in particular on Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) as a Western writer and the evolution of his first novel, Red Harvest (1929) throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.

Dashiell Hammett is usually called the creator, the “father” of hard-boiled detective fiction, but it is my contention that he should also be considered as a Western writer, since the influence of Western spaces and myths is fundamental for the development of his work. Although born in the East (Maryland), after joining the Pinkerton Detective Agency (around 1915) he lived and worked in the American West for long periods of time. We know from his biographers (Richard Layman; Joan Mellen) that he worked as a detective in Montana and the Pacific Northwest (Spokane and Seattle), that he stayed in hospitals near San Diego and Tacoma, Washington, to recover from his tuberculosis, and that he lived and worked in San Francisco and the Bay area approximately between 1921 and 1930, his most productive years. Later on, during his script-writing period, he also lived, and occasionally worked, in the Los Angeles area.

When, forced by his illness, he decided to start a career as a writer, he was living in San Francisco, and, after some non-generic attempts, he decided to write detective stories based on his own work with the Pinkerton Agency (that he renamed Continental Agency) and to set them in the places he knew best, San Francisco and the surrounding area. Accordingly, his Continental Op stories are set in very specific San Francisco neighborhoods, like Chinatown, the Tenderloin, the Financial District or Russian Hill (Trobits), and streets (which even appear in the story titles, like “Death on Pine Street” or “The House in Turk Street”).1 But the San Francisco Western location turns out to be very useful for Hammett, and he actually sends the Op to investigate cases around the American West, in real places like Tijuana (in “The Golden Horseshoe”), or fictional but identifiable locations like the island of Couffignal (north of San Francisco in the San Pablo Bay in “The Gutting of Couffignal”), Corkscrew, AZ (in “Corkscrew”), Quesada (based on the Monterey-Half Moon Bay area in his second novel The Dain Curse), or Personville (based on Butte, Montana, in Red Harvest). Hammett’s third novel, The Maltese Falcon, is also set in San Francisco and, with so many spatial details that, for example, one can actually visit the place over the Stockton Tunnel where Sam Spade’s partner is (fictionally) murdered by Brigid O’Shaughnessy (there is even a plaque to remind the occasional visitor). Hammett’s last two novels (The Glass Key, and The Thin 1

These locations can actually be followed in detail in a Dashiell Hammett tour organized by writer Don Herron, who has also published The Dashiell Hammett Tour, San Francisco: City Light Books, 1991.

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Man), however, were set in Eastern locations, an unnamed Eastern city identifiable as Baltimore, and New York City respectively.

But if the biographical connections and the locations are significant, it is also very important to stress the strong relationship between the Western and detective genres when Hammett started writing detective stories. As Nicolas S. Witschi has stated, “at almost every acknowledged point of significance in its history, the detective novel in the United States relies vitally on the American West—as subject, as topos, or even simply as setting—to aid in the process of evolution or reinvention” (381). In fact, the very first detective stories as such (that’s to say, with most of the structural and thematic features of the genre) were created by an American writer, Edgar Allan Poe. And, after the classical form of the genre was fruitfully developed in England by Arthur Conan Doyle and his followers, it was in the West of the United States that the genre was revitalized by writers like Hammett and Raymond Chandler when they created the hardboiled subgenre.

Interestingly enough, Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet (1887) was partially set in the American West, and the character and the genre became so popular that, as Witschi reminds us, Mark Twain used Holmes as a character in his short novel A Double-Barrelled Detective Story (1902), where he contrasted Holmes’ intellectual approach to crime-solving with the physical abilities of Holmes’ American counterpart (Archy Stillman, whose powerful sense of smell ironically allows him to solve the puzzle created by Twain).

After the great success of the Sherlock Holmes stories, during the first two decades of the 20th century the genre fell into a period of repetition, trivialization and extreme codification, as can be seen in the work of writers like Ronald Knox and others; these writers created “Detective Story Decalogues” which turned the genre into a crossword-like game between the writer and the reader, who had to solve a riddle following very strict rules in a very British context of “fair play.” As Julian Symons has said, “in these years the detective story reached peaks of ingenuity that have never since been attained and are now rarely attempted; and, sometimes in the same book, it dropped into abysms of absurdity and dullness that have never again been plumbed” (109-110). Whereas English writers like Dorothy Sayers drew from the English tradition of the “comedy of manners” to try to instill some new blood into the genre (Grella), Dashiell Hammett and other subsequent writers looked at the American tradition of Western novels.

In fact, the relationship between the hard-boiled detective story and the Western is so close that authors like Cynthia S. Hamilton consider them as two manifestations of the same literary formula, which she calls the “American adventure formula” (Hamilton 2), a unique combination of setting, hero, plot, style, and theme: There are two crucial elements in the setting of the master formula: lawlessness and the maximum opportunity to personal enrichment. These two characteristics make the setting the best possible proving-ground for the individualistic values of the American ideology. The hero is the best man; he demonstrates what it is possible for the individual to accomplish. The plot in which he is presented involves some kind of chase. The story is told using a colloquial style of narration, characterized by the literary imitation of everyday 2

speech. The theme which permeates every aspect of the master formula is the primacy of the individual; he is seen to be the key unit of society (Hamilton 2), Although Hamilton’s approach can, and has been contested, the connection between both genres (or subgenres) seems undeniable. As Witschi said, “it has become something of a commonplace to observe that the distinctly American detective story is by and large a genre western transposed into an urban environment, that the cynical and disillusioned gumshoe is but a twentieth-century gunslinger in a cheap suit and a fedora” (382), although he has also stressed that the “detective” literary label had already been created before the popular cultural category of “cowboy” had been established. Joseph C. Porter has also stressed a “crucial difference” between the Western hero and the hard-boiled detective hero: “the gunfighter or mountain man can move on to the next territory. The hard-boiled dick has no place to go. The settlements have reached the Pacific terminus and have spilled back on themselves. The detective hero remains dissatisfied, for his rootlessness is static” (Porter 414).

Be it as it may, it seems fairly obvious that Hammett not only drew from his own personal experience (which he used intensively to advertise the “reality” of his own stories as opposed to the fictionality of almost everybody else’s) but also from an American Western tradition that, having started with James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales (827-1841), became extremely popular during the second half of the 19th century in the new format of ‘dime novels’. This popular format combined “conventional moral attitudes, stereotyped heroism and villainy, and the romance of the frontier in a simply told and fast-paced story that could be afforded by any man with a dime to spare” (Hart 154). Although dime novels included all types of stories, approximately half of the millions (literally) of titles published between 1860 and the turn of the century had the American West as setting (Goulart 230). But, interestingly enough, the cowboy became slowly replaced by a new protagonist, the detective, although often the only thing that changed was the setting rather than the hero’s characterization. This change is related by experts to the popularity of a series of novels supposedly written by the founder of the Pinkerton Agency, Allan Pinkerton himself.

Books like The Molly Maguires and the Detectives (1877) or Criminal Reminiscences and Detective Sketches (1879) helped to popularize an image of the detective whose features as adventure action-hero were closer to the cowboy than to the intellectual, deductive figure being developed across the ocean. With the help of the Pinkerton novels, detective dime novels soon gained ground with protagonists like Old Sleuth, Nick Carter or even Western characters, who moved straightaway to an urban environment, as in a dime novel called Buffalo Bill, Detective published at the end of the 19th century (Goulart).

The direct heirs of the dime novels in the 20th century were the pulps, magazines whose name came from the cheap wood pulp paper they used, and which started being published at the turn of the century. They soon became “the principal entertainment vehicle for millions of Americans. They were an unflickering, uncolored TV screen upon which the reader could spread the most glorious imagination he possessed” (Goodstone v). At first, pulps like Argossy, or All-Story published all types of stories, although the target audience always tended to be male, urban and working class; but around 1915 pulps became more specialized: Detective Story started in 1915, Western Story in 1919, and The Black Mask (which would lose the article in a few years) also in 1919. As it is well known, this was the pulp were Hammett published most of his 3

detective stories and all his Continental Op stories. It is interesting to note that the subtitle of the magazine changed from “A Magazine of Mystery, Thrills and Surprise” to “A Magazine of Detective, Adventure, and Western Stories” (my italics). In fact, at the time when Hammett wrote his Black Mask stories, the magazine published both detective stories and Westerns, so it is no wonder that the features of Westerns influenced Hammett’s Continental Op stories. As a result, the Op, like many cowboy heroes, is a character of few words, who tells his own story in a very understated and colloquial style; he often becomes a “man in the middle” between the criminals and the law, and therefore needs to resort to his own conscience when confronted by moral doubts. Also, in most of the Op’s stories,2 the interest is more progressive than retrogressive, that is, it lies more in the suspense of “what will happen next?” than in filling in the blank of the traditional “whodunit” of classic detective stories. Finally, the Op’s mysteries are almost always solved by means of action rather than intellect (frequently by what the Op terms “stirring things up,” which often involves creating dissension among the criminals) as opposed to the deductive solutions proposed by the likes of Holmes. All these features became representative of this new type of detective stories, which were soon associated to Black Mask and were later known as the “hardboiled school of fiction,” with practitioners like Raymond Chandler, E.S. Gardner or Raoul Whitfield.

But what is important here is to highlight that most of the features that became associated with this type of detective fiction probably came straight from the Western stories that were also being published in the same issues of Black Mask. In fact, although this is not so well known, Hammett also tried his hand at some Western stories.

“The Man Who Killed Dan Odams” and “Afraid of a Gun” were both published in Black Mask in 1924 and were both set in the state of Montana, which Hammett knew well from his Pinkerton years. They are part of a group of early stories where Hammett dealt with the stereotypes created by fiction and their effect on reality. This group would also include Hammett’s very first story, “The Barber and his Wife” (1922), and two adventure stories, “Ruffian’s Wife” and “Ber-Bulu,” published in an adventure pulp called Sunset Magazine in 1925. As an example, “Ber-Bulu” deals with one of the most classical antecedents of hard-boiled fictional heroes, biblical Samson himself, who, now with the name of Levison, is placed by our writer on a pacific island and ridiculed once deprived of his hairy attributes. Hammett was a very skeptical man and he probably needed to write this kind of stories to show the other side of the action hero he was creating (the Op) and which did not always surface in this character. In these early stories, Hammett deconstructs and criticizes the male chauvinistic and even reactionary ideology that can be seen in some of his own hard-boiled stories. This kind of selfcriticism disappears later as the main theme of independent stories when Hammett starts writing novels, probably because he tried to incorporate these ideas in a format which allowed for more ambiguity.

“Afraid of a Gun” (March 1924) is set in the Cabinet Mountains, along the Kootenai River in Montana, and it explores the dimensions of fear in the hard-boiled Western hero. One of the conventions in this type of popular literature is that the hero has no fear and feels no pain. In contrast, this story portrays a character whose irrational 2

In fact some Op stories follow a more traditional structure and are not so far from the classic British model. For a complete analysis of every story written by Hammett, you can check my book La narrativa popular de Dashiell Hammett: ‘Pulps’, cine y comics.

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fear of physical pain produced by firearms has taken him to a life of flight and cowardice. However, once he experiences this pain and he realizes that it is nothing unbearable, he recovers his lost courage and decides to reenact all his life and face all the shoot-outs he had escaped from in the past. The irony is that he is so badly injured that he will probably never have the chance to show his regained courage in front of his past enemies.

“The Man Who Killed Dan Odams” (January 1924) shares the same setting (Cabinet Mountains, Kootenai River) and is a poetic story about a man who walks inevitably towards his own death. The structure and the iconography place this story very clearly within the limits of the Western genre. However, it is not a classic Western, but a more of a ‘twilight,’ revisionist Western which, like the Western movies produced in the 1950s, questions the ideology and the assumptions of the genre. In this case, the story deals with a common Western theme, the contrast between nature and civilization.

It portrays the flight of a man from prison through a hostile and harsh natural environment that may remind the reader of some of the stories written by Jack London.

However, real danger lies not in nature but in the elements of civilization that the hero finds in his flight: the cars, the roads, the telephone and telegraph wires that carry information about his whereabouts. In his flight, the man ends up identifying with the natural environment surrounding him: The man stood for a time where he had halted—just within the door to one side—a grotesque statue modeled of mud. Short, sturdy-bodied, with massive sagging shoulders. Nothing of clothing or hair showed through his husk of clay, and little of face and hands ... He scowled, and turned his eyes—now redder than ever with flocks of blood (Hammett, “Man” 38), The story describes a process of identification of this man with primitive natural forces which ends with the man turning into an animal: The man wolfed the meal without looking at it ... Blood still dropped from his left hand, staining table and floor. Bits of earth were dislodged from his hair and face and hands and fell into his plate, but he did not notice them (Hammett, “Man” 39), However, the man needs to turn to civilization in order to survive, and when he does, he signs his own death warrant. The irony lies in the fact that after such a terrible flight, he ends up precisely in his victim’s house, where, through a quite obvious kind of poetic justice, he dies trying to (literally) get into his victim’s trousers. Throughout this story we find a writer trying to redefine the role of the hard-boiled hero in this kind of fiction.

Hammett contrasts past and present to show that the old Western code of honor is no longer valid. Thus, the man with no name who had killed Dan Odams says that “it was fair shooting” (Hammett, “Man” 37), and yet he is punished by this action as it certainly would not have happened in a classic Western.

Before getting to Red Harvest, where Hammett tried to incorporate this criticism of the hard-boiled hero into a Continental Op novel, there are two other Western stories that deserve our attention. The first is a rather disappointing story from 1924 titled “Nightmare Town,” whose only claim to posterity is that it is an obvious predecessor of Red Harvest. It is set in the fictional town of Izzard, Arizona and is a parody of the 5

classic Western story of the stranger coming to clean the town. The hero’s name (Steve Threefall) already alludes to this parodic nature, which he himself admits (“Why, he wondered, whenever there was some special reason for gravity, did he always find himself becoming flippant? Why ... did he slip uncontrollably into banter—play the clown?” [Hammett, “Nightmare” 13]). However, this tragicomic tone disappears at the end of the story, which becomes an uneven mixture of pulp conventions, including a happy romantic ending.

The second story is a more interesting hybrid. “Corkscrew” (September 1925) is subtitled “A Western Detective Story” and it made the Black Mask cover with the typical image of a Western shooting (Herron np). It is an Op detective story where the San Francisco detective finds himself in a typical Western setting. Corkscrew, Arizona, is the last frontier, the last region of the American Southwest without telephones or railroad, and the Op’s job is “to make this part of Arizona nice and lady-like” (Hammett, “Corkscrew” 17) as “this end of Orilla county has been left to itself longer than most of the Southwest. But those days are over” (Hammett, “Corkscrew” 30). The forces of capital, represented by the Orilla Colony Company, have irrigated and developed the land; in order to sell it, they need to bring civilization to the wilderness, and the agent of civilization is the Continental Op. The story is a hybrid of Western and hard-boiled detective conventions. On the one hand, the setting, the iconography, the stock characters (hero, sidekick, girl, and villains), and the structure (stranger’s arrival, development of conflicts, final shoot-out) all belong to the Western genre. Even the Op acquires features of the Western hero: he acts as a middle man (together with his sidekick) between the “riff-raff” and the “better element,” the characters that represent traditional moral values (a division similar to the one that can be found in a classic Western like Stagecoach, for example). And he even plays Western roles like the tenderfoot (when he shows he cannot ride a horse) or even a traditional sheriff: “According to his way of telling it, you was the toughest, hardest, strongest, fastest, sharpest, biggest, wisest and meanest man west of the Mississippi River” (Hammett, “Corkscrew” 16). But it is a hard-boiled detective story, and therefore the Op solves two crimes using deductive techniques, and he gives us several examples of his particular brand of hard-boiled humor, like the very beginning of the story: Boiling like a coffee pot before we were five miles out of Filmer, the automobile stage carried me south into the shimmering heat, blinding sunlight, and bitter white dust of the Arizona desert ... It was a nice ride! I understood why the natives were a hard lot. A morning like this would put any man in a mood to kill his brother, and would fry his brother into not caring whether he was killed (Hammett, “Corkscrew” 1).

Probably the weakest point of “Corkscrew” is the uncomfortable integration of the many different personas adopted by the Op throughout the story: tenderfoot, sheriff, hard-boiled detective, friend of the ‘uncivilized’ cowboys but at the same time paid by the capital to destroy their environment… On the plus side, the story helps the reader think about the relationships between Westerns and detective stories, and allows Hammett to rehearse several features that he will later develop in Red Harvest. In both works, for instance, he sends the Op to a Western scenario to clean and bring civilization to a town, and in both the Op uses a similar strategy, “stirring things up” by having the different criminal gangs fight against each other: “A hombre might guess that 6

you was playing the Circle H. A. R. against Bardell’s crew, encouraging each side to eat up the other, and save you the trouble” (Hammett, “Corkscrew” 20).

Red Harvest is set in Personville, Montana, “an ugly city of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining. Spread over this was a grimy sky that looked as if it had come out of the smelters’ stacks” (Hammett, Red 1). Like many other parts of the American West, Personville—apparently directly inspired by Butte (Crowley)—had been “harvested” by copper mining companies that had destroyed the “red” natural environment. But, unlike Corkscrew, or the setting of “The Man Who Killed Dan Odams,” this is not a Western last frontier, but a city fully integrated in the American political and economic system, so corrupt that everybody knew it as Poisonville: For forty years old Elihu Willsson—father of the man who had been killed this night—had owned Personville, heart, soul, skin and guts. He was president and majority stock holder of the Personville Mining Corporation, ditto of the First National Bank, owner of the Morning Herald and Evening Herald, the city’s only newspapers ... Along with these pieces of property he owned a United States senator, a couple of representatives, the governor, the mayor, and most of the state legislature. Elihu Willsson was Personville, and he was almost the whole state (Hammett, Red 7), This description of the city is provided by Bill Quint, a fictional member of the very real ‘International Workers of the World,’ a union (also known as the ‘Wobblies’) that had been a major force in the most violent confrontations between the mining corporations and the workers around 1917. During these violent years, the Pinkertons were hired by the mining corporations as strike-breakers; according to Hammett’s life-companion and playwright, Lillian Hellman, Hammett had taken part in these conflicts and had even been offered five thousand dollars to kill a union leader (Hellman 613-614).

Considering Hammett’s later involvement in politics3, it is common to find political readings of Red Harvest, which obviously involves a radical critique of the social, political, and economic system: “In Red Harvest Hammett implicitly attacks both free enterprise and democracy. The one is presented as exploitation and the other as corruption ... The Op moves in a fallen world, but we never learn how or when it fell; and Hammett offers no political formula that will redeem it” (Bentley 68). However, it would be wrong to interpret it as a “proletarian novel,” or as a more or less conventional Marxist novel. The novel criticizes the system, but provides no alternative, and in the end, although the Op manages to clean the town of “riff-raff” he gives it back to its “owner”, “ready to go to the dogs again” (Hammett, Red 132). J.A. Zumoff has analyzed the novel from a political perspective and he concludes that “whatever Hammett’s later professional or political course, Red Harvest, while obviously political, does not have any obvious politics” (Zumoff 132), and that it is precisely its ambiguity that “gives Red Harvest its power as literature” (Hammett, Red 130).

This ambiguity can also be observed in the development of the Op’s character.

The beginning of the plot follows the features of a Western, as Allen Barra has pointed out: 3

He became a member of the Communist Party in the 30s, and went to jail for refusing to give the names of contributors to a bail fund during the McCarthy years.

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The murdered man was the town’s leading reformer, his father hires the Op to stay on and clean up the town. So far, we’re in a B western, and observing the connections of that genre, the local robber barons hold all the power, there is practically no indication of a central authority to challenge them. Unbridled capitalism has led to a state of moral and, finally, social anarchy. The twist, which separates “Red Harvest” from the western tradition is that the town has no good guys… The classic western hero wore a white hat and killed the guys in black hats; in “Red Harvest,” everybody wears a shade of gray (Barra, “From” np).

As Barra insinuates, although the Op inherits features of the Western hero coming to clean the town by means of action and resorting to his own conscience, he becomes a much more complex character. In fact, Hammett, able to use a longer format for the first time, integrates the criticism of the hard-boiled hero he had attempted in some of his early stories by creating a more complex character. The Op follows the same procedure he had used before, having the different criminal gangs fight each other, but he provokes such a bloody “red harvest” of deaths that in the chapter titled “The Seventeenth Murder” he confesses: “This damned burg's getting me. If I don't get away soon I'll be going blood-simple like the natives ... I’ve arranged a death or two in my time, when it was necessary. But this is the first time I’ve ever had the killing fever ... Play with enough murder, and it gets you one of two ways. It makes you sick, or you get to like it” (Hammett, Red 102). The Op actually justifies his unjustifiable behavior by blaming the city itself (“It’s this damned burg. You can’t go straight here” [Hammett, Red 102]), but the reader is able to think otherwise and perceive two voices in the story: the Op’s, which justifies his own acts as nothing else but a job which had to be done, and Hammett’s, which is offering a critique of the hard-boiled hero, as he had been doing in some of his earlier Western and adventure stories.

In this sense, Hammett uses a very innovative technique that he later continued using in all his other novels: he writes metaphorical interludes that provide an alternative to the narrative voice and that can be interpreted as clues to the whodunit and as hints at the complexity of his protagonist’s real nature.4 The interludes used in Red Harvest are two hallucinations that the Op experiences after drinking laudanum in the company of a prostitute he has grown fond of called Dinah Brand. At the end of these hallucinations (where he imagines himself in the company of a veiled woman and falling down towards his death while trying to kill a man), he finds his hand holding an ice pick buried in Dinah Brand’s corpse. These hallucinations offer the reader clues to find out who had killed Dinah, but they also play a crucial role in the development of the hard-boiled hero: we can see an image of identification of the Op with crime that leads him to his own death. In the act of taking the law into his own hands to murder his enemy, he kills himself, a metaphor of the moral destruction that the Op is undergoing in Red Harvest. It is no wonder therefore that when he wakes up, he himself turns out to be the main suspect of Dinah Brand’s murder. Neither the Op nor the reader is able to know whether he has committed this crime or not, and the rest of the novel is a desperate search for the truth as well as his own questionable innocence.5 4

Other examples are the Flitcraft parable in The Maltese Falcon or the dreams in The Glass Key (González, “Dreams”).

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Porter has also pointed out that the Op’s first hallucination takes him westward to several American cities, “never getting west of Denver and Dallas,” and has said that these hallucinations can be regarded 8

Although Red Harvest has been praised by many critics, it has also been criticized for its cumulative structure and its “extravagant number of victims” (Gregory 38). However, in order to consider its structure we should not forget that Red Harvest was first published as a series of four episodes (from November 1927 to February 1928) in Black Mask. E. R. Hagemann has studied the transition from Black Mask to its edition by Knopf as a book and documented the changes, which in most cases were due to pressure from the editors. In fact, following Hagemann’s analysis, a case could be made that the episodic publication is the real work by Hammett, whereas the book publication was a result of other circumstances. At any rate, the analysis of the Black Mask episodes shows us clearly that, like “Corkscrew”, “The Cleansing of Poisonville” (as the episodes were referred to in the magazine) is a hybrid work, influenced both by Westerns and by classic detective stories. Western stories provide the novel with the action plot developed throughout the four episodes: the cleansing of Poisonville, whereas the detective story pattern is evident in the way each individual episode is structured: a whodunit solved at the end by the Op. The whodunit of the first episode is “Who Killed Donald Willson?,” the journalist who had first got in touch with the Continental Agency. The second episode’s title “Crime Wanted—Male or Female” shows us the Op ironically looking for a crime to solve, as a way to “stir things up,” and have the criminal gangs fight with each other, whereas the third (“Dynamite”) presents the result of the Op’s schemes. The last episode (“The 19th Murder”), finally, shows the Op frantically struggling to find Dinah’s killer in order to clear his own conscience.

As soon as Knopf published Red Harvest and The Dain Curse (both in 1929), Hammett started receiving offers from the film industry, which was in the middle of a revolutionary transition to sound. 1930 was actually a turning point for Hollywood: the first ‘talkie’ is usually considered The Jazz Singer (1927), but the change to sound film was not immediate. In 1930, the American industry still produced 175 silent movies, but in 1931 it produced only 26. The future was in sound, and the industry needed writers to provide longer, more developed scripts. As a result, in 1930 Hammett started working as a scriptwriter for Paramount7 and sold the rights to two of his novels: The Maltese Falcon (which had been pre-published in Black Mask during 1929 and 1930) to Warner, and Red Harvest to Paramount. The adaptations of The Maltese Falcon are relatively well-known: from the first 1931 adaptation with the same title, through the bizarre comedy Satan Met a Lady (1936, with Bette Davis), to the 1941 classic directed by John Huston and starred by Humphrey Bogart. Red Harvest’s adventures and misfortunes in the film world, however, are not so well known.

The novel was very quickly adapted as a film. Garrett Ford wrote a script based on a treatment by Ben Hecht, and finally Hobart Henley directed Roadhouse Nights, which was released in 1930. The result is a very disappointing comedy that, despite explicitly acknowledging its origins, has almost no connections with the original. as “an allegorical comment on the search for the Golden West and the results of that frantic search on the entire nation” (Porter 418-419). For Porter, the novels of Hammett and Chandler represent the end of the Western trail, the realization that “the search for material and spiritual El Dorados produced the Personvilles of the West” (418).

6 F.W. Murnau’s Taboo and Charles Chaplin’s City Lights.

7 Hammett’s work resulted in an outline for City Streets, a film directed by Rouben Mamoulian and starred by Gary Cooper, released in 1931.

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Instead of the Op we find a journalist (Willie Bindbusel) who half-heartedly investigates a smuggling case in a roadhouse bar. Roadhouse Nights is also remembered because it was the film debut of comedian Jimmy Durante, who performs several vaudeville acts in the roadhouse which provides the film with its title. Allen Barra says that “the studio panicked when confronted with Red Harvest’s violence and political cynicism” (Barra “From” np) and decided to use the names of the writer and the novel but change everything else: “There was almost nothing of Hecht in the picture, and nothing at all of Hammett. So began Red Harvest’s strange journey as a great American cult novel — the book that no one has ever succeeded in bringing to the screen. As of this writing, it remains the only Dashiell Hammett novel that has not been turned into a movie” (Barra, “From” np), a statement that has been repeated again and again by Hammett critics and fans and that needs to be qualified, as we will show in the remainder of this essay.

Unlike most Hammett novels, which were adapted on several occasions to the screen,8 Red Harvest has never been adapted “officially” by Hollywood. However, the novel has an interesting history of unacknowledged versions. It first resurfaced again in 1961 in no other place than Japan. Although director Akira Kurosawa never admitted the debt, Yojimbo follows Red Harvest’s plot so closely (now with an unnamed samurai walking into a Japanese town dominated by two warring factions, and managing to make them destroy each other) that many Hammett and Kurosawa scholars were quick to point it out (Barra, “From” np), but the Japanese director did not acknowledge its apparent sources. However, the Western features of the basic plot were so obvious that the next time that the plot propped up in a movie, the movie had to be, almost by necessity, a Western. Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964) not only follows Yojimbo’s plot (now set in a town by the Mexican-US border), but even has “almost identical shot selection and camera angles” (Barra, “From” np). Kurosawa actually sued the producers and ended up receiving a portion of the profits from A Fistful of Dollars, but nobody mentioned Hammett or Red Harvest as the previous origin of both films.

30 years later, the story appears again in Hollywood and in the American West.

Last Man Standing (1996), directed by Walter Hill and starred by Bruce Willis, is a gangster film about rival Irish and Italian bootleggers set somewhere on the U.S. Southwestern border with Mexico. The stranger hires out to both sides and the rest of the plot follows quite closely, again, our story. The producers of Last Man Standing had bought the rights from the Kurosawa estate but had done nothing about Red Harvest or A Fistful of Dollars. According to Barra, this time they received complaints not only from the makers of A Fistful of Dollars but also from Grimaldi Productions who had bought the rights to make a version of Red Harvest in 1973 (Barra, “From” np).

Barra ends up his account of the unacknowledged versions of Red Harvest with references to the Mad Max movies and the Coen Brothers (Blood Simple and Millers’s Crossing in particular) and a mention to Deadwood, when the Red Harvest theme “comes back to its geographical roots, a Northwestern mining town in a no man’s land” (Barra, “From” np). Deadwood creator, David Milch, has acknowledged Red Harvest’s influence (“I’d say there’s a lot of the spirit of Hammett, particularly the Hammett of Red Harvest, in Deadwoood” [Barra, “Man” 53]), and Nicolas Witschi has highlighted the hard-boiled/noir elements in the series (Witschi, “Down”). Although they both 8

The Maltese Falcon, as mentioned before, three times; The Glass Key, two; The Thin Man had only one adaptation but five immensely popular sequels throughout the 30s and 40s. The Dain Curse is the only Hammett novel which has had no film version. It had, however, a TV version in 1978.

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depict the arrival of civilization and capital into a Northwestern mining town, and present a protagonist caught between two gangs, the differences in historical time (from the 1870s to the 1920s) and characterization make it hard to extend the similarities beyond the spirit mentioned by Milch. Personville could be Deadwood 50 years later: Deadwood shows us the arrival of “civilization” and the forces of capital. Poisonville is the result of that arrival, the destruction of that alleged “civilization” and the return to unleashed violence.

So, according to most sources, this would be the end of “Red Harvest’s strange journey as a great American cult novel — the book that no one has ever succeeded in bringing to the screen,” as quoted before. However, there is an acknowledged version of Red Harvest that has been lost for a long time, since it was released in July 1979 only in a few Spanish cinemas, and just a few VHS copies seem to be remaining. The film is La ciudad maldita, a 1978 Spaghetti Western that takes the novel back to its western origins. The film’s opening credits establish the origins very clearly: “Argumento de Jason E. Squire, basado en Red Harvest de D. Hammet” (sic), and “guión de Juan Bosch y Alberto de Stefanis.” Jason E. Squire is the author of The Movie Business Book and a professor now at the University of Southern California, but in the 1970s he worked as the key executive in America for Italian producer Alberto Grimaldi, the Italian producer of the two sequels to A Fistful of Dollars, and several Bernardo Bertolucci films, like Last Tango in Paris or Novecento. Let’s remember that Grimaldi had bought the rights to adapt Red Harvest in 1973. Squire has described the story in private correspondence: Flashback: It's 1977 and I am working for Alberto as his creative executive in the United States, based at the offices of P.E.A. Films., Inc. New York.

Back then, he was spending more time in the U.S. than before. I'd become enamored of Red Harvest (as you can imagine) as one of the great novels never made into a movie. Taking this as a challenge, I sat down to write a screenplay adaptation of the book without letting Alberto know. When it was done, I gave it to Alberto who enjoyed it. As I recall, he had bought the rights to Red Harvest from the Dashiell Hammett estate (Lillian Hellman as executor) but a clause in the agreement required that a movie of Red Harvest had to be made by a certain deadline. So Alberto asked me to re-write my screenplay as a western, so he could produce a Red Harvest movie before the deadline and retain the rights to the Hammett novel. I finished the western version in August, 1977 … I never worked with the two who have screenplay credit on the movie … The western movie was never released in English, sorry to say.9 Juan (Joan) Bosch, AKA John Wood, was a Spanish director who had made a few Spaghetti Westerns in the early 1970s with Grimaldi. So, apparently, Grimaldi used Squire’s screenplay and he contacted Bosch, who rewrote it (with De Stefanis’s help) as a Spaghetti Western at a time when Spaghetti Westerns had already had their day. The Spanish title translates as “The cursed city” (or “The city with a curse”), but the Italian and English titles give you some food for thought: La notte rosa del Falco, The Crimson Night of the Hawk… Not that there are any hawks, or anything in a crimson color, and most of the action takes place during the day (it was probably cheaper to shoot like this), but I am guessing “Hawk” is a reference to The Maltese Falcon and “Crimson” a 9

Private correspondence with Jason E. Squire (5 December 2013).

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reference to Red Harvest itself. How can anybody know what was in the mind of the translators?

Gone is the name Poisonville (with the allegorical implications it carries in the novel), the Op’s voice as narrator, and the criticism of the hard-boiled-hero-turnedmurderer the attentive reader can glimpse after the “red harvest” unleashed by the Op. Gone is also Bill Quint, the IWW member who acts as the novel’s social conscience and provides it with a deeper socio-political critique than any other Hammett novel (excluding perhaps The Glass Key and its denunciation of the corruption of city politics).

Having said all that, the film is surprisingly faithful to Red Harvest. The Op, who is unnamed but describes himself as working for the San Francisco Continental Agency, comes to Personville to meet Donald Wilson, but finds his client dead, after which Willson’s father asks the Op to clear Personville of “riff-raff”. Almost everything else from the novel’s plot is there: Max Thaler, Sheriff Noonan, Pete the Finn, Dinah Brand (and Hammett’s lunger alter ego Dan Rolff), the fixed boxing fight, the icepick scene where Dinah dies, the Op’s stirring-up moves… But it is a Spaghetti Western, and therefore we find all the subgenre conventions: cowboy hats and horses, the music, the dizzying travelling shots and shocking close-ups, and the cheap settings of the stereotypical small western town10. As one can easily imagine, the conventions of the two genres fit very uncomfortably: there is too much dialogue for a Spaghetti Western (how many words did Clint utter in the whole Leone trilogy?), too many closed spaces, and very little landscape for a Western, and although the film ends with a shoot-out, I doubt that Spaghetti Western fans really enjoyed this movie.

On the plus side, we can finally see a character called “Continental Op” (“Agente de la Continental” in Spanish) in a movie, although he is neither short nor fat.

The actor’s stage name is Chet Bacon, and the only available information about him is that he was an Italian (from Rome) “third-rate regional actor,” who was “going bald” (Comas 110), and who is often confused with Gianni Garko, a well-known Spaghetti Western Italian actor. In fact, he is just another Hammett-look-alike, thin, mustached and tall. Just like Nick Powell in The Thin Man movies, or James Coburn in the Dain Curse adaptation that CBS did precisely in 1978.11 The mythology created around Dashiell Hammett himself as a character (detective turned writer, millionaire turned jailed communist, creator of the hard-boiled genre) is so powerful that it is doubtful that we will ever find an actor who resembles the Op as he describes himself: “I’m short and lumpy. My face doesn’t scare children, but it’s a more or less truthful witness to a life that hasn’t been over-burdened with refinement and gentility” (Hammett, “Big” 349).

Even though there has been talk of the ‘definitive’ Red Harvest adaptation, and, according to a number of sources (Kesten np), at least seven different scripts have been written by directors or scriptwriters like Bernardo Bertolucci, Neil Jordan or Donald Westlake, we still might have to wait. However, the very existence of this Spaghetti Western version of Red Harvest reminds us clearly of the unmistakable Western

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Of course, the setting does not look at all like the Personville described in the novel, just like the Madrid and Almería settings do not look at all like Montana.

11 In the The Dain Curse adaptation the protagonist had a name: Hamilton Nash, although he was called Ham or Nash, probably because they could not call him Sam or Dash, as Samuel Dashiell Hammett was called by friends and relatives.

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character of the Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammett, and the hard-boiled detective genre itself.

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Witschi, Nicolas S. "'Down These Mean Streets': Film Noir, Deadwood, Cinematic Space, and the Irruption of Genre Codes." Witschi, Nicolas S. and Melody Graulich. Dirty Words in Deadwood. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013. 124-140. Print.

Zumoff, J. A. "The Politics of Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest." Mosaic 40.4 (2007): 119-134. Print.

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