The Burglar in the Library - By Lawrence Block Page 0,8
his books in college courses. You can probably buy Cliff’s Notes for The Maltese Falcon. How’s that for fame?”
“Not bad.”
“Hammett and Chandler, Chandler and Hammett. The two of them are considered the founders of hardboiled crime fiction. There were other writers who got there first, like Carroll John Daly, but hardly anybody reads them anymore. Hammett and Chandler were the cream of the crop, and they’re the ones who get the credit.”
“Were they great friends, Bern?”
“They only met once,” I said. “In 1936, if I remember it correctly. Ten Black Mask regulars got together for dinner in L.A. Chandler lived out there, and Hammett was working in Hollywood at the time. Norbert Davis and Horace McCoy were there, too, and Todhunter Ballard, and five other writers I don’t know much about.”
“I don’t know anything about the ones you just mentioned.”
“Well, Ballard wrote a lot of westerns, and I think he was distantly related to Rex Stout. Horace McCoy wrote They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? I forget what Norbert Davis wrote. Stories for Black Mask, I guess.”
“And that’s the only time they met?”
“That’s what everybody says.”
“Oh?”
“Every biography of either of the two of them mentions that meeting. They had a photo taken of the group, to send to the editor of Black Mask back in New York.” I went over to the Biography section and came back with Shadow Man, Richard Layman’s life of Hammett, and flipped through it to the photos. “Here we go. That’s Chandler with the pipe. And that’s Hammett.”
“It looks as though they’re staring at each other.”
“Maybe. It’s hard to tell.”
“Did they like each other, Bern?”
“That’s also hard to tell. Years later Chandler wrote a letter in which he recalled the meeting. He remembered Hammett as nice-looking, tall, quiet, gray-haired, and with a fearful capacity for Scotch.”
“Just like me.”
“Well, you’re nice-looking,” I agreed. “I don’t know about tall.”
She glowered at me. Carolyn can stand six feet tall, but only if she happens to be wearing twelve-inch heels. “I’m not quiet or gray-haired, either,” she said. “I was referring to the fearful capacity for Scotch.”
“Oh.”
“Is that all Chandler had to say about him?”
“He thought a lot of him as a writer.” I flipped pages, found the part I was looking for. I read: “‘Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley; it doesn’t have to stay there forever, but it looked like a good idea to get as far as possible from Emily Post’s idea of how a well-bred debutante gnaws a chicken wing. Hammett wrote for people with a sharp, aggressive attitude to life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street. Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people who commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare, and tropical fish.’”
“Tropical fish?”
“‘He put these people down on paper as they were,’” I went on, “‘and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes.’ Wait, there’s more. ‘He was spare, frugal, hardboiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that never seemed to have been written before.’” I closed the book. “He wrote that in 1944, in an essay for The Atlantic. I wonder if Hammett ever saw it. He was in the army at the time, stationed in Alaska during the Aleutians campaign.”
“Wasn’t he a little old for that?”
“He was born in 1894, so he would have been forty-eight in 1942 when he enlisted. On top of that his health wasn’t good. He’d had TB, and his teeth were bad.”
“And they took him anyway?”
“Not the first two times he tried to enlist. The third time around they weren’t as finicky, and they took him after he had some teeth pulled. Then after the war they jailed him when he refused to tell a Congressional committee if he’d been a communist.”
“Was he?”
“Probably, but who cares? He wasn’t a candidate for president. He was just a writer who hadn’t written much of anything in twenty years.”
“What did Hammett think of Chandler?”
“As far as anybody knows, he never expressed an opinion.” I shrugged. “You know, it’s entirely possible he never read a thing Chandler wrote. But I think he had the opportunity.”