The Persephone Book of Short Stories is going on brief hiatus for a few weeks while I immerse myself in mysteries and crime novels and short stories from that genre. I might still be reading behind the scenes but will write about those stories a little later. Right now I'm working on the first of the series of short stories that Dashiell Hammett wrote about the Continental Op. I've decided I need to own The Continental Op collection of stories (there are seven in this volume), so it's going into my next book order. I've only just started reading a longish short story called "The Tenth Clew" so won't be writing about it directly today, but the excellent introduction to this volume by Steven Marcus has given me lots to think about so I think I'll share some of it here.
I know I say this so often it has become a cliché, but reading about Dashiell Hammett and mysteries/noir crime fiction gave me tingles this afternoon. Truly I could exist on a steady diet of the genre, and I hate to even use the word genre since it is sort of belittling. It's the idea of genre fiction being less good or less worthy than literary fiction (mysteries being what a reader of literature picks up when they need a little break . . . ), and I certainly don't think that is the case with the books I've been reading this weekend. It's quite exciting actually to be reading authors like Hammett and I think if ever I were to study Literature in school (not that there are any plans for it, but I often toy with the idea out of fun), this would be my choice of the area of Lit I would study.
Dashiell Hammett is someone I've read before (The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man) and had decided to revisit his work in anticipation of my trip to San Francisco later this year. He spent eight years in San Francisco (one of the rental properties I looked at booking both last year and this happens to be a former residence of Hammett's--but both times the space was booked--I'll stay there yet!). When it comes to Noir fiction, rather I should say Hard-Boiled since that seems to be the term applied to him, Hammett is important. Without Hammett you might not have a whole slew of other contemporary authors who owe him credit for paving the way. He was an innovator, working at the same time as Ernest Hemingway and working in the same way to create something new and different but that was, too, a reaction to what was going on at the time. Like so many other writers his work and life were to some extent bound up together. He was active between 1929 and 1951 and for a good decade or so of that period what he was writing was really pretty amazing and he was not only popular but admired for.
This is what was giving me tingles--as I had been reading Jean-Claude Izzo just prior to Hammett, who has said that Hammett was an influence on him (but Izzo has created something, too, entirely his own and veers off in another direction--but more about him later). I love it when books cross paths like this, when the threads begin to wind together or like pieces of a puzzle creating a larger picture. With a really good mystery or crime novel, it's not just pure entertainment you are getting but a look at society as well. I read somewhere (and sorry I don't recall where or the exact quote) that you can tell a lot about a society by knowing their criminals and the crimes they commit. And with a good writer it's not just the superficial but what's underneath, the meaning and how it reflects back on the world. Hammett did some interesting things with this. In his work are the beginnings of moral ambiguity, social paradoxes that were not part of the genre before. And Hammett also played with fiction and reality in a way that other authors hadn't, raising his work to an art.
Steven Marcus writes about his own epiphany to all this in Hammett's writing. He was reading him as a boy of twelve.
". . . it was one of the first encounters I can consciously recall with the experience of moral ambiguity. Here was this detective (Continental Op) you were supposed to like--and did like--behaving and speaking in peculiar and unexpected ways. He acted up to the cops, partly for real, partly as a ruse. He connived with crooks, for his own ends and perhaps even for some of theirs. He slept with his partner's wife, fell in love with a lady crook, and then refused to save her from the police, even though he could have. Which side was he on? Was he on any side apart from his own? And which or what side was that? The experience was not only morally ambiguous; it was morally complex and enigmatic as well."
There is a scene in The Maltese Falcon where Sam Spade is telling a story to one of the other characters. Actually it is a case he had worked on where he had been hired to investigate a missing husband. The wife thought she saw him or a man who looked just like him in another city. As it turns out the husband was alive and well and leading a life much like the one he had left behind. On the day he disappeared he had been walking down a sidewalk when a beam from a construction site came crashing down barely missing him. In that moment he was shocked into leaving his old life. "He felt like somebody had taken the lid off his life and let him look at the works."
"The works are that life is inscrutable, opaque, irresponsible, and arbitrary--that human existence does not correspond in its actuality to the way we live it. For most of us live as if existence itself were ordered, ethical, and rational."
The character had been leading a proper and good life, an orderly life, but when the beam had come crashing down he realized that life was not at all "a clean orderly sane responsible affair." So he goes off in search of something new acting in accordance with the irrationality of it all. A few years after his wanderings, however, he ironically settles back down into a normal life quite similar to the one he left. It's this contradiction that is at the heart of Hammett's work. With Hammett's Op--he is called out to investigate some matter. He gathers, researches, snoops, discovers the "reality" of whatever he is looking into.
"And the Op's work therefore is to deconstruct, decompose, deplot and defictionalize that 'reality' and to construct or reconstruct out of it a true fiction, i.e., and account of what 'really' happened."
And there is the other hook with Hammett's work. There isn't really any truth, but only another fiction as created by the Op. In most detective stories, the point is to discover the real truth of the matter, to strip away all the lies and fabrications and to set things back to rights.
"Yet what happens in Hammett is that what is revealed as 'reality' is a still further fiction-making activity--in the first place the Op's, and behind that yet another, the consciousness present in many of the Op stories and all the novels that Dashiell Hammett, the writer, is continually doing the same thing as the Op and all the other characters in the fiction he is creating. That is to say, he is making a fiction (in writing) in the real world; and this fiction, like the real world itself, is coherent but not necessarily rational. What one both begins and ends with, then, is a story, a narrative, a coherent yet questionable account of the world."
See how you can go round and round with this? And then you can add another layer on to all of this by considering when he was writing. Prohibition was in effect--the reality of it all was a fiction, too. Liquor was banned but drinking went on and probably worse than before the law was passed. And corruption was rife. What was meant to remove temptations from society and make it a better, happier, safer place only made it a messier and more violent and corrupt one.
I find all this so very fascinating but didn't mean to go on about it in so much detail. And I didn't even get to the story or to Dashiell Hammett who had a very interesting life as well. So I'll save that all for next week.
Can you tell I am thoroughly enjoying my reading this month? I suspect it is going to overflow into July as well. The books I am reading, and starting to read now will likely take me into the summer to finish. And I've got a variety of books on the go--cozies, suspense stories, detective fiction and a few noir reads. I'm going to corral them all up in a few days and share my progress. I have another pile of 'possibilities', too. I'm not totally neglecting my other reading however, so it's not all crime all the time, but pretty close!