There Was Life Before Sam Spade-Dashiell Hammett’s The Hunter And Other Stories

 

 

Book Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

The Hunter and Other Stories, Dashiell Hammett, edited by Richard Layman and Julie Rivett, The Mysterious Press, New York, 2013

I have spent a considerable amount of cyber-ink in this space extolling the crime detection virtues and spare and functional language of Dashiell Hammett’s major writings. That exaltation has, rightly, been centered on the crime novels, The Glass Key, The Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Thin Man and The Maltese Falcon, especially in the aftermath of the film adaptation of the latter putting hard-boiled but dogged detective Sam Spade, Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor in a classic mix of the stuff that dreams are made of that still is very watchable over seventy-five years later. Although Dashiell Hammett had a relatively short, productive published writing career he did, as the book under review, The Hunter and Other Short Stories testified to write other material not as well known for crime detection magazines and other such journals. And, as is the case here, material, particularly early material which either never was published, or meant to be published.           

 A while back, maybe a year or so ago now I did a book review of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, an unfinished novel at the time of his death. I noted there that despite the fairly recent frenzy of publishers or those who own the rights to the works of famous writers to publish lesser or previously unpublished work to a broader than academic or aficionado public that such efforts do not always serve that writer’s heritage to god effect. I get something of the same feeling here and although I greatly admired Fitzgerald work I was not an aficionado of his every word. With Hammett, yes. So in reading the stories presented here I had mixed feelings that this material while of serious interest to an aficionado is not something that such a person has to absolutely have access to in order to feel that he or she had got the essence of Hammett down.       

No question there are some decent stories here which show that Hammett had some real promise, had some real skill with using parsed but powerful language to set his tales up. The title story is one but many of the others did not draw this reader to read feverishly and devoured at one sitting like he did with the complicated Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon or the murder and mayhem every which way in The Red Harvest. Interestingly the section that did work, did give me a feel for classic Hammett, were the various screenplays, especially the development of the character of the private detective, Gene Richmond, in the screenplay (never produced I believe) On The Make where like Spade with Bridget in Falcon he doesn’t get the trophy girl in the end. Commentary in each section giving the history of each story by the editors was very welcome and informative, and who also in the Introduction explain how this material had only recently come to light through their aficionado interests and plodding through the Hammett Archives.