The Mean Streets

Nightmare Town

by Dashiell Hammett

Edited by McCauley, Greenberg & Gorman.

Vintage Crime/Black Lizard

ISBN: 0-375-70102-8

$13.00  September 2000

Nightmare Town is a collection of twenty stories by the father of modern hardboiled detective fiction. The majority of these tales were published between 1923 and 1934. Nevertheless, this is a new collection in the sense that many of these pieces have been unavailable since their original printing. As such, the release of Nightmare Town in 2000 was a literary event of some magnitude. So much is published each year that it’s impossible to keep up with it all. If you are a Hammett fan who missed this book when it first came out, you need to rectify that deplorable situation right away.

At the heart of the collection are seven stories featuring Hammett’s most fully drawn creation: the nameless, pudgy, middle-aged but always stalwart investigator for the Continental Detective Agency known by all as “the Continental Op.” Same Spade, perhaps Hammett’s most famous character and, of course, the edgy star of The Maltese Falcon, takes center stage in three others. As wonderful as those ten stories are, however, the most interesting fiction in Nightmare Town revolves around protagonists who are most probably unknown to all but the most erudite Hammett geeks.

In the title story (“Nightmare Town”) written in 1924, the enigmatic Steve Threefall awakes from a ferocious drunk in the desert town of Izzard. In a classic pulp fiction tale featuring nearly ceaseless action, Steve unearths the systemic corruption upon which Izzard is built. In the process he saves (what else?) a damsel in distress and battles his way out of the town with an ebony walking stick. The idea of a town fatally poisoned by greed and corruption was to find even more substantial treatment in a series of linked stories published serially in the famed pulp magazine, Black Mask during 1927 and 1928. Those stories were eventually revised and released as the 1929 Continental Op novel, Red Harvest.

“The Assistant Murderer” is a gem of a story from 1926. Here we meet PI Alec Rush, a disgraced ex-police detective who is described by Hammett as being downright ugly – “Things had been done to his features.” In spite of being aesthetically challenged, Rush is both a first-rate detective and an honorable man. Investigating the murder of one Jerome Falsoner, he uncovers a nasty confidence game gone sour when one of the perpetrators falls for the “mark.”

The penultimate story in Nightmare Town is entitled “A Man Called Thin.” In it young Robin Thin, who works for his father’s detective agency, is called in to investigate the robbery of a downtown jewelry store. Thin is a foppish character cut in the mold of the classic Victorian Consulting Detective. In fact, while he may toil at being a detective, his avocation is writing poetry. One senses (hopes!) that Hammett’s tongue was firmly in his cheek with this story as it reads like a parody of the earlier/traditional conventions of the genre that he had set about exploding in his own fiction. In a virtuoso performance worthy of the great Holmes himself, Thin solves the crime and, in the process, is able to use the experience to complete a sonnet he was working on when so rudely interrupted by the case.

The final offering in the text is, in many ways, the most significant. “The First Thin Man” is a preliminary draft, some ten chapters long, of what would emerge as Hammett’s last novel. Conspicuously absent, however, is the celebrated (make that, inebriated) duo of Nick and Nora Charles. In their place we find John Guild of San Francisco’s Associated Detective Bureaus. This is a darker and, in many regards, a more engrossing tale than what finally saw publication as The Thin Man. Always somewhat dissatisfied with that latter work, I may be forgiven for wishing that “The First Thin Man” had ultimately become the book Hammett completed.

Although they vary greatly in overall quality, each of the stories in Nightmare Town is absorbing and eminently readable. (Did Hammett ever write anything that wasn’t?) Hammett’s prose is, as always, lean and mean. In even the weakest of these tales, his dialogue is realistic and as sharp as a filet knife. While this is not the place to start if you are only casually acquainted with Hammett’s work, Nightmare Town is a treasure trove worthy of a privileged place on the bookshelf of the hardcore fan who has already worked through the texts in the standard canon. As William F. Nolan concludes in his introduction to this volume, “In the genre of detective fiction, [Hammett] was the master … that mastery is evident in Nightmare Town, the largest collection of his shorter fiction and by far the most comprehensive.”

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