The Crime of the Sign: Dashiell Hammett's Detective Fiction - Critical Essay

In the "real world" of Hammett's fiction, gangsters wield political power, people are not what they pretend to be, justice is not served, and law and order are polite fictions. "It is not a very fragrant world," Chandler notes in an understatement, "but it is the world you live in" (236).

As Chandler's description makes clear, one of most salient characteristics of this world is the chasm between appearance and reality, a chasm exacerbated by wholesale role-playing and pretense. In a rare moment of honesty, Brigid O'Shaughnassey tells Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, "I'm not at all the sort of person I pretend to be" (55). For once she is telling the truth, but using it to serve a lie. The point is that her line could be spoken by most of Hammett's characters. In Red Harvest, for example, Chief of Police Noonan adopts a bluff and hearty role with the Op; he's always glad to see the Op (92) and continually expresses concern about his welfare (62) even while he is engineering two attempts to assassinate him. The Op himself carries a walletful of false IDs. Trying to pick up information after arriving in Personville, the Op runs into union boss Bill Quint and plays the garrulous stranger:

I dug out my card case and ran through the collection of credentials I had picked up here and there by one means or another. The red card was the one I wanted. It identified me as Henry F. Neill, A. B. seaman, member in good standing of the Industrial Workers of the World. There wasn't a word of truth in it. (7)

The Op, blatantly masquerading as A(ble) B(odied) seaman, is indeed the ABC man, able to construct an identity made of letters in a moment. The Op argues that role-playing is required in his profession, that it enables him to get the job done. But the impersonations of detective fiction are not only ubiquitous and overdone; they can also be entirely gratuitous. The first sentence of the Hammett short story "They Can Only Hang You Once," for example, is: "Samuel Spade said, 'My name is Ronald Ames."' This entry line is entirely appropriate, since everyone else in the story is acting, but there is little reason for Spade's misrepresentation, since no one in the house he is calling on knows who he is.

One of the most egregious examples of misleading appearances occurs in "The House in Turk Street." While conducting a routine investigation, the Op encounters a sweet old couple, the Quarres. The Op soon figures out that this couple knows nothing about his case, but he lingers in the homey atmosphere. It turns out, of course, that the couple are ringleaders of a criminal gang (not in any way connected to the Op's investigation), and the next thing the Op feels is a gun pressed against his neck. The woman's last appearance in the story just before she catches a hailstorm of bullets, highlights the gap between appearance and reality:

I looked at the old woman again, and found little of the friendly fragile one who had poured tea and chatted about the neighbors. This was a witch if there ever was one--a witch of the blackest, most malignant sort. Her faded eyes were sharp with ferocity, her withered lips were taut in a wolfish snarl, and her thin body fairly quivered with hate. (106)