City jungles and expressionist reifications from Brecht to Hammett - expressionists Bertolt Brecht and Dashiell Hammett

The verbal reticence of so many of Hammett's figures can be partially ascribed to a conviction that the act of signification is a philosophically futile process that does nothing to alter the fundamental emptiness of signified phenomena. The Op's customary reliance on tautological utterances reflects a conscious inability to construct an authentic discursive response. After hearing the impassioned confession of a murderous bank clerk struggling to understand his own motives, the Op reflects, "I couldn't find anything to say except something meaningless, like: 'Things happen that way'" (Red Harvest 57-58).

The emptiness of signification in Hammett's work negates the possibility of satisfactory closure to the mysteries and puzzles conjured up in his narratives. The conclusions of his novels are always vaguely unsettling because the final solutions seem like false constructions and shed suspicion on the inventive powers of the detective. The Thin Man concludes with a highly conjectural and somewhat preposterous explanation of events by the protagonist, who concedes that his hypothetical resolution is based on speculation. The last word of the book belongs to his wife, Nora, who responds, "That may be, but it's all pretty unsatisfactory" (180). This is a startling concluding note for a genre conventionally based on the expectation of definitive resolution and stable closure.

How does a detective operate in an epistemologically uncertain universe in which there is no stable truth behind the deceptive illusions on the surface? The Op responds by abandoning the chimerical search for concealed master narratives and instead scrambles signification by inventing falsehoods and projecting them onto phenomena. The Op's most important talent thus becomes his capacity for discursive intervention as a means of generating conflict. Unlike most detective figures, he rarely resorts to physical coercion, but rather relies on his ability to spread rumor and create subversive alliances and antagonisms. He walks into a boxing ring in Red Harvest, and merely by the utterance of the phrase "Back to Philly, Al" (72) - which conceals a false threat of reprisal against one of the fighters - he manages to unfix the fight and provoke a series of murders and conflicts among rival gangs. He routinely fixes false alibis for himself and manufactures evidence against others. In "The Golden Horseshoe," unable to sustain a conviction due to lack of evidence, he invents a false crime to hang a criminal for a murder he didn't commit.

The Op's illicit tactics of detection suggest the profound moral ambivalence of his identity and activity. The diabolical character of Hammett's protagonists is reinforced by the visual analogy of Spade to Satan in the first paragraph of The Maltese Falcon. Edenbaum refers to the Op's method as "not a divine plan but a satanic disorder" (92). The subversive potential to collapse systems of signification places these characters in opposition to the reified administrative structures that dominate and determine their environment.