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

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1999 by Carl D. Malmgren

The same kind of metamorphosis occurs in the first part of The Dain Curse, when Alice Dam Leggatt is transformed, in an instant, from "Betty Grocker" to "Ma Barker." With radical transformations such as these, Hammett begins to call into question the idea that most things are what they seem to be. In Hammett that is just not the case, and naively succumbing to such commonsensical ideas can be downright dangerous.

In fact, the Op inhabits a world so histrionic, so unstable, so fluid that role-playing sometimes creates a kind of flickering half-reality. False appearances manufacture unreal realities. A case in point is the notorious seduction scene in "The Girl with the Silver Eyes," in which the eponymous character tries to persuade the Op not to take her to jail:

"Little fat detective whose name I don't know"--her voice had a tired huskiness in it, and a tired mockery--"you think that I am playing a part, don't you? You think that I am playing for liberty. Perhaps I am."

She continues in this vein, reciting the story of her lurid sexual past, teasing the Op, all the while undermining his firm purchase on the situation: "But because you do none of these things, because you are a wooden block of a man," she wheedles, "I find myself wanting you. Would I tell you this, little fat detective, if I were playing a game?" (Continental Op 148-50). That final question, balanced between mockery and self-conscious surrender, acts out the ontological precariousness of the Op's world. When she falls into his arms at the end of the siren song, no one--Op, girl, reader--can be sure if she is acting or not. The Op is forced to impose a kind of certainty on the situation by insisting that everything she has told him is a lie and by trying, almost hysterically, to punch holes in her story.

The same kind of ontological confusion occurs again and again between Brigid O'Shaughnassey and Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. Early on she makes the following "confession" to Sam Spade during a harsh grilling: "Oh, I'm so tired," she blurts out, "so tired of it all, of myself, of lying, and thinking up lies, and of not knowing what is a lie and what is the truth" (89). There is just no way to tell if this too is part of her act, her ongoing seduction of Spade, but it works, because she reaches out to touch Spade and they fall into bed together. Analyzing the final encounter between Spade and O'Shaughnassey, Robert Shulman notes, "He acts as if he cares for her; she acts as if she cares for him. To an extent both are acting, telling stories to each other, but to an extent they may also be in love" (409). In a world of nonstop role-playing, it is often impossible to distinguish between acting and being. This confusion of appearance and reality opens up in Hammett's world a zone of cognitive indeterminacy.

Throughout Hammett's fiction runs the fear that nothing can be taken at face value, nothing is what it appears to be--a fear that culminates in a suspicion not only of individual people but also of the social order itself. In Red Harvest, Hammett gives full play to this suspicion. The mean streets of Personville are the stage for a massive fiction, where gangsters masquerade as businessmen, capitalists contract with criminals, and no one can tell the difference between them. The arrival of the Op can be seen as the addition of another player, someone ready to ad-lib his own script.