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

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

Only not in "Poisonville." Near the end of the novel, the Op makes a rambling confession to Dinah Brand: "Poisonville is right. It's poisoned me" (145). Something does happen to the usually unflappable Op in the town; he does become infected, caught up in its schemes and practices. In Personville, violence is the basic means to selfish ends, and its inhabitants play out the Hobbesian war of all against all (Marcus 19). The Op manipulates and exacerbates this state of affairs, time and again "just stirring things up" (79, 178). In so doing, he becomes an active, involved, interested participant in the "red harvest" and thereby relinquishes his claim as locus of value. [3] "Cleaning up the town" becomes for him a euphemism for systematically eliminating its various players. The Op "declares war on Poisonville" (62), and his intervention results in a full-scale shooting war that ends only when all the major players, except Willson and the Op, are eliminated.

Since the Op is solely concerned with "cleaning up the town," he "is quickly drawn into the expanding circle of violence in Personville and eventually becomes himself an agent of this violence" (Gregory 37). But this is not the full measure of the extent to which Personville has infected the Op. He does not simply participate in the wholesale slaughter; he masterminds it. He sets up the relatively innocent prize-fighter Ike Bush and then makes no comment at all when Ike gets a knife in the neck. Working with Sheriff Noonan, he fingers Whisper Thaler for Noonan's brother's murder even though he knows Whisper is innocent, and even though Noonan has double-crossed him and tried to murder him twice. Supposedly acting as peacemaker at the council of war, the Op goads the participants into a subsequent orgy of bloodletting. Several hours later, when he wakes up with his hand on an icepick sticking in the heart of the woman he is supposedly emotionally involved with, the Op methodically cleans up all traces of hims elf and walks out of the door.

Inevitably the question becomes how to account for the Op's active role in the bloodletting that he catalyzes in Personville. He himself tries to point the finger elsewhere, suggesting in one place that Dinah Brand is responsible; she has been "stirring up murderous notions" in her boyfriends, including apparently the Op (147). In general, though, he lays it off on the gap between theory and practice: "It's right enough for the Agency to have rules and regulations," he tells his coworker Mickey Linehan, "but when you're out on a job you've got to do it the best way you can" (109). Where the job is concerned, the end, no matter how suspect, justifies the means, no matter how bloody.

A more compelling explanation of the Op's participation in the red harvest has been offered by Sinda Gregory, who holds the "system" responsible. By insisting on the "moral neutrality" that produces efficiency and gets the job done, the Continental Detective Agency inevitably dehumanizes its agents, turns them into mere operatives: