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

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

HAMMETT'S MEAN-INGLESS STREETS

The realist in murder writes of a world... where no man can walk down a dark street in safety because law and order are things we talk about but refrain from practising.

Raymond Chandler 236

Hammett makes it clear in Red Harvest that the acts of social rupture he is recording have begun to affect the sign, creating a rift between signifier and signified. At one point in the narrative Dinah Brand urges the Op not to mention killing, because she is afraid of the word. The Op chides her for the childishness that makes her confuse words with deeds: "You think if nothing's said about it, maybe none of the God only knows how many people in town who might want to will kill you. That's silly" (148). Unlike Dinah Brand, most of the other people in the Op's world labor under no such misconception. They are very much aware that Personville's lawlessness infects language itself, with the result that most speech acts are highly suspect.

They are aware, for example, that there is no necessary correspondence between words and deeds. The most typical action in Red Harvest is the double-cross, to say one thing and do something else. Sheriff Noonan spends much of the novel double-crossing Whisper Thaler. Dinah Brand systematically double-crosses most of her admirers. In this world basic words no longer mean what they used to. Promises are made and routinely broken; truces are called only to be violated. Waving the white flag of surrender, Pete the Finn emerges from his wrecked headquarters, hands on head. The sender has faith in his sign; the receiver ignores it. Pete the Finn is greeted by an insult, four bullets in the face and body, and laughter from an onlooker (182). These and other crimes go unsolved or unpunished, in large part because all the perpetrators have alibis, which they invent casually and trade freely. Whisper Thaler has a group of hoods who regularly provide him with an alibi. Reno Starkey gives the Op an alibi for a crime tha t he himself has committed, the murder of Dinah Brand.

In Personville everyone has a story and seems anxious to share it with the Op. Unfortunately for the Op, most of these stories are misrepresentations or even complete fabrications. At one point the Op abruptly breaks off an interview because he knows his informant would only lie to him (28). After boozily rehearsing the history of her relation with Donald Willson, Dinah Brand challenges the Op to figure out "which part of the story I told you is true" (37). The Op himself is confident that "I looked most honest when I was lying" (156). In passages of dialogue, he sometimes replaces the tag "I said" with "I lied," as if to show that while he carries on his masquerade in Personville he is at least playing square with the readers.

As the above quotes suggest, the Op frequently makes references to the acts of storytelling and conversation, to saying and meaning. Red Harvest is a talky novel, composed in great part of dialogue, much of which is metalinguistic; it talks about talk itself. "You talked too much, son," the Op says, when he fingers the bank clerk Albury for the murder of Donald Willson: "That's a way you amateur criminals have. You've always got to overdo the frank and open business" (55). When ex-cop McSwain offers to do "things" to move the operation along, the Op asks bluntly, "You want to stool-pigeon for me?" McSwain shoots back, "There's no sense in a man picking out the worst name he can find for everything" (89). It's appropriate that the mayhem in the novel ends with the Op listening to the last of the gangsters, Reno Starkey, "talk himself to death" (198).