Forgotten Books: Blood Money by Dashiell Hammett

My wife and I are planning another trip to San Francisco. Last time, a few years back, we saw and did most of the famous stuff, so this time we plan to get a little more up close and personal. And for me, that means walking in the footsteps of Dashiell Hammett.

So I picked up the latest edition of Don Herron’s Hammett Tour guidebook (and a very fine one it is) and started re-reading The Complete Works. I began with the Continental Op stories, because they’re my favorites, and have been reading them in order of publication.

The first few Op tales are well-written, and groundbreaking in that they present a realistic look at the work of a big agency detective, just the sort of work (minus the strikebreaking) that Hammett did for the Pinkertons.

Given his druthers, I suspect Hammett would have continued in that vein, turning out stories that would have been more appropriate in True Detective than in Black Mask. Thankfully, Black Mask’s readers wouldn’t let him. Being fans of such wildly unrealistic private dicks as Carroll John Daly’s Race Williams, they were a bloodthirsty bunch, demanding ever more action.

To keep the readers (and editor Cap Shaw) happy, Hammett was forced to take his Op beyond reality to the edge of Hardboiled Fantasyland. Whether that was a good or bad thing depends on your perspective. My take is - it was perfect.

The Op remained a real detective, and a real man, but he was thrust into ever more violent - and entertaining - situations, until reaching his absolute peak in my favorite Hammett novel, Red Harvest. I’ll be re-reading that book soon, and chances are it will still be my fave, but last week I got reacquainted with the book that could have been Hammett’s first novel, and it’s a damn strong contender. For the poetry of its violence, it has never been excelled.

Blood Money began life as two 1927 Black Mask novelettes, “The Big Knockover” and “$106,000 Blood Money.” At one point, Afred A. Knopf wanted to published them as a novel. Hammett refused, but in 1943, Lawrence E. Spivak, the company that had been churning out his pulp stories in digest format, did the deed under the title $106,000 Blood Money. In short order, Tower Books did a hardcover edition as Blood Money and Dell followed suit with a mapback. Spivak did another digest version, this time called The Big Knockover, and Dell reissued the Blood Money mapback, so the “novel” was actually published five times. Though I have all five, I chose to read the Tower hardcover for the ultimate experience.

Part 1, originally “The Big Knocker” is a trip to Fantasyland, with a hundred or more mobsters coming from across the country to converge on San Francisco and rob two banks at once. When the mastermind and his core supporters escape, the Op stays on their trail, and delivers their just deserts in Part 2, originally“$106,000 Blood Money.”  Part 2 is more grounded in reality, but is every bit as entertaining. Hammett’s prose had been steadily improving, and by this point it was flat-out amazing. Even though I just finished the book, I already want to read it again.

Since 1966, when Random House issued their version of The Big Knockover, a 13-story hardcover collection edited by Lillian Hellman, the two tales have appeared as separate novelettes. Too bad. Together, they're every bit as novelesque as the two official Op novels, Red Harvest and The Dain Curse. Currently, the Blood Money saga appears as a small part of the 2001 collection Crime Stories and Other Writings. It deserves better.

This week’s amazing selection of Forgotten Books is linked for your convenience at SPINETINGLER.