Max Collins - Kill Your Darlings

I’d been nervous about attending the Bouchercon; the last one of these I’d attended, I was a barely published writer of short stories-now I was a more visible “author” of two published hardcover novels, one of which had just been nominated for Novel of the Year by the Private Eye Writers of America (whose awards ceremonies were traditionally held at Bouchercon). I considered the nomination a fluke-for one thing, the book had gotten (deservedly) mixed reviews; for another, the hero wasn’t a private eye and so, technically, the book probably shouldn’t have even been in the running. But knowing I didn’t deserve to win-knowing I didn’t have a prayer to win-didn’t keep me from writing an acceptance speech over and over again in my brain on the four-hour drive from Port City to Chicago.

“I understand your idol Roscoe Kane’s here,” Tom said.

“Yeah, you just missed him.”

“Damnit! Will you introduce me tomorrow?”

“Of course.”

“I bet meeting him must be an experience.”

“It certainly is.”

“He’s one of my favorites, too, you know.”

Tom was one of the world’s foremost authorities on private eye fiction, and one of the genre’s biggest enthusiasts; getting on his list of favorites didn’t make you one of the elite. Even I was on. In fact, the first fan letter I ever had was from Tom. God bless him.

“What do you think about this Hammett thing?” he said.

“What Hammett thing?”

“The new Hammett book.”

“What, you mean the latest biography, the one by Cynthia Crystal?”

“No, no… I mean the new novel.”

I picked up the bottle of Pabst he’d been pouring from and looked it over.

“Tom,” I said. “I don’t know how to break this to you, but Hammett’s been dead since ’61, and that’s put a crimp in his publishing efforts. Considering he stopped writing around ’34, I hardly think there’s a new Hammett novel, unless it was written with a Ouija board.”

“It’s an unpublished book that he wrote in the twenties. A lost manuscript that got found a few months ago.”

“Yeah, right, in a box in the back of Murder Ink bookstore next to MacBeth Meets the Bowery Boys by Francis Bacon and Huntz Hall.”

“Mal, this is for real. The manuscript’s been authenticated. The Hammett estate is standing behind the thing.”

“Are they involved in the publication? Will they hold the copyright?”

“I believe so.”

“Then they stand to gain. Sounds hinky to me.”

Tom made a face; this time he looked at my Pabst bottle to check what I was drinking. “Hey, the executors of the estate aren’t going to hoax the public where Hammett’s concerned. If they were out for a buck, they wouldn’t’ve kept so many of his short stories from being reprinted in book form; they’re fussy about what Hammett stuff gets put back in print. But how could they stand in the way of a newly discovered book-length work?”

I was starting to think Tom was telling the truth and not taking advantage of a hick from Iowa who’d been drinking all evening.

“Hammett’s my favorite writer,” I said. “I’d love to read a new Hammett book. So would a few other people. Don’t play games with me, boy. What’s the deal?”

The novel, a mystery featuring Hammett’s famous Continental Op character, was entitled The Secret Emperor , and until recently had been believed left unfinished by Hammett, in its earliest stages, as some notes in the Hammett collection at the University of Texas would indicate. But, apparently, during 1927-a year when Dashiell Hammett had been thought to have temporarily given up writing to go back to the ad copy-writing game-Hammett had revised and completed the manuscript.

“Hammett’s editor at Black Mask , old Cap Shaw, had encouraged him to do this book,” Tom said, “but when Hammett showed it to him, the Captain was disappointed.”

“Why? Was it bad?”

“How should I know? I haven’t read it yet; damn few people have. But Shaw is said to’ve been disappointed because Hammett didn’t construct it as a serial, so that Shaw could run it in installments in Black Mask .”

“Which is how Hammett’s first book, Red Harvest , and most of his other books were put together,” I said.

“Right. This one was all of a piece. Hammett apparently lost confidence in the book, and never showed it to a major publisher; instead, he sold first rights to a little California firm that specialized in rental library hardbacks-westerns and detective stories. Why that company never printed the book is, you should pardon the expression, a mystery. But here’s the rub: they never really folded, that house. They were swallowed up by several other publishing firms, the latest of which is Mystery House.”

“Mystery House! That’s Gregg Gorman’s company.”

“You know Gorman?”

“I know the s.o.b.”

“Sounds like a warm relationship.”

“That’s another story. Keep going with yours.”

“Well as you know, Gorman’s a specialist in reprinting ‘important’ mystery fiction… stuff the hardcore mystery fans are willing to buy, in rather expensive editions. You collect that stuff?”

“Some of it,” I admitted. “I bought The Complete Race Williams by Carroll John Daly, in a slipcased set.”

Daly’s character Race Williams was, historically, fiction’s first hard-boiled private eye; but Daly was a rotten if energetic writer-“Okay, rats… make a move and I’ll open you up, and see what you had for supper!”-and only a fool (like me) would buy the complete Race Williams novels in a slipcased set. I said so to Tom.

“Well, meet another fool. Apparently there were around twenty-five hundred of us that foolish, and at two-hundred dollars a boxed set, that ain’t hay. And it’s just one of many editions Gorman’s brought out.”

I nodded, sourly. “Gorman’s done some good work, for scholars and mystery-fan fools like us. But he’s still an s.o.b.”

“So I gather. Anyway, Gorman uncovered this manuscript, somehow, and rather than publish it himself, sent it out for bid to all the major publishers last month. He worked out some kind of deal with the Hammett estate-since all he owned was first publication rights-and everybody seems to be happy.”

This was an important literary event, to say the least; Hammett was, by nearly universal acclamation, the finest mystery writer America has yet produced (or is ever likely to). One of a handful of American crime writers (with Chandler and possibly James M. Cain) to achieve a reputation of literary worth transcending the genre, Hammett published a mere five novels: Red Harvest , a violent shoot-’em-up that paved the way for the Spillane school; The Dain Curse , a complex story about a family with skeletons in its closet that set the pattern for Chandler and Ross Macdonald; The Maltese Falcon , the most famous private eye story of all, starring the most famous private eye of all, Sam Spade; The Glass Key , the understated crime story that was Hammett’s personal favorite (and Roscoe Kane’s favorite Hammett, incidentally); and The Thin Man , which combined the tough mystery with the comedy of manners, and gave the world (particularly Hollywood) Nick and Nora Charles and their terrier, Asta.

And now a posthumous work: The Secret Emperor .

“Who’s bringing it out?”

“Random House.”

“What did they pay?”

“Six figures, is what I hear. What six, exactly, I couldn’t say.”

“Here’s to capitalism,” I said, clinking my glass of beer to Tom’s. Considering Hammett’s leftist politics, I made sure my facetiousness was self-evident, in case his ghost was nearby; and if Hammett’s ghost was anywhere, it would be in a bar.