Lawrence Block: The Burglar in the Library

“And that’s the only time they met?”

“That’s what everybody says.”

“Oh?”

“Every biography of either of the two of them mentions that meeting. They had a photo taken of the group, to send to the editor of Black Mask back in New York.” I went over to the Biography section and came back with Shadow Man, Richard Layman’s life of Hammett, and flipped through it to the photos. “Here we go. That’s Chandler with the pipe. And that’s Hammett.”

“It looks as though they’re staring at each other.”

“Maybe. It’s hard to tell.”

“Did they like each other, Bern?”

“That’s also hard to tell. Years later Chandler wrote a letter in which he recalled the meeting. He remembered Hammett as nice-looking, tall, quiet, gray-haired, and with a fearful capacity for Scotch.”

“Just like me.”

“Well, you’re nice-looking,” I agreed. “I don’t know about tall.”

She glowered at me. Carolyn can stand six feet tall, but only if she happens to be wearing twelve-inch heels. “I’m not quiet or gray-haired, either,” she said. “I was referring to the fearful capacity for Scotch.”

“Oh.”

“Is that all Chandler had to say about him?”

“He thought a lot of him as a writer.” I flipped pages, found the part I was looking for. I read: “‘Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley; it doesn’t have to stay there forever, but it looked like a good idea to get as far as possible from Emily Post’s idea of how a well-bred debutante gnaws a chicken wing. Hammett wrote for people with a sharp, aggressive attitude to life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street. Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people who commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare, and tropical fish.’”

“Tropical fish?”

“‘He put these people down on paper as they were,’” I went on, “‘and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes.’ Wait, there’s more. ‘He was spare, frugal, hardboiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that never seemed to have been written before.’” I closed the book. “He wrote that in 1944, in an essay for The Atlantic. I wonder if Hammett ever saw it. He was in the army at the time, stationed in Alaska during the Aleutians campaign.”

“Wasn’t he a little old for that?”

“He was born in 1894, so he would have been forty-eight in 1942 when he enlisted. On top of that his health wasn’t good. He’d had TB, and his teeth were bad.”

“And they took him anyway?”

“Not the first two times he tried to enlist. The third time around they weren’t as finicky, and they took him after he had some teeth pulled. Then after the war they jailed him when he refused to tell a Congressional committee if he’d been a communist.”

“Was he?”

“Probably, but who cares? He wasn’t a candidate for president. He was just a writer who hadn’t written much of anything in twenty years.”

“What did Hammett think of Chandler?”

“As far as anybody knows, he never expressed an opinion.” I shrugged. “You know, it’s entirely possible he never read a thing Chandler wrote. But I think he had the opportunity.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think the two of them met a second time, two years or so after Chandler ’s first novel was published. I think Chandler brought a copy of the book with him and presented it to Hammett.”

“And?”

“And I think I know where the book is,” I said. “I think it’s at Cuttleford House.”

Chandler never mentioned a second meeting, I told Carolyn, and neither did Hammett. But nine or ten months ago I’d been browsing through some books I’d bought for store stock, and I wound up getting caught up in one I’d never seen before, a memoir called A Penny a Word-and Worth It! by an old pulp writer called Lester Harding Ross.

Carolyn had never heard of him.

“Neither had I,” I told her. “Ross seems to have been a hack of all trades. He turned out thousands of words of fiction every day, none of it very good but all of it publishable. He wrote sports stories and western stories and detective stories and science fiction stories, and he did all of his work under pen names. He listed thirty pen names in his book, and admitted that there were others he’d forgotten. He really did spend his life writing for a cent a word, and never seems to have aspired to anything more. I hope he did a little better with his autobiography. It’s pretty interesting stuff, and I’d hate to think he only got six or seven hundred dollars for it.”

“He probably dashed it off in three days.”

“Well, that’s all the time Voltaire spent writing Candide. But all of that’s beside the point. The thing is, Ross really enjoyed being a writer, whether or not he took much pride in the stuff he was writing. And he enjoyed the company of other writers. He was acquainted with most of the pulp writers of his era, directly or by correspondence.”

“Including Hammett and Chandler?”

“Well, no, as a matter of fact. But including George Harmon Coxe.”

“I know that name.”

“I’m not surprised. He published a lot of books, good tough hardboiled stuff. And he was a friend of Chandler ’s. After The Big Sleep came out, Chandler wrote to Coxe, who had just built a house in Connecticut. Chandler was interested in moving there himself.”

“It’s hard to imagine Philip Marlowe in Connecticut. He’s such an L.A. kind of guy.”

“I know, but Chandler was looking for some place more affordable than California. He was also thinking about moving back to England. He wound up staying in California, but, according to Lester Harding Ross, he actually did visit Coxe at his home in Connecticut.”

“When?”

“That’s not clear, but it was probably sometime in the summer or fall of ’41.” I slipped behind the counter and found my copy of A Penny a Word-and Worth It! “Here’s what Ross has to say. ‘I wish I could find a letter Coxe wrote me around that time. It seems Chandler came east to confer with his people at Knopf, then stayed a day or two with the Coxes. One night they drove to visit some friends named Fortnoy or Fontenoy, and also visiting were Hammett and the Hellman woman. Evidently Fortnoy or Fontenoy or whatever his name was had a free hand with the liquor bottle, and all in attendance drank deeply. Chandler had brought along a copy of his book, and made a big show of presenting it to Hammett, writing a flowery inscription on the flyleaf. The rich thing is that he’d originally brought the book with him from California as a gift for Coxe, and now had no copy to give him! Coxe’s words on the subject were wonderfully wry, but, alas, his letter must have been a casualty of one of our many moves.’”

“‘The Hellman woman.’ Lillian Hellman?”

“Uh-huh. She’d bought Hardscrabble Farm in 1939, and Hammett spent a good deal of time there. The farm wasn’t exactly a hop-skip-and-jump from Cuttleford House, but it wouldn’t have been more than a two-hour drive.”

“I must have missed something, Bern. When did Ross say anything about Cuttleford House?”

“He didn’t. But he said something about a man named Fontenoy.”

“And?”

“And I looked for references to Fortnoy or Fontenoy in the biographies of Hammett and Chandler, but I couldn’t find anything close. I also looked for any indication that a presentation copy of The Big Sleep had been part of Dashiell Hammett’s estate, or Lillian Hellman’s. I checked auction records, and I called people in the book trade who would be likely to know about that sort of thing. I checked the letters of George Harmon Coxe, to see if he reported the incident to any of the other people he corresponded with.”