Back in the war days the I.W.W.--in full boom throughout the west--had lined up Personville Mining Corporation's help. The help hadn't exactly been pampered. They used their new strength to demand the things they wanted. Old Elihu gave them what he had to give them and bided his time.

In 1921 it came. Business was rotten. Old Elihu didn't care whether he shut down for a while or not. He tore up the agreements he had made with his men and began kicking them back into their prewar circumstances. Of course they yelled for help. They struck.

The strike lasted eight months. Both sides bled plenty. The Wobblies had to do their own bleeding. Old Elihu hired gunmen, strike breakers, national guardsmen and even parts of the regular army, to do his. When the last skull had been cracked, the last rib kicked in, organized labor in Personville was a used firecracker.

Hammett turned out a ton of these kinds of stories, before The Maltese Falcon was made into three different movie versions and made him famous. After that, he went out to Hollywood and lived the big life for a while, went broke, ran off to New York, lived in a hotel managed by Nathanial West and wrote The Thin Man--the book that would make him his second fortune. Nick Charles is the hero of The Thin Man, and he and his wife, Nora, are witty, urbane detectives who showed how much the sensibilities of the country had grown since Hammett first started. Nick Charles would rather go to a party than investigate--and both he and Nora would rather have had a roll in the hay (not always with each other) than a knock on the head. The Charles were made into movies and a radio series. Hammett revelled in his creation. Mickey Spillane was still doing hard-boiled stuff, of course but Hammett was again ahead of the pack.

And in New York Hammett drank with Faulkner, drinking so much that they often passed out together at swank parties and were steered to the coat room so as not to embarrass the guests. This was in the mid-thirties, and Hammett was at the height of his work--and of his political calling. Ever since Red Harvest his upbringing and sojourns among the scum that preyed on the poor had made him a devoted Marxist and remained devoted, giving time, money and writing to groups which sought to stamp out anti-Semitism and Fascism.

Not surprisingly, then, he begged the Army to take him into World War II. Then in his fifties, he still served for two years. Yet when he got out, and before he could go back to writing--the Red Scare was here. Hammett was called in front of numerous committees to talk about his Communist activities. He spent 26 weeks in jail once for refusing to cooperate with one such committee and though the sentence was only for contempt of court, the time in prison irrevocably destroyed his health. Then, he was out again, only to be hauled in front of more committees. Hammett had always claimed to be a Marxist and a Socialist--and put no faith in the Fascism that increasingly crept into Stalin's Russia. But such subtleties were lost on the zealots. Marxism was considered synonymous with godless, atheist Ivans. The labor movements of the '20s and '30s simply did not translate.

And the proceedings were often ludicrous:

Chairman: Well, now, you have told us that you will not tell us whether you are a member of the Communist Party today or not, on the ground that if you told us the answer might incriminate you. That is normally taken by this committee and the country as a whole to mean that you are a member of the Party, because if you were not, you would simply say, "No," and it would not incriminate you. You see, the only reason you have the right to refuse to answer is if you feel a truthful answer would incriminate you. An answer that you were not a Communist, if you were not a Communist, could not incriminate you. Therefore, you should know considerable about the Communist movement, I assume.

Mr. Hammett: Was that a question, sir?

The Committees could no longer throw him in jail, but they did for all intents and purposes. His livelihood was destroyed by the tax boys, and he spent the rest of his days as a recluse. He kept telling himself he could write again, but there were no jobs and it didn't happen. When he died, the government tried the last ignominy of removing his body from Arlington National Cemetery. Even though he had fought in two wars, the authorities saw him as a disgrace. The attempt didn't work. By the time they got around to it, McCarthy was out and the whole nightmare was over.

And now we have the whole story in Layman's The Shadow Man. Layman's book is the best of its kind around today, and even without the help of Lillian Hellman, he has pieced together the life in a readable, if somewhat stodgy account. It's workmanlike biography of an unworkmanlike man, with none of the flair that marked Hammett's writing and none of the hard sensibilities he made so popular. In some respects, it's not nearly as interesting as Hammett's fiction, since Hammett's Ops have more to say about the state of things in the urban steamvat than any academic ever will. Still, it's worth reading if only for a hint at how right Gertrude Stein was As he said in an early story:

You can go to hell trying to be a hero and nobody will even bat an eye. Nobody will even hear you fall--unless you happen to fall right on top of them. And even then they'll just arrest you for breaking their own, stupid little necks.

He probably didn't even know he was writing his own epitaph.