Books: The Master & the Counterfeit

THE BIG KNOCKOVER by Dashiell Hammett. 355 pages. Random House. $5.95.

THE BY-PASS CONTROL by Mickey Spillane. 220 pages. Duffon. $3,95.

Mickey Spillane is a direct literary descendant of Dashiell Hammett, although it would be imprecise to stress the word literary in reference to Spillane. Hammett, who died in 1961, created the tough-guy private eye, who has since taken up permanent residence in the ghetto world of detective fiction, but none of Hammett’s many imitators ranks lower than Mickey Spillane. Anyone who bothers to measure Spillane’s latest Tiger Mann mystery against this posthumous collection of Hammett’s Continental Op stories, first published in the ’20s in Black Mask magazine, will instantly see why.

Like Spillane’s other hero, Mike Hammer, Tiger Mann is not tough at all, merely brutal. The book opens with Mann gratuitously killing an enemy who is already moribund. It ends with Mann’s equally unnecessary murder of a woman with whom, following inflexible habit, he has shacked up. Between bloodlettings, Mann saves the world from nuclear destruction. It is a parody of Hammett, though an unconscious one, and it might be funny if Spillane could write.

Hammett could write. Into his bony prose went the conscientious effort of the craftsman whose best work escaped the literary basement where most mystery books belong. His Continental Op (for operative), based on the author’s own experience as a Pinkerton detective, is authentically tough. All mystery stories are implausible, and so are Hammett’s. But in his case the reader accepts their implausibility because the characters, particularly the Op himself—a fat, stubby, middle-aged man who never got a name and needed none, being an archetype—seem so real. “He put these people down on paper as they are,” wrote Raymond Chandler, whose fictional Philip Marlowe was one of the more successful copies of Hammett’s laconic Op. “He made them talk and think in the language they customarily used.”

To this anthology Playwright Lillian Hellman, who shared and sheltered many of Hammett’s years, has contributed an introduction that pays sentimental homage to his talent. She has also included the fragment of a serious novel, undertaken late in Hammett’s life and never published before. There is just enough of it to suggest that the author did his creative spirit a disservice in confining it to literature’s underworld.