Dashiell Hammett

Samuel Dashiell Hammett was born in St Mary's County, Maryland, on 27 May 1894, to southern Catholic parents, Richard Thomas Hammett and Anne Bond ('Dashiell' was a version of De Chiel, a family name on his mother's side). Raised in Philadelphia and Baltimore, he attended Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, but dropped out in 1908, soon after starting his first year of high school, since the family, because his father's ill health, depended on him for income. His jobs were numerous and low-paying, many of them with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O): from the age of thirteen, he worked, amongst other things, as newsboy, messenger boy, freight clerk, timekeeper, stevedore, railroad labourer, nail-machine operator in a box factory, advertising manager. It was an early life very different from that of his fellow hard-boiled writer, Raymond Chandler, and one not out of keeping with the description that Chandler gave, in 'The Simple Art of Murder', of Hammett's distinctive contribution to the development of American crime fiction: Hammett, he said, wrote 'for people with a sharp, aggressive attitude to life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there...Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse...He put these people down on paper as they are, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes.'

A more direct influence on the substance of this tough, down-to-earth fiction, however, was the job Hammett applied for in 1915, when he was 21. He answered a 'Help Wanted' advertisement for detectives placed by the Pinkerton National Detective Agency - an ad that said 'orphans preferred'. The implication of danger was presumably an element in its appeal to Hammett: in contrast to the tedium of his earlier jobs, working for Pinkerton's provided opportunities for travel, risk and adventure. Twenty years later, Lillian Hellman wrote, he still had 'bad cuts on his legs and an indentation in his head from being scrappy with criminals'. Hammett was employed as a Pinkerton's operative on and off for eight years, working on everything from the theft of a Ferris wheel to 'big' cases like those of Nicky Arnstein (a Wall Street con man found guilty of bond theft) and Fatty Arbuckle. Amongst his mentors was his Baltimore supervisor, James Wright, a short, tough-talking agent whom Hammett greatly liked and who served as the model for the main protagonist of his early stories, the Continental Op. The work on which Hammett was employed, however, was not always something of which he felt proud. Pinkerton agents were sometimes, for example, brought in as strike breakers, and Hammett himself was apparently offered $5,000 by the Anaconda Copper Company to kill the labour organiser Frank Little (Little was finally lynched in 1917). Whether or not he himself was ever active in strike breaking, Hammett's sense of being seen as a paid thug was one of the things that made working for Pinkerton's a 'racket' for which he ultimately felt real distaste.

Hammett's stint as a Pinkerton's operative was interrupted by the First World War. He enlisted and served as part of the Motor Ambulance Corps of the US Army in 1918-19, until he caught influenza, from which he developed the tuberculosis that weakened him for the rest of his life. Given a medical discharge, he went back to work for Pinkerton's at the Spokane, Washington, branch. A recurrence of tuberculosis put him back into hospital, but by mid-1921 was again working for Pinkerton's, this time in San Francisco, and now married to Josephine (Jose) Dolan, a young woman who had nursed him in hospital and who was already five months pregnant. In February 1922, suffering from ill-health and increasingly cynical about detective work, Hammett resigned from Pinkerton's.

This was the beginning of Hammett's career as a writer. After he left Pinkerton's he signed up for journalism courses at Munson's Business College and later the same year was managing to earn money not just by writing advertising copy but by selling his first short pieces and stories. His break-through came with a vignette, 'The Parthian Shot', accepted for publication in a society magazine called The Smart Set, which was run by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, who had (in 1920) also been responsible for starting The Black Mask. It was, of course, in his writing for Black Mask that Hammett found a distinctive voice and subject-matter. His first detective story to be published in Black Mask, 'The Road Home' (December 1922), was uncharacteristic (being set in Southeast Asia), but in his third story for the magazine, 'Arson Plus', he introduced his nameless protagonist, the paunchy but tough operative for the Continental Detective Agency who became known as the Continental Op and who appeared in some three dozen of Hammett's stories over the next eight years. The earliest of Hammett's Black Mask contributions (including 'Arson Plus') were published under the byline of Peter Collinson. As Hammett explained, 'Peter Collins' being slang for 'a nobody', his byline meant 'nobody's son' - an explanation that obviously fits well with the anonymity that set Hammett's Op apart from poseurs in the genteel tradition of detective stories, like S. S. Van Dine's Philo Vance. The first of the Black Mask contributions to be published under the name of Dashiell Hammett was the third of the Op stories, 'Crooked Souls' (aka 'The Gatewood Caper'), published in October 1923. Black Mask was the major outlet for his work until 1930. Although he briefly quit working for the magazine in 1926, he joined it again at the request of Captain Joseph T. Shaw, who took over as editor beginning with the November 1926 issue and who became known for encouraging a high standard of colloquial, racy writing, favouring 'economy of expression' and 'authenticity in character and action'. A year later, in November 1927, Black Mask began serialisation of Hammett's first novel, at this stage entitled The Cleansing of Poisonville (and as Red Harvest when it was published in book form two years later).

Hammett's Black Mask contemporary, Carroll John Daly, is generally credited with writing the first 'hard-boiled detective story' ('The False Burton Combs', which appeared in the December 1922 issue), but although Daly was hugely popular it was Hammett's work that had lasting impact. Hammett's immense influence is due in part to his superior ability in creating a distinctive voice, a true 'hard-boiled ' style that is in itself an implicit rejection of bourgeois hypocrisy and conventional values. His spare, unembellished prose is appropriate to his no-nonsense protagonists. Hammett is often praised as a realist, and unquestionably part of his superiority to a writer like Daly lies in his greater verisimilitude. His flawed, vulnerable narrators and his hard, direct representation of contemporary material give him an ability to lay bare, as in Red Harvest, the 'heart, soul, skin and guts' of a corrupt town. In a way, however, what most distinguishes Hammett from Daly are the qualities which have led critics to label him a modernist : his development of more sophisticated ironies , his ambiguity, narrative fragmentation and complexity, his disruption of reliable narrative and of binary oppositions between good and evil, order and disorder. In contrast to other early Black Mask writers, he doesn't just aim to expose the falsity of public discourse and to bring out the hidden connections between the criminal and the official, but to create narratives in which lying and deceit erode all human relations and all of the fictions sustained by respectable society.

Hammett's first four novels all initially came out as serialisations in Black Mask and were then published in hardback by Alfred A. Knopf: his Continental Op novels, Red Harvest and The Dain Curse, both emerged in 1929; thereafter he varied his protagonists, and The Maltese Falcon, in which he created his most famous private eye, Sam Spade, appeared in novel form in 1930; The Glass Key, with Ned Beaumont as its protagonist, was serialised in Black Mask March-June 1930 and was published by Knopf in 1931. His fifth and last novel, The Thin Man, the only one not to appear first in Black Mask, received 'a modest advance' from Knopf and was published in 1934. Although Hammett's habits (womanising, gambling, drinking) brought him financial difficulties in the early 1930s, he was by the middle of the decade reaching the height of his fame and able to capitalise on the rapid increase in his popularity: he was, as Lillian Hellman said, 'the hottest thing in Hollywood and New York'.

As was the case with Chandler a decade later, much of Hammett's new prosperity was due to the Hollywood interest in his stories and novels. In 1930, Paramount released the first film to be based on one of Hammett's stories (Roadhouse Nights, very loosely adapted from Red Harvest) and the next year there was the first of three Warner Brothers adaptations of The Maltese Falcon. Neither this 1931 version (aka Dangerous Female, directed by Roy Del Ruth) nor a 1936 version called Satan Met a Lady (starring Bette Davis and directed by William Dieterle) made a real impact at the box office, but much of Hammett's other work was now being brought to the screen. The only lastingly influential adaptation of The Maltese Falcon was, of course, the third (1941), John Huston's first film, in which Humphrey Bogart, playing Sam Spade, created the most famous image of the hard-boiled private eye. In the 1930s, by far the most successful adaptation of a Hammett novel was The Thin Man (1934), with William Powell and Myrna Loy as the wisecracking, hard-drinking Nick and Nora Charles. It was a film that, over the next dozen years, spawned five sequels, increasingly remote from the original novel. Hammett himself sold his rights to the Thin Man title to MGM for $40,000 in 1937: nobody, he told Lillian Hellman, 'ever invented a more insufferably smug pair of characters. They can't take that away from me, even for $40,000.'

Much of what we know of Hammett in the period from 1930 on derives from the writing of Lillian Hellman, whose Pentimento (1973) has an account of their life together. Hammett's marriage to Jose had ended in separation in 1929, and he first met Hellman in 1930, at about the time that he was starting to write The Thin Man. In 1932, as he was working to complete a second version of the novel, he told her that she was the model for Nora Charles ('But I was soon put back in my place - Hammett said I was also the silly girl in the book and the villainess.'). Not long before their first meeting Hammett had moved to Hollywood: 'When I first met Dash,' Hellman recalled, 'he was throwing himself away on Hollywood parties and New York bars.' A dozen years Hammett's junior, the 24-year old Hellman was forceful, witty and intelligent. Working as a script reader, she aspired to being a playwright, an ambition in which Hammett helped and supported her. Although it was a tempestuous relationship, they had what Hellman calls 'thirty-one on and off years' together, until Hammett's death in 1961.

After writing The Thin Man, however, Hammett himself more or less quit publishing. Although he did work on other things (creating radio programmes, writing screen stories and, in 1934, a comic strip, Secret Agent X-9, which was drawn by Alex Raymond) he produced no more crime fiction. By Hellman's account, it is possible that he quit writing detective stories because he felt they were looked down on by the smart literary set they now moved in. He intended to create more serious fiction: a novel (called 'Tulip' by Hellman) was meant 'to start a new literary life'. It remained unfinished, however, and although Hammett continued to think of himself as a working writer the truth of the matter was that his career as a novelist ended when he was forty.

Much of Hammett's energy from this time on was channelled into left-wing political involvement and into the defence of civil liberties. To Hellman's astonishment, he also decided that he had to fight for his country: in 1942, at the age of 48, the fervently anti-fascist Hammett enlisted as a private in the army. Over the previous few years, he had made no secret of his communist sympathies (for example, as chairman of the 1940 Committee on Election Rights, he had campaigned to have Communist Party candidates included on state ballots) and the FBI had for some time been documenting his activities. He was refused permission to transfer to a combat zone, the reason given being that his teeth were too bad. He responded by having them all extracted, after which he was sent to the Aleutian Islands, where he served in the Army Signal Corps until 1945. Although he missed the little combat that took place there, he conducted a training programme, edited an army newspaper and, in Hellman's phrase, 'became a kind of legend in the Alaska-Aleutian army'.

Following the war, in 1946, Hammett was approached by the newly formed Civil Rights Congress. He gave his support, thus attracting further attention from the FBI, which closely monitored all groups declared subversive by the Attorney General. Hammett was president of the New York CRC and a trustee of the CRC fund set up to provide bail when arrests were made for political reasons. Among those helped by the fund were four communist leaders accused of conspiring against the government. When they jumped bail, the US District Court in New York demanded information that would help them to trace the fugitives. Questioned by the Court on 9 July 1951, Hammett repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment. He was declared guilty of contempt of court for his refusal to produce books and records or to divulge the names on a list of contributors to the bail bond fund. Sentenced to six months in a federal penitentiary, Hammett was sent to the Federal Correctional Institute at Ashland, Kentucky. Released from prison after five months (9 December 1951), Hammett found himself blacklisted in Hollywood and subject to an IRS investigation which claimed that he owed thousands of dollars (the federal government attached all his royalties and billed him for $111,000 in back taxes). Jail weakened him, Hellman wrote, leaving 'a thin man thinner, a sick man sicker,' and in the McCarthyite 50s, there were inevitably further confrontations. Hellman herself was summoned in 1952 to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and in March 1953 Hammett was called by McCarthy to testify before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. He again pleaded the Fifth Amendment. In 1955 he was once more summoned, this time to testify before the New York State Joint Legislative Committee, though he was dismissed without penalty.

Although Hammett's political activities of the 1940s and 1950s can, of course, be read back into his fiction of the 1920s and 1930s, the connections should not be oversimplified. Hammett identified himself as a communist but he also attacked the party from within: he was, by Hellman's account, 'most certainly a Marxist. But he was a very critical Marxist...often witty and bitingly sharp about the American Communist Party'; he was attacked from within the party for creating novels which were by no means written in support of a party line. The critique he develops is in many respects strongly left-wing, for example in its hostility to the greed and exploitation he associates with unrestrained capitalism . One might argue, however, that the economic structure of capitalism generally appears to be presented more as an effect than a cause. Hammett expresses a pessimistic vision that is essentially political without being programmatic and, like Conrad , conveys a sense of irremediable human flaws, abuses of power, inescapable violence and death, rather than a hope that changing the structure of society will bring a utopian transformation. The atmosphere of ubiquitous deceitfulness is such that moral chaos and betrayal seem the norm rather than the exception. Anarchic human appetites - sometimes sexual, but more often the lust for wealth or power - disorder all relationships from the most personal to the political and economic.

The last years of Hammett's life were spent in poor health, often isolated and drinking heavily. From 1952 he lived in a small cottage in Katonah, New York, and then, for his last four years, with Lillian Hellman in her apartment in New York, with summers in Vineyard Haven: 'Not all of that time was easy,' Hellman said, 'and some of it was very bad, but it was an unspoken pleasure that having come together so many years before, ruined so much, and repaired a little, we had endured.' Hammett died on 10 January 1961, suffering from lung cancer. He asked to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery, and, although he had never seen active combat, he had served in both world wars and his wish was honoured.

Red Harvest

Red Harvest, first called The Cleansing of Poisonville, was serialised in Black Mask between November 1927 and February 1928. Published in the following year by Alfred A. Knopf, it became Dashiell Hammett's first hard-boiled novel. Along with The Glass Key (1931) it is the most directly political of Hammett's novels; it is certainly the most violent and apocalyptic of his works, representing not remediable political-economic ills but a sense of deep-seated moral disorder. The Montana mining town in which the novel is set has an element of historical specificity, but Hammett also makes extensive use of the naming of the town, which is known by two names, both metaphoric. As 'Personville' it suggests a representative population and, in terms of the power structure, one man's presumption in taking over the whole town, making it in every respect his personal property ('Elihu Willsson was Personville'); the name itself embodies the American ethos of opportunistic individualism. The insidious nature of the corruption Willsson presides over gives rise to the town's other name, 'Poisonville', with its suggestions of crookedness and violence spreading like a toxin through the body politic, not just in one small town but (given the representative nature of the name) through the whole of American society.

At the beginning of Red Harvest Donald Willsson, an idealistic young newspaper publisher, launches a campaign against the corruption of Personville, unaware of how deeply involved his own father is in these crimes. As often happens in Hammett novels the protagonist's closest alliances turn out to be with those who are most guilty and who have most to conceal: he has been hired by the son of the man who is at the centre of the town 's corruption; when the son is killed, shortly after the arrival of the Op in Personville, he is hired by the father himself, once old Elihu Willsson is persuaded that his gangster associates mean to murder him as well. Willsson has 'owned Personville, heart, soul, skin, and guts,' for forty years - president and majority stockholder of both the Personville Mining Corporation and the First National Bank, owner of the city's only newspapers, 'and at least part owner of nearly every other enterprise of any importance'. In the early 1920s, Willsson had managed to crush a miners' strike by calling in hired gunmen (as well as strike-breakers, national guardsmen and parts of the regular army), and he has, in consequence, lost control of his town. The criminals who have helped to put down the strike cannot be kept in check by Willsson, who is himself implicated in their corrupt methods.

The Op's own character is, he says, 'infected' with the poison of violence . He plays all factions against one another and abandons himself to the violent atmosphere in full awareness of the corruption of his own character and motives: 'It makes you sick, or you get to like it'. The Op's investigation leads him into a 'red harvest' of violence. He tells the book's bad-good woman, Dinah Brand, that after sixteen murders in less than a week he fears he himself is going 'blood-simple': 'Donald Willsson; Ike Bush; the four wops and the dick at Cedar Hill; Jerry; Lew Yard, Dutch Jake, Blackie Whalen and Put Collings at the Silver Arrow; Big Nick, the copper I potted; the blond kid Whisper dropped here; Yakima Shorty, old Elihu's prowler; and now Noonan.' In the following chapter, 'The Seventeenth Murder', the Op wakes from a surreal dream to find that his right hand is holding an ice pick, the six-inch blade of which is buried in Dinah Brand's breast. The nightmarish final chapters bring more carnage and some of the answers (the dying Reno Starkey explains how he almost accidentally killed Dinah Brand while the Op was 'coked to the edges') and the Op can claim to have had at least a temporary effect on the corruption of Personville. 'You came crying to me,' he tells Elihu Willsson, 'that some naughty men had taken your little city away from you...I don't know how various ruckuses around town have come out, but I do know the big boys - the ones you were afraid of - are dead.' There are still, however, 'plenty of busy young men working like hell right now, trying to get into the dead men's shoes.' After the Op's frenzy of cleansing and retribution, he has merely given the town back into the same hands as before. Personville is 'all nice and clean and ready to go to the dogs again', and the Op is under no illusion that he has achieved something of lasting value.

The Maltese Falcon

In The Maltese Falcon , in place of the nameless Continental Op of Red Harvest and The Dain Curse, Dashiell Hammett created as his protagonist one of the most famous examples of the private investigator. The 'blond satan' with the wolfish grin, Sam Spade, is a loner whose audacity and individualism are the product of a thoroughgoing distrust of conventional social arrangements and familiar pieties. Spade's cynical sense of the world is epitomised in the story he tells Brigid of the strange affair of Flitcraft, who abandoned his perfectly ordinary family life after he has nearly been killed by a falling beam: this exposure to life's randomness leads Flitcraft to leave behind his orderly existence, and to drift off, until, when Spade eventually finds him, he has adjusted himself to beams not falling and is now leading more or less the same kind of life he did before, with an ordinary job and a suburban family, again the good citizen, husband and father. As the teller of the parable, Spade confirms his position as the one character in the novel who grasps the absurdity that lies under all ways of ordering the world and giving it value. He knows that life is not 'a clean, orderly, responsible affair' and accepts that men do die 'at haphazard', and in his dealings with others he acts accordingly: 'my way of learning is to heave a wild and unpredictable monkey-wrench into the machinery.'

The Maltese Falcon opens with 'Miss Wonderly' asking for Spade's help in her quest for a restoration of family harmony, claiming that she is searching for a sister whose loss would kill 'Mama and Papa'. This initial pretence is rapidly replaced by the real names and actual motivation. Miss Wonderly first changes her name to 'Miss LeBlanc' and then tells Marlowe that she is really Brigid O'Shaughnessy. 'We didn't exactly believe your story,' Spade tells her when she confesses to having misled him. 'We believed your two hundred dollars.' It then emerges that the actual object of her quest is 'the black figure of a bird', the immense wealth represented by 'the Maltese falcon.' By the time Spade learns these things, his partner, Miles Archer, has been killed, as has Floyd Thursby, the man Archer has been tailing on behalf of 'Miss Wonderly', and Spade himself is a suspect. When we reach the end, it becomes clear to us that even at this stage Spade must have known that it was actually Brigid herself who killed Miles Archer, but neither we nor the femme fatale knows that he knows. In retrospect, it makes his coldness and cynicism very apparent: sure that his client is a murderess, he strings her along, sleeps with her, and pretends to be her ally in pursuit of the fabulous object at the centre of the plot, the Maltese falcon.

The falcon, though it is covered in black enamel to disguise its worth, is said to be encrusted with priceless jewels. Spade's investigations involve a series of encounters with the others who want to gain possession of this fabulous object. The obese, all-devouring Caspar Gutman, whose history of the Falcon is a tale of the universal pursuit of riches, is the father-figure of a grotesque family group (the effeminate Levantine, Joel Cairo; Gutman's young 'gunsel', the thuggish Wilmer). The group is constituted by its lust for the falcon, which they deem to be 'the property of whoever can get hold of it'. In seeking its possession Gutman will do anything, whether it is killing others or quite readily agreeing to the sacrifice of his surrogate son Wilmer. The Maltese Falcon is a novel in which deceit and betrayal are the norm; trust is impossible as false stories proliferate and 'Everybody has something to conceal.'

The sought-after 'ornament' itself finally arrives in San Francisco. Brigid has given the falcon to Captain Jacobi in Hong Kong, to be brought over on the ship La Paloma. When the Captain is shot, he shows up (following Brigid's instructions) at Spade's office, fatally wounded but carrying a brown paper parcel containing a 'foot-high figure of a bird, black as coal'. Now in possession of the bird, Spade has a stronger hand to play in his dealings with Gutman. He recommends concocting a story for the benefit of the police, suggesting to Gutman that the two murders should be pinned on Wilmer, and eventually the stories Spade tells begin to converge with the truth of what happened: Brigid killed Miles Archer, and Thursby and the captain were killed by Wilmer. Spade cagily negotiates with Gutman and finally produces the parcel containing the Maltese falcon. The prized object, however, turns out to be a fake, a worthless commodity with nothing but 'the soft grey sheen of lead' underneath the black enamel.

As the novel draws to a close, Gutman is shot by the boy he has been willing to betray, and Brigid is turned over to the police by Spade. In his dealings with Brigid, Spade argues that, against the possibility of their loving one another, must be set not just the code that governs his role as a private eye but what we take to be his well-founded conviction that only a sap would trust Brigid: 'I don't even like the idea of thinking that there might be one chance in a hundred that you'd played me for a sucker.' She asks him whether he would have treated her differently if he had received his share of the money from the sale of a genuine falcon, and the answer he gives suggests the ambivalent position of the archetypal hard-boiled investigator . Self-aware and self-mocking, he acknowledges that he is often seen as indistinguishable from the crooks with whom he has to deal, but even though he readily admits looking after his own financial interests, he is not ultimately motivated by greed: 'Don't be too sure I'm as crooked as I'm supposed to be,' Spade replies. 'That kind of reputation might be good business - bringing in high-priced jobs and making it easier to deal with the enemy.'

The Glass Key

The editor of Black Mask, Joseph T. Shaw, said in defence of his magazine in 1930 that he had published only one story, the serialised parts of Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key, in which 'the gangster was in any sense Òthe heroÓ' and this, he said in defence of his magazine, was justified as a representation of the alliance between corrupt politicians, public officials and organised crime. It was a demonstration of 'one of the most serious illnesses, to put it mildly, that our body politic has ever suffered from.' During the 1930s, it became increasingly common for American hard-boiled writers to create criminal protagonists, but The Glass Key, published in Black Mask between March and June 1930, was one of the earliest of such stories. The protagonist, Ned Beaumont, is very unlike Hammett's earlier investigators, the Continental Op and Sam Spade. He lacks even the partial legitimation of the private eye , since he is merely the henchman of a prominent racketeer and politician. Beaumont is a gambler who is capable of being thoroughly unscrupulous, for example of planting evidence; he is a man of dubious values and cloudy motives, telling harsh truths about some things and lying about others.

The Glass Key is one of the most pessimistic and unsettling of Hammett's novels, the title itself suggesting a liminal passage into darker experience through a door which, once opened, cannot be locked again. When the novel opens, there is about to be an important election, with control of the city up for grabs. Beaumont is the friend and hanger-on of Paul Madvig, a ward boss who had, about a year previously, 'picked [Beaumont] up out of the gutter'. Against Beaumont's advice, Madvig has allied himself with Ralph Henry, an old Senator whose backing in the election, Madvig believes, will enable them to 'put over the whole ticket just like nobody was running against us'. Beaumont warns that 'aristocrats' like the Senator regard Madvig as a lower form of life and will deal with him as though 'none of the rules apply'. Madvig, however, has an additional motive: he is in love with the Senator's daughter, Janet Henry, and intends to marry her, in spite of the fact that he has forbidden Janet's ne'er-do-well brother, Taylor, from seeing his own daughter, Opal.

When Taylor Henry is found dead, Madvig is a chief suspect. Believing him to be innocent, Beaumont starts to investigate the crime and manages to secure some official backing in this task, being made special investigator for the District Attorney's office. He takes considerable risks on Madvig's behalf, infiltrating the rival political camp of Shad O'Rory, who thinks Beaumont has broken with Madvig and so can be used to help frame him for the murder of Taylor Henry. Sadistically beaten and held captive by O'Rory's thugs, Beaumont survives his ordeal only to be told by Madvig that he actually did kill Taylor - an accidental killing committed in self-defence, concealed only because he feared losing the hand of Janet Henry. Beaumont tries to convince him that this is a hopeless attachment, since Janet hates Madvig and, believing that he did kill her brother, has sent anonymous letters and has tried 'to play you into the electric chair'. Madvig throws him out, and Beaumont agrees to help Janet Henry in her search for some kind of evidence that will either prove or disprove the guilt of his friend. In the final confrontation of the novel, just after he stops the Senator from going off to shoot 'my son's murderer', Beaumont reveals that it was in fact the Senator himself who killed Taylor, hitting him with a heavy cane in an angry quarrel during which 'Taylor spoke to me as no son should speak to a father.' Madvig was guilty only of the cover-up, which he urged on the Senator because of the 'nasty scandal' that would damage their chances in the election campaign.

Beaumont's cynicism about the old Senator has been more than justified. Senator Henry was willing to betray his daughter by using her attractions to secure the support of Paul Madvig; having accidentally killed his own son, he showed himself willing to murder Madvig so that he would carry the blame for the earlier crime (since Madvig was likely to change his story if he was actually arrested). Beaumont tells Janet at the end that he has suspected her father's guilt for some time, believing that Madvig was more likely to conceal the Senator's guilt than his own: 'He knew I didn't like your father,' Beaumont tells her, and 'didn't think he could trust me not to knife him.' Disgusted by her father's betrayals and by the fact that he left her brother to die alone in the street, Janet plans at the end to go off with Beaumont. As Beaumont prepares to depart, he stares 'fixedly' through an open door, and we are left pondering the open question of whether Madvig stands any chance of 'cleaning house' and ultimately managing to 'get the city back'.