Distinctly Montana Magazine

w w w . d i s t i n c t l y m o n t a n a . c o m 13 D ESPITE THE DETECTIVE MYSTERY STORY having been more or less the invention of the American Edgar Allen Poe, the English subsequently picked up the baton. First by way of Dickens and then Arthur Conan Doyle's iconic Sherlock Holmes, they made it into a genteel genre in which mustachioed detectives solved bloodless murders in country estates, on luxury cruises, or while riding trans-con- tinental trains. Then, in the early 20th century, writer Dashiell Hammett took the mystery, kicked the legs out from under it, and sent it tumbling into the gutter. Before he was a writer, Hammett was a detective for the famous independent Pinkerton Detective Agency, working mainly out of the San Francisco office, though for a brief time after WWI, he worked in the Spokane office, which brought him to cases all over the Inland Northwest and Montana. In a piece he later wrote for a magazine entitled "From the Memoirs of a Private Detective," he remembers several cases in Montana. Hammett describes transporting a prisoner from Gilt Edge (now a ghost town) to Lewistown. At first, the man professed his innocence over and over, but after Hammett's vehicle broke down, Montana weather became an interroga- tion technique in itself: "After shivering all night on the front seat his morale was low," Hammett wrote, "and I had no difficulty in getting a complete confession from him while walking to the nearest ranch early the next morning." Hammett would have another brush with Montana that would inspire the book that made him famous, changed American letters forever, and introduced the world to a new genre. And, well, it may not have even happened. • • • Frank Little was a vocal agitator who was famous for risking life and limb to spread the gospel of the Inter- national Workers of the World, a global union which many other domestic unions, such as the American Federation of Labor, regarded as too radical. Indeed, the IWW had had connections with socialist and anarchist groups. Frank Little was one of the most passionately radical of the "wobblies," or IWW men, opposing America's entry into the Great War calling the U.S. soldiers fighting abroad "Uncle Sam's scabs in uniform." Needless to say, he made enemies. Before he arrived in Butte in 1917 he had already suffered a broken an- kle during a labor dispute in Arizona, a hernia in Mississippi, and a kidnapping in Duluth. Butte, Montana would prove to be the end of the line for him. Masked men would succeed in kidnapping Little on the early morning of August 1, 1917, dragging him behind their car in his underwear before bashing his head, fracturing his skull, and hanging him from a railroad trestle on the Mil- waukee Bridge at the edge of Butte. Pinned to his body was a note that read "first and last warning" as well as the numbers 3-7-77, familiar to Montanans for signifying the Vigilantes killings of the late 19th century. Many believed that assassins and thugs in the employ of the Anaconda Company committed the crime, but it has nev- er been officially solved. The playwright Lillian Hellman, who would be Hammett's partner for the second half of his life, reported hearing Ham- mett tell a shocking story for the first time and being ap- palled: "I remember sitting on a bed next to him in the first months we met, listening to him tell me about his Pinkerton days when an officer of the Anaconda Copper Company had offered him five thousand dollars to kill Frank Little, the labor union organizer. I didn't know Hammett well enough to hear the anger under the calm voice, the bitterness under the laughter..." Hellman was well known for left-wing causes. When called before Congress to tes- tify about the supposed infiltration of the American cognoscenti by Communist sym- pathizers in the 1950s, she refused to testify against people she knew. So the idea that Hammett might have been connected with the murder of International Workers of the World agent Frank Little, a crime that had scandalized a nation, troubled her. The writer James Ellroy, a contemporary practitioner of the noir best known for his novel L.A. Confidential, calls the encounter "a primer on situational ethics. He knew it was wrong and didn't do it," but that Hammett still "stayed with an organization that in part suppressed dissent and entertained murderous offers on occasion... That disjuncture is the great theme of his work." The problem is this: the historical record suggests that, while the Pinkertons employed Hammett in 1917, the year Little was murdered, he did not work at the Spokane or Den- ver offices, the closest to Butte, until 1920. And Hellman was well-known for being a storyteller herself. It is possible that Hammett, Hellman or some combination of the two concoct- ed the story of the offer of $5,000. Even so, Hammett almost certainly did do some anti-union work, possibly in Butte. If he wrote about Butte and its conflicts between socialists, unions and copper kings like he knew it first hand, then it's probably because he did. by SHERMAN CAHILL DASHIELL HAMMETT!

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