Favorite Stories: Fly Paper

"Fly Paper" was a Continental Op story. Published in Black Mask in the August 1929 issue.

This was one of Dashiell Hammett's later stories, written when he was at the top of his game and getting ready to produce the serials that would later be published as the brilliant novels Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon. But even among the excellent stories Hammett was writing at that time, "Fly Paper" has always been one of my favorites.

First, it's simply a great detective story. As Hammett states in the first sentence: "It was a wandering daughter job."

The wayward daughter of a wealthy man is living with a thug. The Continental Detective Agency is on retainer to keep an eye on her in case she gets into too much trouble. Then she vanishes from New York. When the father gets a telegram from San Francisco--supposedly from the daughter--asking for money and permission to come home--Hammett's unnamed Op is assigned to bring her the cash.

But the woman waiting for the cash isn't the daughter. The telegram was part of a swindle, but the Op is able to get a lead on the girl. This soon leads him to a corpse--someone has been poisoned with arsenic soaked out of fly paper. He then sees someone else get killed--shot by a killer lurking outside an apartment window. An extended chase after a killer leads to a tense confrontation in an alley. Throughout all this, the plot unfolds in a logical manner.

On top of the superbly told story, there is Hammett's usual terse but sharp prose and characterizations. There's also a wonderful good cop/bad cop scene when a suspect is interrogated.

But I think what really sells it is a certain thematic undertone. By the end of the story, three people are dead. All three die essentially because they make dumb mistakes. These are mistakes made out of fear, anger or greed--thoughtless decisions that even a not-to-bright person should have realized were stupid. Three people die because they were essentially too dumb to live.

None of them were very nice people, but it gives the story a forlorn sense of tragedy that lifts "Fly Paper" up from being just a well-told detective tale into an examination of how the worst aspects of our nature can often make us stupid.

The story was adapted in 1995 for an episode of a cable series called Fallen Angels. Christopher Lloyd--someone I never would have pegged for playing a hard-boiled P.I.--doesn't look anything like Hammett's overweight Op, but still brings his own interesting take to the character.

Hard-Boiled storytelling

The Big Knockover & $106,000 Blood Money (1926), by Dashiell Hammett


Dash Hammett was the driving force behind the development of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction, combining his awesome skill as a writer with his experience as a Pinkerton to add a sense of realism and healthy cynicism to the genre.




But writing for the pulps didn’t always pay that well and Hammett briefly retired from writing in the mid-1920s. Fortunately, the promise of better pay and more creative freedom lured him back to the typewriter.


He soon produced a pair of novellas (published in Black Mask magazine in 1926) that pretty much tell a single story—a very, very hard-boiled tale involving murder, thievery, double-crosses, triple-crosses and (if you counted it out) probably a quadruple-cross or two.


Hammett’s protagonist is the same unnamed, overweight operative for the Continental Detective Agency who had headlined most of the writer’s previous short stories. When a large and very organized band of outlaws knock over two banks at once, he gets involved in the investigation. Soon, though, the field of suspects shrinks considerably as the bad guys begin to whack each other (often in large batches all at once) to avoid having to divide up the loot.


When said loot is recovered, the top crook manages to slip away. The second novella involves efforts to track him down.


There’s so much to enjoy in these two stories. Hammett’s precise, straightforward prose is always fun to read. The names of the various crooks involved in the big robbery are wonderful (The Dis-and-Dat Kid; L.A. Slim; Old Pete Best; Shorty McCoy; etc.) I have no idea if these names come from his own experience as a detective or from his imagination as a writer. I do know that if crooks didn’t have such names in the 1920s, they sure as heck should have. It just sounds right.


There’s a few nifty action scenes and some really good twists at the end of both stories.


The protagonist (referred to by fans—though never in the stories—as the Continental Op) is smart and capable, following up leads in a logical manner and playing intelligent hunches. But there’s another aspect to him that Hammett continued to follow up on in future stories—the idea that a career chasing criminals can drain a person of his humanity. The Op’s boss, for instance, is described thus: “Fifty years of crook-hunting for the Continental had emptied him of everything except brains and a soft-spoken, gently smiling shell of politeness that was the same whether things went good or bad—and meant as little at one time or another.”


The Op is going down the same road. He’s been a detective so long that he really doesn’t have anything else in his life other than detective work. This shows several times in the stories when we see just how ruthless he can be in order to get the job done. It’s an element to the character that adds extra bite to an already sharp story.

Next month, we'll visit the L.A. criminal court room along with Perry Mason in "The Case of the Beautiful Begger."

Red Harvest

I was in a conversation the other day about the best detective/mystery novels ever.

Of course, it's pretty much impossible to list a single "best ever" because there is so much variety within the genre. There's the traditional whodunit, the American hard-boiled detective, historical mysteries, amatuer detectives and so on and so one. Every single one of these sub-genres has produced some excellent stuff.

So that gave me an idea for a new blog series, covering a sample book from each of these sub-genres. Each book will be, in my humble opinion at least, one of the best of its type.

We'll take a slug of bourbon from the bottle in our desk drawer and start with the hard-boiled detective.

Born in the pages of Black Mask magazine in the 1920s, the hard-boiled style of writing is sparse and powerful, telling often complex stories in a relatively few pages. The hard-boiled detective is a tough man in a tough world, surrounded by violence and corruption. But he himself must have a strong sense of honor--a set of personal ethics that he holds inviolate. As Raymond Chandler writes in his essay "The Simple Art of Murder "...down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid."

Dashiell Hammett did not publish the very first hard-boiled story, but he's still pretty much the father of the genre because he did it so darn good. Many people consider The Maltese Falcon to be his best novel (and with good reason), but I always lean towards Red Harvest as being my personal favorite. Originally serialized in Black Mask, it was later re-written slightly and published as a novel.

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Red Harvest's protagonist is an unnamed detective referred to by fans as the Continental Op, a character who starred in many of Hammett's stories. (He works as an operative for the Continental Detective Agency--hense the nickname.)

The Op is a coldly professional P.I. who seems to live only for his job. In an earlier story, a character referred to him as "A monster. A nice one, an especially nice one to have around when you're in trouble, but a monster just the same, without any human foolishness like love in him, and - What's the matter? Have I said something I shouldn't?"

In Red Harvest, the Op travels to Personville, a small town more commonly referred to as Poisonville because of the rampant corruption. The newspaper editor who hired the Op to clean up the town in murdered before the two can meet. The Op does some investigating, learns what he can about the different mobs based in the town, then uses a campaign of lies and half-truths to turn them all against one another. Basically, he cleans up the town by getting the bad guys to wipe each other out.

It's great storytelling, with crackling, straight-forward prose that carries the plot along at a fast pace. It's not a long novel, but an awful lot of stuff goes down before the climax. It's packed to the brim with believable characters and more than its share of pure suspense.

Thus, Red Harvest stands out as a great example of just how good hard-boiled fiction can be.