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.