George,
Re your comment below:
> You missed my point. I didn't say Hammett
was
> imitating Daly or trying
> to be Daly, but I did feel he was reacting to
Daly.
> When I read Red
> Harvest it was my gut reaction that Hammett was
try
> to show the Black
> Mask audience how a Race Williams,
> fight-fire-with-fire style plot
> should be handled or how it would have been
handled
> with the Continental Op at the helm.
But that kidn of fast-action, whiz-bang, fight-fire-with-fire
plot was a feature of the Op series almost from the very
beginning. "Corkscrew," sort of a short story dry run for RED
HARVEST, predates HARVEST by some three years, for
example.
"The Gutting of Couffignal," at one level, is nothing but one
long sustained shoot-out closing with a dress rehearsal for
FALCON's renunciation scene.
"One Hour," as its title suggests, is a story of the Op
getting involved in a fast-moving criminal plot that he has
to resolve in 60 minutes, and the action never flags.
Hammett didn't include fast-action simply to compete with
Daly. I'm not sure he was even that aware of Daly. He was
writing the kind of stories he wanted to write and that he
felt particularly qualified to write. If there was an outside
influence moving Hammett to include action scenes (and,
occasionally, it could get excessive in a Daly-like way; see
BLOOD MONEY), it was, as you also suggested, the editorial
hand, first of Phil Cody then of Cap Shaw.
Finally, Hammett was so much better at the action scenes than
Daly, that if anyone influenced ANYONE, it was Hammett
influencing Daly.
Indeed, Daly's Williams seems to continually be trying to
one-up the Op in derring-do. If the Op shoots the gun out of
the bad guy's hand and shrugs it off as not that much of a
trick for anyone who's a fairly good shot, Williams will
outdraw a man who's already got the drop on him and shoot him
five times before the bad guy gets a shot off, or fires
simultaneously from his matched set of .44's, both slugs
making a single hole in the bad guy's head.
And that points up why Hammett was so much better at that
stuff than Daly. Hammett wrote scenes you could believe, and
he wrote them with the air of someone who'd been there, done
that, and bought the t-shirt. The improbable feats of Daly's
heroes were the work of someone overcompensating.
JIM DOHERTY
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