Dashiell Hammett: A Life, and: Dockers and Detectives: Popular Reading, Popular Writing (review)

reviews 127 own body—the more he fought, the more the sweat and bile and molten tissue fused itself to him. No, no, he cried, he had come to give them money! he had come to make up for the sins of his nation. ... (41) Morally blind, however, to the full implications of his nightmare, Neuman eventually sleepwalks to his death-by-gunfire at the Grand Opening of the Rock Island Playland, lost in drug induced memories ofthe first Bomb test at Alamogordo. Unable to shake the tar baby handed him by Zaner, Neuman thus comes full drcle at the end, when justice is delivered either by or in spite of (it is never made dear) two Zaner henchmen assigned to guard Neuman—two black dudes by the names of Amos and Andy. Zigal's vision, as weU as his capacity for bitter, black humor and irony, makes Playlanda worthy addition to the tradition ofpolitical allegory and satire represented by Kubrick's Dr. Strangeloveand Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. In sure, strong strokes he is able to sketch out the essential unity and surreal irony of post-war American capitalism, revealing the glittering surfaces of the culture of Fun built on the concrete-bunkered foundations of the War Machine. Playland is a parable of and for our time, a book to read after the tdevision is turned off and the image on the evening news of Reagan-at-the-ranch fades from the screen. DAN ARMSTRONG Diane Johnson. Dashiell Hammett: A Life. New York: Random House, 1983. 344 pp. $17.95 (doth). Ken Worpole. Dockers and Detectives: Popular Reading, Popular Writing. London: Verso , 1983. 125 pp. $7.95 (paper). At 40, Dashiell Hammett was finished as a writer. In a five year burst, all the novds he would write had appeared. By the time his fifth and last. The Thin Man, was published in 1934, he had achieved fame and, only recently, some fortune, though most of the money would come later from the movies and radio. In the years ahead Hammett would be increasingly engaged as u public figure, then public enemy, and finally federal prisoner, convicted in 1951 for contempt of court for refusing, as a trustee of the Civil Rights Congress of New York, to name contributors to the Civil Rights Congress bail fund, which was used to release from custody/defendants accused of un-American or subversive activities under the Smith Act. Lillian Hellman was perhaps best placed to understand the complexity of this life: why did the writing cease? What private thoughts drove the public man? She had met him in 1930, and was with him off and on until his last day in 1961. And she did provide a measured guess in her introduction to his collected works in 1965 when she posed the first of these two related crudal questions: 1 have been asked many times over the years why he did not write another novd after The Thin Man. I do not know. I think, but I only think, I know a few of the reasons: he wanted to do new kind [sic] of work; he was sick for many of those years and getting sicker. But he was a man who kept his work, and his plans for work, in angry privacy and even I would not have been answered if I had even asked, and maybe because I never asked is why I was with him until the last day of his life.1 Diane Johnson's wonderfully told and wdl researched Dashiell Hammett: A Life takes up this and other dues surrounding the mysteries of Hammett and constructs a portrait of a man which is not likely soon to disappear. Much of Hammett's "sickness" can be attributed to his ever-increasing thirst for alcohol. His lungs were a life-long problem too; they led to his discharge from the army in 1919 after spending most of his army life in bed with TB, and later ddayed his acceptance by the army in the second world war until medical qualifications had been relaxed and all but abandon- 128 the minnesota review ed. But it was the bouts of drinking...