Dashiell Hammett

“ Guy bellowed out, an animal noise without meaning.
A chair slammed to the floor. Feet shuffled, stamped, scuffed. Grunts punctuated snarls.
Concealed by night, the two men and what they did became for the first time real to Margaret, physically actual. They were no longer figures whose substance was in what they did to her pride. One was her husband, a man who could be maimed, killed. Doucas was a man who could be killed. They could die, either or both, because of a woman’s vanity. A woman, she, had flung them toward death rather than confess she could be less than a giant’s wife. ”

“ I spent a lot of time out there with him. He was a hard man to get along with, a thoroughly disagreeable companion, but he had gin—real gin and plenty of it—and I was tired of nipa and samshu. He thought I wasn't afraid of him, and that error made it easier for me to handle him.
There was something queer about this Levison. He was as strong as three men and a vicious brute all the way through, but not with the honest brutality of a strong man. He was like a mean kid who, after being tormented by larger boys, suddenly finds himself among smaller ones. ”

“ WHEREVER crime or criminals were discussed by enlightened folk, the name of Waldron Honeywell could be heard. It was a symbol—to the citizens of Punta Arenas no less than to those of Tammerfors—for the ultimate in the prevention and detection of crime. A native of the United States, Honeywell’s work had overflowed the national boundaries. Thirty years of warfare upon crime had taken him into every quarter of the globe, and his fame into every nook where the printed word penetrated. ”

“ How are you going to prove that when the Coonses were planted in Thornburgh’s house—if you can even prove they were—they and the Trowbridge woman knew he was going to load up with insurance policies?”
The sheriff spat disgustedly.
“You guys are the limit! You run around in circles, digging up the dope on these people until you get enough to hang ’em, and then you run around hunting for outs! What the hell’s the matter with you now?” ”

“ They had to do with pride in a man’s courage and hardihood: courage and hardihood that could make of thefts, of murder, of crimes dimly guessed, wrongs no more reprehensible than a boy’s apple-stealing. They had to do with the existence or non-existence of this gilding courage, without which a rover might be no more than a shoplifter on a geographically larger scale, a sneak-thief who crept into strangers’ lands instead of houses, a furtive, skulking figure with an aptitude for glamorous autobiography. ”

“ Clane had been blackmailing Grover—I didn’t have a single doubt of that—and I didn’t think he had been very far away when Grover was killed. That woman alibi of his sounded all wrong!
But the bloody finger-prints were not Clane’s—unless the police identification bureau had pulled an awful boner—and the man who had left the prints was the bird I was setting my cap for. Clane had let three days pass between the murder and his appearance at headquarters. The natural explanation for that would be that his partner, the actual murderer, had needed nearly that much time to put himself in the clear. ”

“ I carry a lot of weight these days, but I can still step a block or two in good time. Along both sides of the alley were the rears of apartment buildings, each with its back door looking blankly, secretively at me.
The plainclothes man who had been trailing behind me came up, then O’Gar and Thode in their machines, and soon, Lusk. O’Gar and Thode rode off immediately to wind through the neighboring streets, hunting for the woman. Lusk and the plainclothes man each planted himself on a corner from which two of the streets enclosing the block could be watched. ”

“ How conceivably could Guy—her hard-bodied, hard-nerved Guy, to whom violence was no more than addition to a bookkeeper—be harmed by a perfumed asthmatic fat man? Whether Guy slept or Guy woke if Doucas came as an enemy, then so much the worse for Doucas—a flesh-bound house-dog growling at her red wolf of a husband!
She jumped up from her chair and began to bustle with toaster and coffee pot. Leonidas Doucas was put out of her mind by the news he had brought. Guy was coming home. The fat man in black had said so, speaking with assurance. ”

“ Unga and Jokanain were two ugly statues against two doors. The chatter of flying foxes busy among the cottonwoods and the rustling of thatch in a breeze heavy with the stink of drying tripang were the only things you could hear.
I had a dull, end-of-the-road feeling. A Moro is a simple son of nature. When he finds himself so placed that he can kill, he usually kills. Otherwise, it runs in his head, of what use is the power? It's a sort of instinct for economy. I suspected that Levison, gagged, was being cut, in the Moro fashion, into very small bits ”

“ Gatewood’s voice was thick and blurred—I could imagine the boiling that was going on inside him.
“Good!” came the brisk voice. “Put a piece of paper around it, and leave the house with it, right away! Walk down Clay street, keeping on the same side as your house. Don’t walk too fast and keep walking. If everything’s all right, and there’s no elbows tagging along, somebody’ll come up to you between your house and the water-front. They’ll have a handkerchief up to their face for a second, and then they’ll let it fall to the ground. ”

“ NOW that the meek and the humble have inherited the earth and it were arrogance to look down upon any man—the apologetic being the mode in lives—I should like to go monthly to some hidden gallery and, behind drawn curtains, burn perfumed candles before the images of:
Joachim Murat, King of Naples, who mourned, “Ah, the poor people! They are ignorant of the misfortune they are about to suffer. ”

“ All that stuff we were told about Thornburgh had a fishy sound. Whiskers and an unknown profession, immaculate and working on a mysterious invention, very secretive and born in San Francisco—where the fire wiped out all the old records—just the sort of fake that could be cooked up easily.
“Then nobody but the Coonses, Evelyn Trowbridge and Handerson ever saw him except between the tenth of May and the middle of June, when he bought the house. The Coonses and the Trowbridge woman were tied up together in this affair somehow, we knew—so that left only Handerson to consider. ”

“ He had met Henry Grover—he called him “Henny”—in 1894, in Ontario, where Grover was working a claim: the gold mine that had started the murdered man along the road to wealth. Clane had been employed by Grover as foreman, and the two men had become close friends. A man named Denis Waldeman had a claim adjoining Grover’s and a dispute had arisen over their boundaries. The dispute ran on for some time—the men coming to blows once or twice—but finally Grover seems to have triumphed, for Waldeman suddenly left the country. ”

“ He is a bore when he discusses art and philosophy, but when he switches to criminal psychology he is delightful. There is a theory that any one who talks enough on any subject must, if only by chance, finally say something not altogether incorrect. Vance disproves this theory: he manages always, and usually ridiculously, to be wrong. His exposition of the technique employed by a gentleman shooting another gentleman who sits six feet in front of him deserves a place in a How to be a detective by mail course. ”

“ Step by step Jeffol drove Levison across the room and through that door, Ca'bi going in with them. The door closed and Unga, holding me with the blunderbuss, put his back against it.
Dinihari sprang up and dashed toward him. Jokanain caught her from behind and flung her into her corner again. Beyond the door Levison roared out oaths. Ca'bi's voice cackled excitedly in answering oaths, and in orders to her son. Bind (ikat) and naked (telanjang) were the only words I could pick out of the din. Then Levison's voice choked off into silence, and no sound at all came from the sleeping-room. ”

“ The purring gurgle died, leaving a more oppressive silence, the silence of wide emptiness. It was as if walls and men were gone and she stood alone in a black void.
Cold metal came under sliding palm. A finger found the button, fumbled too eagerly atop it, slid off. She clutched at the button with both hands, ground a thumb into it. Light came. She whirled her back to the wall.
Across the room Guy straddled Doucas, holding his head up from the floor with thick hands that hid the Greek’s white collar. Doucas’ tongue was a bluish pendant from a bluish mouth. His eyes stood out, dull. ”

“ We’ve all seen the modern girl. She’s a rare bird and here she is in all her glory—if that’s what it is. A good detective yarn, this, with lots of action and some real people. Go to it.
Harvey Gatewood had issued orders that I was to be admitted as soon as I arrived, so it only took me a little less than fifteen minutes to thread my way past the door-keepers, office boys, and secretaries who filled up most of the space between the Gatewood Lumber Corporation’s front door and the president’s private office. ”

“ A burglar who had killed a man, and perhaps picked up $10,000 in the bargain, wouldn’t be likely to turn his hand to another job right away.
I looked at the paper-knife with which Grover had been killed, and at the photographs of the bloody prints, but they couldn’t help me much just now. There seemed to be nothing to do but get out and dig around until I turned up something somewhere.
Then the door opened, and Joseph Clane was ushered into the room where O’Hara, Dean and I were talking.
Clane was a hard-bitten citizen, for all his prosperous look ”

“ Thus Heath, a police detective-sergeant, says that any pistol of less than .44 calibre is too small to stop a man, and the district attorney, Markham, displays an amazed disinclination to admit that a confession could actually be false. ”

“ The county road that passed the front gate was shunned by automobiles, so McClump said, in favor of the State Highway to the north.
Where the house had been, was now a mound of blackened ruins. We poked around in the ashes for a few minutes—not that we expected to find anything, but because it’s the nature of man to poke around in ruins. ”

“ Bringing to his work a singularly perspicacious intellect, and combining an exhaustive knowledge of both the scientific and more practical phases of his profession, he had reduced it to as nearly exact a science as possible ”

“ Beyond the curtain the two men bargained on across the table.
“. . . every—cent. Men—do—not—profitably—betray—me.”
She glared through the gap between portiere and frame, at fat Doucas with his pistol level on table-top, at red Guy pretending to ignore the pistol. Rage filled her, weaponless, impotent rage. Or was it weaponless? The light-button was beside the door. Doucas and Guy were occupied with one another—
HER hand moved before the motive impulse was full-formed inside her. ”

“ I caught a street-car and dropped off down in the shopping district. I visited the five largest department stores, going to all the women’s wear departments from shoes to hats, and trying to learn if a man—perhaps one answering Leighton’s description—had been buying clothes that would fit Audrey Gatewood within the past couple days. ”

“ I asked, as we rolled back toward Sacramento.
Mac’s too lazy to express an opinion, or even form one, unless he’s driven to it; but that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth listening to, if you can get them.
“There ain’t a hell of a lot to think,” he said cheerfully. “Handerson is out of it, if he ever was in it. There’s nothing to show that anybody but the Coonses and Thornburgh were there when the fire started—but there may have been a regiment there. Them Coonses ain’t too honest looking, maybe, but they ain’t killers, or I miss my guess. ”

“ It is, if this evidence is to be believed, a scandalously rattle-brained organization: trivialities are carefully guarded while grave secrets are given out freely: no member ever knows what his coworkers are up to. ”

“ She was a sleek brown woman with the knack of twisting a sarong around her hips so that it became part of her—a trick a woman has with a potato sack or hasn't with Japanese brocade. She was small and trimly fleshed, with proper pride in her flesh. She wasn't exactly beautiful, but if you were alone with her you kept looking at her, and you wished she didn't belong to a man you were afraid of. That was when she was Levison's.
She was Jeffol's first. ”

“ Margaret rolled over beneath the covers, putting her back to the sun-painted west wall, and closed her eyes again.
But drowsiness would not come. She was definitely awake to the morning excitement of the next-door chickens, the hum of an automobile going toward the ferry, the unfamiliar fragrance of magnolia in the breeze tickling her cheek with loose hair-ends. She got up, slid feet into soft slippers, shoulders into bath robe, and went downstairs to start toast and coffee before dressing.
A fat man in black was on the point of leaving the kitchen. ”

“ I caught a street-car and went back to town, called at Ned Root’s office, and headed him out toward Grover’s. Ned is a human adding machine with educated eyes, ears, and nose. He can spot a kink in a set of books farther than I can see the covers. ”

“ There’s three men and a woman, and—’ And then I heard a man curse, and a sound as if he had struck her, and the phone went dead. I tried to get central to give me the number, but she couldn’t! It’s a damned outrage the way the telephone system is run. We pay enough for service, God knows, and we ...”
O’Gar scratched his head and turned away from Gatewood.
“In sight of Twin Peaks! There are hundreds of houses that are!”
Gatewood meanwhile had finished denouncing the telephone company and was pounding on his desk with a paperweight to attract our attention. ”