PARTISAN REVIEW
363
service he came down with influenza which led to the activation in him
of tuberculosis.
It
was his first encounter with the series of lung dis–
eases from which he was eventually to die.
In
1919, he returned to his
work at Pinkerton and his travels and adventures in the service of the
agency. The active and arduous work of a private detective agent in the
field brought on another attack of tuberculosis, and he was hospital–
ized in 1920 and 1921 in government hospitals on the West Coast.
While he was in the hospital he became involved with one of the
nurses who worked there, and they were married toward the end of
1920.
Hammett was discharged from the hospital in May 1921, and he
and his wife made their way along the West Coast to San Francisco.
The town awakened Hammett's interest, and he went back to work
there for the local branch of the Pinkerton Agency. He was to live in
San Francisco for the nex t eight years, and the city provided him with
the loca le and material for a large part of his writing. Yet even as he
was returning to work as a detective, other interests began to make
themselves felt in him. H e had conceived of (he idea of becoming a
writer, and was beginning to write bits of verse, small sketches from
his experiences as a detective, and other pieces of apprentice work.
Finally, the successful solution of a case led to his leaving the agency.
Some $200,000 in gold was missing on an Australian ship that had put
into San Francisco. The Pinkerton Agency was employed by the in–
surance company involved to find the gold-which they believed was
stashed away on the ship. Hammett and another operative were sent to
search the ship and found nothing.
It
was decided to send Hammett
back to Australia on the ship in the belief that he might still find the
missing loot. Hammett looked forward to the adventure. Just before
the ship was to leave San Francisco, he made one last routine search
and found the gold-it was hidden in a smokestack. He had solved the
case and lost the trip to Australia. Frustrated and outdone by his own
success, he handed in his resignation.
Soon after this, while working at odd jobs, Hammett began to
hemorrhage again. Feeling that he had little time left to live, and that
the one thing he wanted to do before he died was to write, he moved
away from his family, took a cheap single room, and started to write.
Some time around here he also began to work for a local jewelry store
as a writer of advertising copy.
It
was an odd and uncertain Bohemian
existence; sometimes he lived on soup; frequently he drank too much.
