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STEVEN MARCUS
tained with pleasure. For Hammett and Spadeand the Op the sustain–
ment in consciousness of such contradictions is an indispensable part
of their existence and of their pleasure in that existence.
That this pleasure is itself complex, ambiguous, and problematic
becomes apparent as one simply describes the conditions under which
it exists. And the complexity, ambiguity, and sense of the problemat–
ical are not confined to such moments of " revelation"-or set pieces
-as the parable of Flitcraft. They permeate Hammett's work and act
as formative elements in its structure, including its deep structure.
Hammett's work went through considerable and interesting develop–
ment in the course of his career of twelve years as a writer. H e also
wrote in a considerable variety of forms and worked out a variety of
narrative devices and strategies. At the same time, his work considered
as a whole reveals a remarkable kind of coherence.
In
order to further
the understanding of that coherence, we can propose for the purposes
of the present analysis to construct a kind of " ideal type" of a Ham–
mett or Op story. Which is not to say or to imply in the least that he
wrote according to a formula, but that an authentic imaginative vision
lay beneath and informed the structure of his work.
Such an ideal-typical description runs as follows . The Op is called
in or sent out on a case. Something has been stolen, someone is miss–
ing, some dire circumstance is impending, someone has been mur–
dered-it doesn't matter. The Op interviews the person or persons
most immediately accessible. They may be innocent or guilty-it
doesn't matter; it is an indifferent circumstance. Guilty or innocent,
they provide the Op with an account of what they know, of what they
assert really happened . The Op begins to investigate; he compares
these accounts with others that he gathers; he snoops about; he does
resea rch; he shadows people, arranges confrontations between those
who want
to
avoid one another, and so on. What he soon discovers is
that the "reality" that anyone involved will swear to is in fact itself a
construction, a fabrication , a fiction , a faked and alternate reality-and
that it has been gotten together before he ever arrived on the scene. And
the Op's work therefore is to decons truct, decompose, deplot, and de–
fictionalize that "reality" and to construct or reconstruct out of it a true
fiction , i.e., an account of what "really" happened.
It
shou ld be quite evident that there is a reflexive and coordinate
relation between the activities of the Op and the activities of Hammett,
the writer. Yet the depth and problematic character of this self-reflexive
