PARTISAN REVIEW
371
process begin to be revealed when we observe that the reconstruction or
true fiction created and arrived at by the Op at the end of the story is no
more plausible-nor is it meant to be-than the stories that have been
told to him by all parties, guilty or innocent, in the course of his work.
The Op may catch the real thief or collar the actual crook-that is not
entirely to the point. What is to the point is that the story, account, or
chain of events that the Op winds up with as "reality" is no more
plausible and no less ambiguous than the stories that he meets with at
the outset and later. What Hammett has done-unlike most writers of
detective or crime stories before him or since-is to include as part of
the contingent and dramatic consciousness of his narrative the circum–
stance that the work of the detective is itself a fiction-making activity, a
discovery or creation by fabrication of something new in the world, or
hidden, latent, potential, or as yet undeveloped within it. The typical
"classical" detective story-unlike Hammett's-can be described as a
formal game with certain specified rules of transformation. What or–
dinarily happens is that the detective is faced with a situation of inade–
quate, fa lse, misleading, and ambiguous information. And the story as
a whole is an exercise iF} disambiguation-with the final scenes being a
ratiocinative demonstration that the butler did it (or not); these scenes
achieve a conclusive, reassuring clarity of explanation, wherein every–
thing is set straight, and the game we have been party to is brought to
its appropriate end. But this, as we have already seen, is not what or–
dinarily happens in Hammett or with the Op.
What happens is that the Op almost invariably walks into a situa–
tion that has already been elaborately fabricated or framed. And his
characteristic response to his sense that he is dealing with a series of
deceptions or fictions is-to use the words that he uses himself re–
pea tedly- " to stir things up." This corresponds integrally, both as
metaphor and in logical structure, to what happened in the parable
of Flitcraft. When the falling beam just misses Flitcraft, " 'he felt like
somebody had taken the lid off life.' " The Op lives with the unin–
terrupted awareness that for him the lid has been taken off life. When
me
lid has been Iifted, the logical thing to do is to "stir things up"–
which is what he does.
2
He actively undertakes to deconstruct, decom-
2. These homely metaphors go deep into Hammell's life. One of the few things that he
could recall from his childhood past was his mother's repeated advice that a woman who
wasn't good in the kitchen wasn't likely to be much good in any other room in the
house.
