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epiphany of these circumstances in "The Golden Horseshoe." The Op
is on a case tthat takes him to Tijuana. In a bar there, he reads a sign:
ONLY GENUINE PRE-WAR AMERICAN AND
BRITISH WHISKEYS SERVED HERE
He responds by remarking that "I was trying to count how many lies
could be found in those nine words, and had reached four, with prom–
ise of more," when he is interrupted by some call to action. That sign
and the Op's response to it describe part of the existential character of
the social world represented by Hammett.
Another part of that representation is expressed in another kind of
story or idea that Hammett returned to repeatedly. The twenties were
also the great period of organized crime and organized criminal gangs
in America, and one of Hammett's obsessive imaginations was the no–
tion of organized crime or gangs taking over an entire society and run–
ning it as if it were an ordinary society doing business as usual. In
other words, society itself would become a fiction, concealing and bely–
ing the actuality of what was controlling it and perverting it from
within. One can thus make out quite early in this native American
writer a proto-Marxist critical representation of how a certain kind of
society works. Actually the point of view is pre- rather than proto–
Marxist, and the social world as it is dramatized in many of these
stories is Hobbesian rather than Marxist.
4
It
is a world of universal
warfare, the war of each against all, and of all against all. The only
thing that prevents the criminal ascendancy from turning into perma–
nent tyranny is that the crooks who take over society cannot cooperate
with one another, repeatedly fall out with each other, and return to the
Hobbesian anarchy out of which they have momentarily arisen. The
social world as imagined by Hammett runs on a principle that is the
direct opposite of that postulated by Erik Erikson as the fundamental
and enabling condition for human existence. In Hammett, society and
drink such liquor. In other words, Americans were virtually being solicited by their own
laws
to
support an illegal trade in liquor, even while Congress was passing the Volstead
Act
which was intended to prevent such a trade.
4. Again it can hardly be regarded as an accident that the name Hammett gives to the
town taken over by the criminals in
Red 'Harvest
is "Personville"-pronounced " Poi–
sonville." And what else is Personville except Leviathan, the "artificial man" repre–
sented by Hobbes as the image of society itself.
