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first instance of the rules laid down by the Continental Agency, and
they are " rather strict." The most important of them by far is that no
operative in the employ of the Agency is ever allowed to take or collect
part of a reward that may be attached to the solution of a case. Since he
cannot directly enrich himself through his professional skills, he is
saved from at least the characteristic corruption of modern society–
the corruption that is connected with its fundamental acquisitive
structure. At the same time, the Op is a special case of the Protestant
ethic, for his entire ex istence is bound up in and expressed by his work,
his vocation. He likes his work, and it is honest work, done as much
for enjoyment and the exercise of his skills and abilities as it is for
personal gain and self-sustainment. The work is something of an end
in itself, and this circumstance also serves to protect him, as does his
deliberate refusal
to
use high-class and fancy moral language about
anything. The work is an end in itself and is therefore something more
than work alone. As Spade says, in a passage that is the culmination of
many such passages in Hammett-
' 'I'm a detective and expecting me
to
run criminals down and then
let them go free is like asking a dog to catch a rabbit and let it go.
It can be done, all right, and sometimes it is done, but it's not the
natural thing. "
Bei ng a detective, then, entails more than fulfilling a social function or
performing a social role. Being a detective is the realization of an iden–
tity, for there are components in it which are beyond or beneath soci–
ety-and cannot be touched by it-and beyond and benea th reason.
There is something "natural" about it. Yet if we recall that the nature
thus being expressed is that of a man hunter, and Hammett's apt met–
aphor compels us to do so, and that the state of society as it is
represented in Hammett's writing reminds us of the state of nature in
Hobbes, we see that even here Hammett does not release his sense of
the complex and the contradictory, and is making no simple-minded
appeal
to
some benign idea of the " natural."
And indeed the Op is not finally or fully protected by his work, his
job, his vocation. (We have all had to relearn with bitterness what
multitudes of wickedness "doing one's job" can cover.) Max Weber has
memorably remarked that " the decisive means for politics is violence."
In Hammett's depiction of modern American society, violence is the
decisive means indeed, along with fraud, deceit, treachery, betrayal,
