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STEVEN MARCUS
and general, endemic unscrupulousness. Such means are in no sense
alien to Hammett's detective. As the Op says, " 'detecting is a hard
business, and you use whatever tools come to hand.' " In other words,
there is a paradoxical tension and unceasing interplay in Hammett's
stories between means and ends; relations between the two are never
secure or stable. And as Max Weber further remarked, in his great essay
"Politics as a Vocation": "The world is governed by demons, and he
who lets himself in for ... power and force as means, contracts with
diabolic powers, and for his action it is
not
true that good can follow
only from good and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is
true. Anyone who fails to see this is, indeed, a political infant." Nei–
ther Hammett nor the Op is an infant; yet no one can be so grown up
and inured to experience that he can escape the consequences that at–
tach
to
the deliberate use of violent and dubious means.
These consequences are of various orders. "Good" ends them–
selves can be transformed and perverted by the use of vicious or in–
discriminate means. (I am leaving to one side those even more perplex–
ing instances in Hammett in which the ends pursued by the Op corre–
spond with ends desired by a corrupted yet respectable official society.)
The consequences are also visible inwardly, on the inner being of the
agent of such means, the Op himself. The violence begins to get to
him:
I began to throw my right fist into him.
I liked that. His belly was flabby, and it got softer every time I
hit it. I hit it often.
Another side of this set of irresolvable moral predicaments is revealed
when we see that the Op's toughness is not merely a carapace within
which feelings of
ten~erness
and humanity can be nourished and pre–
served. The toughness is toughness through and through, and as the
Op continues his career, and continues to live by the means he does, he
tends to become more callous and less and less able to feel. At the very
end, awaiting him, he knows, is the prospect of becoming like his boss,
the head of the Agency, the Old Man, "with his gentle eyes behind
gold spectacles, and his mild smile, hiding the fact that fifty years of
sleuthing had left him without any feelings at all on any subject."
This is the price exacted by the use of such means in such a world;
these are the consequences of living fully in a society moved by the
principle of basic mistrust. "Whoever fights monsters," writes Nietz-
