The first time I saw the movie The Thin Man was during the heyday of UHF television, and some obscure channel was playing detective movies on Saturday mornings. It wasn’t until many years later that I discovered the book, and then the writer, and before long, I read every scrap of Dashiell Hammet that I could find. But it was the glorious movies starring William Powell and Myrna Loy, bantering over cocktails, that I remember most. “Will you bring me five more Martinis, Leo? Line them right up here.” That line was always delightful enough, but in the following scene, a hungover Nora Charles drops back on the bed and exclaims, “What hit me?” Nick quickly replies, “The last martini. How ’bout a pick-me-up?“
In a recently published book, Nathan Ward’s The Lost Detective, I discovered what Hammet was up to leading up to writing The Thin Man. According to Ward, Dashiell Hammet spent the winter of 1932 at the Sutton Club Hotel on East 55th Street. He had spent the previous months at finer accommodations like the Hotel Elysée, the Biltmore, and the Hotel Pierre on 5th Avenue overlooking Central Park. Hammet had taken a suite there, and unable to pay his bill after one bender too many, he needed to skip out.
Ward wrote: Hammett contrived a scheme for sneaking out on his bill at the Pierre: “His knowledge of the mentality of house detectives provided the key,” Sid Perelman recalled in a memoir. “Hammett decided to use fat as a subterfuge. He pulled on four shirts, three suits, innumerable socks, two lightweight ulsters, and an overcoat, cramming his pockets with assorted toiletries. Then he puffed out his cheeks, strode past the desk without a glimmer of suspicion, and headed for the Sutton.” There, when the faux fat man arrived, Perelman and others were all gratefully ensconced with their own projects. Hammett brought his own.
For eight months, Hammet wrote diligently and soberly at The Sutton Club, which was managed by Sid Perelman’s brother-in-law. We know him as Nathaniel West, an author who helped out his writer friends. West is the author of the classic Miss Lonelyhearts and Day of the Locust.
Fellow writer Lillian Hellman, and Hammet’s long suffering companion wrote about those days.
I had known Dash when he was writing short stories, but I had never been around for a long piece of work: The drinking stopped, the parties were over. The locking-in time had come and nothing was allowed to disturb it until the book was finished. I had never seen anybody work that way: the care for every word, the pride in the neatness of the typed page itself, the refusal for ten days or two weeks to go out for even a walk for fear something would be lost.
The novel was finally published in January of 1934. MGM bought the rights to make a movie for $21,000. The first chapters were published by Redbook Magazine and ran it in December of 1933. Controversy about the town of the writing was used to promote the book. The objection over the drinking and lewdness was one thing, a passage that was censored became the advertising thrust by Knopf to promote the book. Ward writes:
The deleted “question on page 192” was Nora’s: “Tell me something, Nick. Tell me the truth: when you were wrestling with Mimi, didn’t you have an erection?”
The Thin Man was the antidote for the hard times of the great depression. The bad behaving rich people bantering and drinking was the escapist fare that people wanted to see. The movie spawned five sequels.
By October 1934, MGM brought Hammet back to Hollywood. They knew that only Hammet could write the sequel, and paid him $2,000 per week while he finished a new screen story. Hammet’s publisher, Alfred Knopf, would never see another novel from Hammet.
