Woman in the Dark
“Parker Introduction Woman in the Dark was published in Liberty magazine in three installments on April 8, April 15, and April 22, 1933, and thus appeared after Dashiell Hammett had written all his novels but one. It is very much Hammett: the offbeat names (Brazil), the flat dialogue, the casually callous cops, the upper class bad guys, the decent low lifes (though suspicion of the wealthy was not peculiar to Hammett in 1933). And yet it also shows us Hammett's view of life in transition.In The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade recounts a story from his investigative past to Brigid O'Shaughnessy while they await Joel Cairo. Here is an abridged version. The words are Hammett's, the abridgement, mine.A man named Flitcraft had left his real-estate-office, in Tacoma, to go to luncheon one day and had never returned…"He went like that," Spade said, "like a fist when you open your hand… Well, that was in 1922. In 1927 I was with one of the big detective agencies in Seattle. Mrs. Flitcraft came in an...d told us somebody had seen a man in Spokane who looked a lot like her husband.MoreLess
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