Into the Alley

Daniel Soar

• Nightmare Town: Stories by Dashiell Hammett, edited by Kirby McCauley and Martin Greenberg et al
  Picador, 396 pp, £16.99, March 2001, ISBN 0 330 48109 6
• Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett 1921-60 edited by Richard Layman and Julie Rivett
  Counterpoint, 650 pp, £28.99, June 2001, ISBN 1 58243 081 0

A blank page is frightening. Something has to be written, but how do you choose the words? Why this word and not that? How to overcome the arbitrariness of writing? One way is to trick yourself, to pretend that what you’re about to write has already been written, that someone has been there already and that you’re only following his traces, trying to reconstruct what must have happened. This is the idea of detective fiction: you begin with an unexplained corpse or an impossible theft; following the clues should tell you what happened, and then how and why. It’s a nice solution: the writer is the detective, presented with a small group of people he doesn’t know; he has to find out who they are, discover their histories and motives. By the time the story is over, he knows everything. At this point another book might begin.