Free Woman in the Dark by Dashiell Hammett Page A

falling."
    It seems like a time killer, idle talk while waiting. But of course it is not. It is Spade's motive spring. And it is this vision of an implacably random universe which informs nearly all of Hammett's work.
    The men in this work are like Brazil. Sometimes they are detectives, sometimes not, but they are men who understand life as Spade understood it and expect whatever comes. They are men with few friends and no permanent social context. They have no family. Their allegiance is not to the law, but to something else, call it order, a sense of the way things ought to be. In many ways these men seem to be of the people. Indeed, it is occasionally fashionable to view Hammett's work from a Marxist perspective-though such a perspective usually requires one to chew more than he's bitten off. But these men are seemingly immune to the things that compel people. They do not seem afraid of death. They seem able to resist the temptations of money and sex. They seem above pain, and unsurprised by cruelty. They have no illusions. Brazil particularly seems to have muffled himself inside a great calmness, as if nothing much mattered.
    Yet like most of Hammett's men there is passion in him, and it seethes under control only a little past the I-don't-care. The passion often expresses itself in action rather than in speech. The action is normally violent. Woman in the Dark is more of a love story than Hammett usually wrote.
    It appeared two years after he began his lifelong relationship with Lillian Hellman, one year before publication of his final novel, The Thin Man. And the fortuitous ending and implied happily-ever-after for Brazil and Luise is more sentimental than Hammett usually got.
    "Hammett's style," Raymond Chandler once wrote, "at its worst was as formalized as a page of Marius the Epicurean; at its best it could say almost anything. I believe this style, which does not belong to Hammett or to anybody, but is the American Language (and not even exclusively that anymore), can say things he did not know how to say, or feel the need of saying. In his hands it had no overtones, left no echo, evoked no image beyond a distant hill." Perhaps Hammett did not know how to write about love or, until now, feel the need of it. To my eye the happy ending seems a bit forced, as if Hammett, in order to bring Brazil and Luise together after all, might have bent his hard-eyed gaze away for a moment. I'm rather glad he did, in truth. I too am sentimental.
    But if it worked all right here, it led him into a swamp that nearly drowned him in The Thin Man. It was as if Hammett could not accommodate Spade's Flitcraftian view of life with his impulse to write, at last, of love.
    Whatever was at work in Hammett's soul, it is so that after The Thin Man in 1934 Hammett never wrote another novel, and when he died in 1961 he left only the fragment of one in progress, Tulip. In it he appeared to be trying to write something different, something that might integrate the conflicting impulses. Perhaps he tired. Perhaps he couldn't integrate the conflict.
    Woman in the Dark is subtitled, after all, "A Novel of Dangerous Romance." It is a conjunction Hammett never quite tried before. It is a conjunction that works pretty well here. It never worked so well again, but for Hammett, the writer, nothing else did either.
    Robert B. Parker

Chapter One
    The Flight Her right ankle turned under her and she fell. The wind blowing downhill from the south, whipping the trees beside the road, made a whisper of her exclamation and snatched her scarf away into the darkness. She sat up slowly, palms on the gravel pushing her up, and twisted her body sidewise to release the leg bent beneath her.
    Her right slipper lay in the road close to her feet. When she put it on she found its heel was missing. She peered around, then began to hunt for the heel, hunting on hands and knees uphill into the wind, wincing a little when her right knee touched the road. Presently she gave it