Notable

DASHIELL HAMMETT: A LIFE

by Diane Johnson

Random House; 344 pages; $17.95

He was a Pinkerton operative in his 20s. In 1921 he shadowed Comedian Fatty Arbuckle, implicated in the death of a starlet, and noted: "His eyes were the eyes of a man who expected to be regarded as a monster ... I made my gaze as contemptuous as I could." It could have been the stuff of hard-boiled detective literature; instead it was the stuff of hard-boiled detective life: the life lived by Dashiell Hammett, creator of The Thin Man and The Maltese Falcon. A voracious reader of Henry James, before he switched to the school of hard knocks, Hammett wrote four novels in a single burst of creativity from 1927 to 1930. He found himself hailed by Andre Gide and Andre Malraux, and invited to work in Hollywood.

There he discovered familiar diversions, among them prostitutes and Scotch. His great affair with Lillian Hellman did not spur him to write nor, according to this intriguing and detailed account by Novelist Diane Johnson (Lying Low), did it change his habits. Despite his proclaimed affection for Hellman, he continued to patronize ladies of the evening and once asked her to join in a threesome (she declined). Hammett admired Marxism more than the U.S. Communist Party but joined a celebrity cell where he indulged in what Budd Schulberg called "dialectical materialism by the pool." In 1951, long after most film radicals had fled the cause, he spent six months in prison for refusing to divulge names in a Communist-hunting case.

The tight-lipped code of honor was another manifestation of the literary silence, posing as bravery, that lasted until his death of lung cancer in 1961. The act convinced no one, least of all his biographer. Johnson regards her subject without illusion. She knows that inspiration can arrive and vanish without cause and that Hammett's chief tragedy was in holding himself accountable for something beyond his gifts or character. Even so, as she sees it, he showed a streak of heroism, not in his work so much as in "the long blank years that prove the spirit." That kind of exit line is equal to the worst of Hammett's life--and the best of his work.

DEADLY FORCE

by Lawrence O'Donnell Jr.

Morrow; 384 pages; $16.95

On a January afternoon in 1975, while James Bowden was at his job cleaning floors at Boston City Hospital, a store in nearby Cambridge was robbed. Hours later, two Boston policemen spotted Bowden's parked car, which looked like the robbers' and had a similar license-plate number. The police waited, and when they saw Bowden get into the car, leaped out and shot him dead--within "three to five seconds," according to a reporter who was with the police. But the car was not the getaway car. Bowden had no criminal record. And at 5 ft. 4 1/2 in. and 180 Ibs., he fitted the description of the tall, lean robbers in only one way: he was black. Despite the reluctance of citizens to second-guess the police, who continued to insist that Bowden was a criminal, an all-white jury found the killing to be a "wrongful death," and awarded his widow Patricia a judgment, still unpaid, that with interest exceeds $750,000.

If Deadly Force were merely another story of justice delayed and denied, its appeal would be limited by politics and geography. But O'Donnell's thoughtful narrative transcends its arena. The author, 31, grew up in a street-tough Irish Catholic society that had bred legions of police; he had known one of the officers in the case since boyhood. His father, a prominent Boston attorney who took on the widow's case, is himself a former policeman. Thus the book depicts the racial consciousness and social mores of big-city police with fairness, even compassion. That is especially striking because a chilling incident brought the author aboard as an investigator: soon after his father took the case, the son was mysteriously assaulted by police and hospitalized for two days.

The author sued and collected an award from the city; Mrs. Bowden has not, because Mayor Kevin White's administration refused to pay. But both finalists in Boston's mayoral election, on Nov. 15, have said that they will. That would seem to close the books. But, as O'Donnell notes, the policemen who killed Bowden, and those who attacked the author, are all still on Boston's deadly force. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.