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Woman in the Dark : A Novel of Dangerous Romance (1933)

Love may be a many splendored thing, but it sure as heck ruined Dashiell Hammett. This story originally appeared in three installments in Liberty magazine in April, 1933. He had met Lillian Hellman two years earlier, with whom he was to share a rather troubled but now mythical romance (and an unrepentant and slavish enthusiasm for Joseph Stalin) for the rest of his life. The next year he published his final novel, The Thin Man, and then fell silent with a writer's block that ranks second only to that of Joseph Mitchell in legend.

Woman in the Dark is certainly not a novel; at best it's a novella and even then it feels more like the outline for a longer work. The woman of the title is Luise Fischer, the Swiss-born kept woman of a wealthy thug named Kane Robson. Having walked out on him one evening, she twists her ankle and stops for help at cottage occupied by Brazil, a phlegmatic ex-con, who once killed a man in a barroom brawl. When Robson shows up with a henchmen to demand that Luise come back to him, Brazil punches the other man who bangs his head, perhaps fatally, on the fireplace mantle. Now both Brazil and Luise have a reason to take it on the lam :

He emptied his glass and went to the front door, where he made a pretense of looking out at the
night.

    As he turned from the door he caught her expression, though she hastily put the frown off her face.
    His smile, voice were mockingly apologetic : 'I can't help it. They had me away for a while--in
    prison, I mean--and it did that to me. I've got to keep making sure I'm not locked in.' His smile
    became more twisted. 'There's a name for it--claustrophobia--and that doesn't make it any better.'

'I am sorry,' she said. 'Was it--very long ago?'

    'Plenty long ago when I went in,' he said dryly, 'but only a few weeks ago that I got out. That's
    what I came up here for--to try to get myself straightened out, see how I stood, what I wanted to
    do.'

'And?' she said softly.

    'And what? Have I found out where I stand, what I want to do? I don't know.' He was standing in
    front of her, hands in pockets, glowering down at her. 'I suppose I've just been waiting for
    something to turn up, something I could take as a sign which way I was to go. Well, what turned
    up was you. That's good enough. I'll go along with you.'

So much for the set up, in the two sections that follow, the police track them down and Brazil is shot, but the ending suggests that everything may work out for the two who have by now fallen in love.

It's tempting to read the story autobiographically. Two interesting and seemingly dynamic characters meet up and embark on an exciting though fairly implausible love affair, but then their story just kind of tails off into ambiguous and unconvincing anticlimax. Despite periodic flashes of Hammett's trademark hardboiled style, the book is generally disappointing. The conclusion of the story in particular is a far cry from the great final scene of The Maltese Falcon. Ultimately, the book is interesting chiefly as an indicator of where Hammett was headed just before he stopped writing, but if it's an accurate indication, we didn't miss much.

(Reviewed:27-Oct-00)

Grade: (C)

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Woman in the Dark : A Novel of Dangerous Romance (1933)

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