Although he had at first taken the invitation for an April Fools’ joke, such tributes were no longer much of a surprise. The party that evening was given in Stein’s honor, and Hammett was the one person in Hollywood she’d asked to meet. Why is it, she began, that in the nineteenth century men succeeded in writing about so many different varieties of men, and women were limited to creating heroines who were merely versions of themselves-she mentioned Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot-yet in the twentieth century this situation was reversed? Nowadays, Stein pointed out, it was the men who portrayed only themselves, and why should this be so? Stein reasonably assumed that Hammett, a hard-drinking ex-detective whose photograph had appeared on the cover of his latest novel, “The Thin Man,” about a hard-drinking ex-detective, might be in a position to know. Illustration by Floc’hĪt a party in Hollywood in the spring of 1935, Dashiell Hammett was asked by Gertrude Stein to solve a literary mystery. In the twenties, Hammett, like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, sought a unique language to express a unique point of view.
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