Sat 1 Jul 2023
For as long as I remember, which is about as far back as when I first started collecting pulp magazines, the story “The Diamond Wager,†by Samuel Dashiell, which appeared in the October 19, 1929 issue of Detective Fiction Weekly, has been assumed to have been written by one (Samuel) Dashiell Hammett.
This in spite of the fact that this was the only story that Hammett would have ever had published in DFW, and even though it read nothing like anything the creator of hard-boiled detective fiction ever wrote under his own name.
It has taken a long time, but pulp historian Will Murray has discovered another huge flaw in the assumption that Hammett actually wrote the story; that is to say, that there was a fairly well known journalist at the same time the story appeared whose name was, guess what, Samuel Dashiell.
You can read all about it in this post on the Blackgate blog. Will Murray’s account there seems definitive to me. All the collectors who have paid a steep premium for that particular issue of DFW must be well displeased.
July 1st, 2023 at 8:42 pm
—“Sam Dashiell relates many uncensored anecdotes and antics of such people as Walter Durante, Vincent Sheean and George Slocombe in his ‘Scandalous Chronicle’ which McBride will publishâ€â€¦The celebrity trio mentioned in Writer’s Digest were all fellow newspaperman, two of whom also wrote fiction.—
Actually, all three of those journalists wrote fiction. George Slocombe, of the UK, penned a couple of speculative novels, Dictator and Escape into the Past. The novels of Walter Duranty (correct spelling) and Vincent Sheean were better known.
July 1st, 2023 at 10:10 pm
Will seems to have nailed this one down fairly definitively as far as I can see, also the story involves a Lupinesque character and Dashiell was an international journalist more likely to write such a story than Hammett.
July 1st, 2023 at 10:19 pm
Next up, an article proving that “No Crime in the Mountains” by Raymond Chandler in the September 1941 issue of Street & Smith’s Detective Story Magazine, was not written by the Raymond Chandler of Black Mask fame.
Then, another article proving that Tennessee Williams, the famous author, did not write the 1928 Weird Tales story!
At least that is what I’ll be telling dealers in hopes of buying copies for a $1.25 like I paid for the Hammett DFW back in the 1970’s.
July 2nd, 2023 at 12:22 am
Since at least 2019, the HooplaDigital library, available through many public libraries in the U.S., has attributed Samuel Dashiell’s book Victory through Africa, published in 1943, to Dashiell Hammett. The book by Samuel Dashiell, a UPI reporter, not by Hammett, was reviewed in the NY Times on July 11, 1943, p. 48, by Walter Duranty. The book is also available on archive.org. Neither HooplaDigital or their supplier corrected the attribution in response to my emails in 2019 and 2020.