The Big Knockover by Dashiell Hammett

Book Details

A slick, well-oiled gang hit San Francisco’s financial heart like a flash flood. They stormed the vaults of the city’s biggest banks, cleaned out every penny, then vanished into thin air—like they were never there at all.

But soon enough, the bodies started turning up. Bullet-riddled messes, scattered like trash in the back alleys. Robbers who thought they were in on the score. Seems the brains behind the operation had other plans—he wasn’t splitting the take with anyone. The loot? All his. And when you play the game that cold, there’s always a price to pay.

The Big Knock-Over (1927)
Before they actually do it, one is inclined to say it isn’t done. But the gang warfare in Illinois, the big mail-truck holdup in Jersey found bandits using airplanes, bombs and machine guns. And now Mr. Hammett pictures a daring action that is almost stunning in its scope and effectiveness—yet can anyone be sure that it isn’t likely to occur?
A fifteen chapter novella.

$106,000 Blood Money (1927)
THE BIG KNOCK-OVER told of the looting of two banks by a large band of crooks gathered from all parts of the country for that purpose. Following the successful getaway with the plunder, a number of well-known members of the underworld of various cities are found murdered. These men were seen before the holdup and were suspected leaders of small groups participating in it. It becomes evident that the division of spoils is to be made among a few rather than between many. Murder succeeds murder, as the Continental detective narrows his search for the unknown head of the huge plot. In the end he finds him, only to let him escape, as the price of his own life, without knowing him to be the man he was after.
$106,000 BLOOD MONEY is the sequel to THE BIG KNOCK-OVER.
A twelve chapter novella.

This edition of The Big Knockover comes from the original stories as printed in Black Mask magazine in the February and May, 1927 issues. The first hardcover edition wasn’t printed until 1943 and was entitled Blood Money.

In his obituary in  The New York Times,  Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961) was described as “the dean of the… ‘hard-boiled’ school of detective fiction.”

Hammett is remembered for writing some of the seminal novels of crime fiction: Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Glass Key, The Thin Man, and The Maltese Falcon.

FIles:

1. Hammett-TheBigKnockover.epub

Excerpt: The Big Knockover

I

I  FOUND PADDY the Mex in Jean Larrouy’s dive.

Paddy—an amiable con man who looked like the King of Spain—showed me his big white teeth in a smile, pushed a chair out for me with one foot, and told the girl who shared his table:

“Nellie, meet the biggest-hearted dick in San Francisco. This little fat guy will do anything for anybody, if only he can send ’em over for life in the end.” He turned to me, waving his cigar at the girl: “Nellie Wade, and you can’t get anything on her. She don’t have to work—her old man’s a bootlegger.”

She was a slim girl in blue—white skin, long green eyes, short chestnut hair. Her sullen face livened into beauty when she put a hand across the table to me, and we both laughed at Paddy.

“Five years?” she asked.

“Six,” I corrected.

“Damn!” said Paddy, grinning and hailing a waiter. “Some day I’m going to fool a sleuth.”

So far he had fooled all of them—he had never slept in a hoosegow.

I looked at the girl again. Six years before, this Angel Grace Cardigan had buncoed half a dozen Philadelphia boys out of plenty. Dan Morey and I had nailed her, but none of her victims would go to the bat against her, so she had been turned loose. She was a kid of nineteen then, but already a smooth grifter.

In the middle of the floor one of Larrouy’s girls began to sing “Tell Me What You Want and I’ll Tell You What You Get.” Paddy the Mex tipped a gin bottle over the glasses of gingerale the waiter had brought. We drank and I gave Paddy a piece of paper with a name and address penciled on it.

“Itchy Maker asked me to slip you that,” I explained. “I saw him in the Folsom big house yesterday. It’s his mother, he says, and he wants you to look her up and see if she wants anything. What he means, I suppose, is that you’re to give her his cut from the last trick you and he turned.”

“You hurt my feelings,” Paddy said, pocketing the paper and bringing out the gin again.

I downed the second gin-gingerale and gathered in my feet, preparing to rise and trot along home. At that moment four of Larrouy’s clients came in from the street. Recognition of one of them kept me in my chair. He was tall and slender and all dolled up in what the well-dressed man should wear. Sharp-eyed, sharp-faced, with lips thin as knife-edges under a small pointed mustache—Bluepoint Vance. I wondered what he was doing three thousand miles away from his New York hunting-grounds.

While I wondered I put the back of my head to him, pretending interest in the singer, who was now giving the customers “I Want to Be a Bum.” Beyond her, back in a corner, I spotted another familiar face that belonged in another city—Happy Jim Hacker, round and rosy Detroit gunman, twice sentenced to death and twice pardoned.

When I faced front again, Bluepoint Vance and his three companions had come to rest two tables away. His back was to us. I sized up his playmates.

Facing Vance sat a wide-shouldered young giant with red hair, blue eyes and a ruddy face that was good-looking in a tough, savage way. On his left was a shifty-eyed dark girl in a floppy hat. She was talking to Vance. The red-haired giant’s attention was all taken by the fourth member of the party, on his right. She deserved it.

She was neither tall nor short, thin nor plump. She wore a black Russian tunic affair, green-trimmed and hung with silver dinguses. A black fur coat was spread over the chair behind her. She was probably twenty. Her eyes were blue, her mouth red, her teeth white, the hair-ends showing under her black-green-and-silver turban were brown, and she had a nose. Without getting steamed up over the details, she was nice. I said so. Paddy the Mex agreed with a “That’s what,” and Angel Grace suggested that I go over and tell Red O’Leary I thought her nice.

“Red O’Leary the big bird?” I asked, sliding down in my seat so I could stretch a foot under the table between Paddy and Angel Grace. “Who’s his nice girl friend?”

“Nancy Regan, and the other one’s Sylvia Yount.”

“And the slicker with his back to us?” I probed.

Paddy’s foot, hunting the girl’s under the table, bumped mine.

“Don’t kick me, Paddy,” I pleaded “I’ll be good. Anyway, I’m not going to stay here to be bruised. I’m going home.”

I swapped so-longs with them and moved toward the street, keeping my back to Bluepoint Vance.

At the door I had to step aside to let two men come in. Both knew me, but neither gave me a tumble—Sheeny Holmes (not the old-timer who staged the Moose Jaw looting back in the buggyriding days) and Denny Burke, Baltimore’s King of Frog Island. A good pair—neither of them would think of taking a life unless assured of profit and political protection.

Outside, I turned dowm toward Kearny Street, strolling along, thinking that Larrouy’s joint had been full of crooks this one night, and that there seemed to be more than a sprinkling of prominent visitors in our midst. A shadow in a doorway interrupted my brain-work.

The shadow said, “Ps-s-s-s! Ps-s-s-s!”

Stopping, I examined the shadow until I saw it was Beno, a hophead newsie who had given me a tip now and then in the past—some good, some phoney.

“I’m sleepy,” I growled as I joined Beno and his arm-load of newspapers in the doorway, “and I’ve heard the story about the Mormon who stuttered, so if that’s what’s on your mind, say so, and I’ll keep going.”

“I don’t know nothin’ about no Mormons,” he protested, “but I know somethin’ else.”

“Well?”

“‘S all right for you to say ‘Well,’ but what I want to know is, what am I gonna get out of it?”

“Flop in the nice doorway and go shut-eye,” I advised him, moving toward the street again. “You’ll be all right when you wake up.”

“Hey! Listen, I got somethin’ for you. Hones’ to Gawd!”

“Well?”

“Listen!” He came close, whispering. “There’s a caper rigged for the Seaman’s National. I don’t know what’s the racket, but it’s real. Hones’ to Gawd! I ain’t stringin’ you. I can’t give you no monickers. You know I would if I knowed ’em. Hones’ to Gawd! Gimme ten bucks. It’s worth that to you, ain’t it? This is straight dope—hones’ to Gawd!”

Excerpt From: Dashiell Hammett. “The Big Knockover.”