By my silence lately, dear reader, if you exist, you might have concluded that I’d run afoul of some Providence mobster, that I’d been whacked, rubbed out, offed. And where would that have left us? I think it was Aristotle who said a dead blog is not a blog. I’d hate to leave Brian to shoulder alone not merely the writing but also the existential burden of this blog. Contrary to your summary conclusions, O reader, no evil fate has befallen me, I’m happy to report. Instead of sleeping the big sleep, I’ve been reading “The Big Sleep.” That’s Raymond Chandler’s 1939 novel, which introduced the underworld to Philip Marlowe. Wise-cracking, smooth-operating Marlowe—played by Humphrey Bogart, in full swagger, in the excellent 1946 film adaptation—is a California PI, a private eye, a sleuth, a gumshoe, a dick, a shamus. And rather than the novel, which is worth a read, it’s that last synonym, shamus—Chandler deploys at least twice in “The Big Sleep”—that I want to examine here.
The reason “shamus” caught my eye dates back to at least 1998. I recall my befuddlement when, in the Coen brothers film “The Big Lebowski,” a detective played by Jon Polito tells Jeff Bridges’s The Dude that he’s a “brother shamus,” mistaking The Dude’s flailing attempt to secure a kidnapped trophy wife for slick detective work. I had never heard the word before, and I was unable to find any reference to it in books around the house. (This was a time before my parents’ house had Internet access.) I got the reference, but I never did figure out where this novel (to me) slang came from.
Now, thirteen years later, prompted this time by the slightly—though only by virtue of lapsed time—higher-brow Chandler rather than the Coens, I rekindled my search. As it happens, somebody got to this search before me. From a 1965 piece in The Atlantic:
When [Chandler contemporary Dashiell] Hammett started writing, there was a dictionary of the underworld which used the word “shamus” as a tag for a private detective. Hammett picked that word up, and it ran through all his stories. Every time one of his detectives would enter on the scene, someone would sneeringly refer to him as shamus. Since Hammett’s time, a whole school of realistic writers have had their characters refer to a private detective as a shamus.
Just where did that word come from? I have made it a point to try and find out and I am completely baffled. The late Raymond Schindler, one of the world-famous private detectives, told me he had never heard the word. At my request, he had asked private detectives whom he employed, and they had never heard it used. I asked the wardens of various pentitentiaries, and they told me they had never encountered the word except in fiction. During the past eighteen years, I have had quite a few contacts with inmates of penitentiaries. I have asked them about “shamus” and whether they had ever heard it applied to a private detective. Not one of them ever had.
Then one day I happened to be discussing the matter with a man who had worked for a Jewish haberdasher, and he told me had had heard the word used; it applied not to a private detective but to some kind of phony. No matter; thanks to Dashiell, the Dictionary of American Underworld Lingo lists “shamus” as a Jewish-American word meaning a policeman or prison guard, and the American Thesaurus of Slang lists it as applying to a policeman, an informer, or a stool pigeon.
It has been many years since Dashiell Hammett first put the word into circulation. Today the general reading public considers “shamus” a slang term customarily used by the underworld describing the private detective. It assumes that the writer who uses it knows his way around.
In fact, according to various dictionaries, it seems the answer is not exactly as straightforward as this. There’s some debate about whether shamus is a play on the Yiddish word “shammes,” which means a sexton in a synagogue. I guess the joke hinges on the comparison of a house dick to the caretaker of sacred ground. It’s not clear to me exactly what the punch line would be—were this etymology to prove correct—but surely there’s one buried in there somewhere. Alternatively, some dictionaries suggest the word might be a play on the Irish name Seamus. At the time of the apparent coinage of “shamus,” or at least its appearance in the common parlance of detective fiction, thanks to Hammett, cops and cop-types were often Irish or Irish-American. The joke, in this case, is less sophisticated than the Yiddish version—or maybe it just makes more sense—and also more offensive. Shamus, after all, is not a kind word to call a detective at the time Chandler was writing, and given the Irish etymology, “shamus” implies that buffoons who mail-order private eye licenses and suddenly think they’re crack sleuths are, basically, Irish.
Regardless of origin, there’s general agreement that the word entered the English language in 1925 through a feature in the now-defunct Flynn’s Magazine called “Dictionary of the Underworld.” The introduction to the dictionary suggests one way of looking at the etymological confusion surrounding “shamus,” given the environment from which it emerged:
There are dives in New York’s underworld where a language is spoken that the ordinary citizen, listening in, would find impossible to understand. It isn’t English, French, German, or Yiddish; it is a language by itself. In various hobo “jungles” throughout the country the same tongue, with minor variations is being spoken.
And so the need for an underworld dictionary. Chandler came into his own a little after Hammett, to whom he is often compared, fairly or not. Did Marlowe pick the word up from Hammett’s Sam Spade? Or was Chandler independently privy to the “Dictionary of the Underworld” or, simply, the diction of the underworld? I don’t know. Having wended my way here, let me finish with something one of today’s best crime fiction writers, James Ellroy, said about Chandler and Hammett in his Paris Review interview a couple years ago. I haven’t read enough of either to know whether to agree or disagree, but maybe you, dear reader, have. Asked why he considered Hammett “tremendously great” and Chandler “egregiously overrated,” Ellroy answered:
Chandler wrote the kind of guy that he wanted to be, Hammett wrote the kind of guy that he was afraid he was. Chandler’s books are incoherent. Hammett’s are coherent. Chandler is all about the wisecracks, the similes, the constant satire, the construction of the knight. Hammett writes about the all-male world of mendacity and greed.