DAVID HAMMER: Sherlockian Author
David Hammer, signing his latest book during
the S.T.U.D. annual meeting.
(Scotland Yard Books / Chicago / 4 March 99)
by
Gael Stahl
Editor, Nashville Scholars of the Three Pipe Problem
(filed 8 March 99)
Click picture for full photo of D. Hammer
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Iowan David Hammer, an attorney by vocation, has written about
one Sherlockian book per year since 1980. And to that list he has appended
many a travel and many a tale. More than 50 years after Dr. Gray Chandler
Briggs found Camden House (The Empty House), Hammer and his ardent
Audrey began searching, researching, finding, and photographing most of
the Sherlockian sites in England, Europe, and North America. Vincent Starrett
would be proud of him.
Hammer's series of whimsical,
informative travelogues starting with The Game is Afoot, For the Sake
of the Game, The Worth of the Game, To Play the Game, and
A Dangerous Game is so highly appreciated that the series has been rated
one of the five top sources for pursuing the Higher Learning of the Sherlockian
Canon.
The writing style is intimate,
dryly understated, self-denigrating humor framed in exquisite turns of speech
that pit the conversational and anecdotal against the perverse, quick pivot
of a puckish storyteller. And he delivers the sites.
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For our conversation, we sat in Manhattan's Algonquin Hotel library
after an early repast at the 1998 Baker Street Irregular's Martha Hudson
Breakfast, a Friday morning, Jan. 9.
When I told Hammer I'd be probing
his early life, he said he has written an as yet unpublished book called
The Game is Underfoot: The Memoirs of a Sherlockian Publisher. He
wrote about the significant people in his life — many of them now dead,
some famous, some tending toward the infamous.
His first Sherlockian experience
occurred in the late 1940s in central Iowa while riding a short jitney train
from his hometown, Newton, Iowa, to Grinnell College in Grinnell. One of
his parent's friends, a 70-year-old theatrical agent who went by the name
of Edward Holland, was reading the Sherlock Holmes stories. He said it was
the only book he ever read.
"When I get to the end of the
last story, I turn back to the beginning of the first." To young Hammer,
that was a committed Sherlockian, the first person he ever met so
profoundly interested in Sherlock Holmes. There've been a lot of them since.
Hammer's only Holmes book dating back to childhood was the 1930 red-cover
Doubleday out of Garden City. Prefaced by Christopher Morley, it was the
first-ever edition of all 60 stories in the Canon.
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As a boy Hammer had read some of the stories because he was interested
in the English ambience, the fogs and feel of London. Newton was a small
midwestern Maytag company factory town. He was attracted to a magical English
life style that he knew nothing about. He didn't read the American story,
Valley of Fear, until half a dozen years ago when he was researching
the Pennsylvania sites for the fourth Game book.
Hammer's mother read to him for
years before he learned to read. She was a member of the Book of the Month
Club, a teacher, and had a fine personal library.
His father and mother encouraged
young David to read what he wanted. Once when he was in the eighth grade,
he wanted a book about European history. His mother, a library board member,
could get a library discount. The librarian said, "Now you know, Agnes,
that's a college text." Agnes Hammer insisted, "If he wants to read it,
I want him to have it. When people want a book, they're ready for it."
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At nearby Des Moines
there was a used book dealer by name of Hansen whose prices, "like most
used-book dealers, were if not fair, flexible." If you wanted a book, its
value usually went up. Hammer's father, secretary of the Newton Chamber
of Commerce for 30 some years, was not a bookish type. But because of his
son's interest in Robert Ingersoll, he bought an eight-volume set from Hansen,
The Mistakes of Moses. That despite the fact that Ingersoll called
himself an agnostic (but was probably an atheist) and the Hammers were Quakers.
Ingersoll was popular but controversial.
Hammer tells about the visitor to Ingersoll's library in Chicago, who commented,
"You certainly have a lot of books here. What did they cost you?" — "Well,
said America's most stirring public speaker at the time, an engaging writer,
and a quick wit, "Certainly the governorship of Illinois and probably the
presidency of the United States."
Newton's population was about
15,000, a town in which you could walk almost anywhere if you wanted to.
There was no Quaker meeting in the town so the family attended the Congregational
Church together.
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In 1947, Hammer began liberal
arts studies at Grinnell College, a Congregational school, and graduated
in 1951. He claims to have been an indifferent student. Instead of reading
the books called for by the courses, he spent most of his time reading what
he thought were more interesting college library books. He was also active
in extracurricular activities.
He made his alma mater proud
by excelling at many diverse endeavors becoming a fine attorney, scholar,
art and Sherlockiana collector, raconteur, a friend among friends, a much
envied husband, an admired father, a wanderer, a writer, and a publisher.
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GS: Looking back, what was the kernel of those years of higher learning?
Hammer: I think that in a way neither college nor law school are
really worth it. That in a way, it can be a scam. One of the most well-educated
people I know is a high school graduate who read sensible things. I think
one can obtain what college is supposed to give you by yourself. The tragedy
is that if you don't have that background you can fall prey to nutty books
— ideas that are sort of half-baked, because you are meeting them for the
first time.
My complaint about intellectuals
is that they deal in ideas, and after awhile, one idea, no matter how half-baked
or half-cracked it is, sounds every bit as good as another. I don't think
there is any leaven in their bread and that's a mistake. But I think if
you don't go to college, you always think you've missed something more than
you did.
As for law school, it's worse
now than it used to be. In the old days one could become a lawyer, which
is what my other life is, by reading law. And if you had a good mentor,
you learned everything you would have learned in law school. You can't do
that any more. I think it's a shame.
One of my pet peeves is law professors
who have arrogated to themselves narrower areas of practice. Some teach
two or three hours a week and that's it. A lawyer does his research at night,
and there is no reason for law professors not to be able to do it either.
I'm pretty discouraged on that aspect of it.
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GS: What drew you to law; what prepared you for that vocation?
Hammer: I learned more probably, or at least sustained more inspiration
from reading The Holmes – Pollock Letters before I went to law school.
Frederick Pollock was the son of an English writer and judge and
was himself a lawyer, and I believe, in the end was a judge. I always had
an interest in Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. [the Supreme Court justice
who lived 1841-1935] that was probably as great as my interest in the other
Holmes. There is a connection, you know, because the Holmes name was used
by Doyle. It was Holmes Sr. of The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table
[a writer and doctor who lived 1809-94] whom Doyle admired whose name he
used. The first thing Doyle was going to do when he came to the United States
was visit the senior Holmes. Unfortunately Holmes died the week before.
In a way, Oliver Wendell Jr. would have been the other Holmes' stepbrother.
What Holmes Jr. did was to take
a young law student from Harvard each year, one of Judge Frank-furter's
flock, as a clerk each year. There were some interesting ones. Two of them
were the brothers Alger and Donald Hiss. Holmes mentions in his later years
about reading Sherlock Holmes. I always wondered if the old fellow knew
why his patronym had been selected.
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GS: How did the letters of Holmes and Pollock inspire you more than law
school?
Hammer: I learned what the law should be, the approach one should
take to the essential spirituality that should exist in practicing any profession.
I assumed, in my naivete, and I'm still pretty naive, that lawyers talked
about things like Holmes and Pollock did. I learned that wasn't true.
Most lawyers belong to a rather
dull group. It's the unusual one who has an interest outside of the law.
And if the interest is intensive, as matters that are literary or philosophical
usually are, you don't find lawyers there. I remember I came back home at
Christmas after my first six months in the practice of law, and my father
asked me if I had any disappointments. And I said, "Yes, Dad, I do, just
two. One is the bench and the other is the bar." I think I would still say
that 40 years later.
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GS: Where did you go to study law?
Hammer: I started law school at Northwestern University. That
ended rather abruptly when I was drafted into the Korean War. I passed the
test that kept you out of the war until you finished law, medical, or whatever
school it was. I was somewhat disappointed that I was drafted. My father
and the fathers of a couple of other fellows drafted at the same time I
was had been active in unseating a rather unsuitable chap who was the mayor
of our town. He was also head of the draft board. But I survived. Afterwards,
I didn't return to Northwestern because I'd married in the interim, and
didn't feel, unlike my children, I guess, that my parents should have to
support me when I was married. So I went to the University of Iowa.
Also, my wife Audrey, who is from the St. Paul-Minneapolis area, did not
want to live in Chicago.
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GS: Where did you spend your years of military service?
Hammer: Specifically, the answer to your question is Virginia.
Generally, the answer is that it was a very undistinguished service career,
for which I was very grateful. At that time, you could put in for Europe
(and so avoid Korea). Each month, the levy came down for people with your
MOS (military occupation specialty) and people were going to Korea right
and left. I didn't want to be one of those people who went to Europe and
then would have to explain to myself later on that it was to avoid responsibilities.
The closest I came to going
to Korea was when the legal officer did not want to choose between Julius
Birnbaum, who was a lawyer, and me to go to Korea. He said, "I don't want
that on my conscience. We flipped a coin. I won. Julius Birnbaum went
to Korea, survived, and made the military his career.
Audrey Hammer delivering a talk at Chicago's STUD Banquet.
5 March 99, at the O'Hare Aerospace Center, Starlight Inn.
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GS: When did you marry Audrey?
Hammer: We married during my last tour of military service.
I was accepted to go to Europe in the CID (Criminal Investigation Division),
but it would have meant another year in the military, and I didn't want
to do that. I had already spent a long summer in 1949 bumming around Europe,
which the military regarded as an added reason to send me over there.
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GS: You'd been to Europe during your undergraduate days at Grinnell?
Hammer: Yes, a friend of mine and I had the idea that we could
probably do it on the cheap, which we could. It was the summer after the
Berlin airlift started — not a smart time to go. Everybody in Europe was
expecting an invasion. One of the professors at Grinnell, my mentor, convinced
my parents that I was mature enough to go, and further, it was a worth
one year of college life. My friend's parents didn't want their son to
go because of the parlous situation
with the Russians. Professor Frederick Baumann convinced my parents
I was mature enough, erroneously I'm sure, to go alone. Since I had an
uncle in the Army of Occupation in Germany and my aunt was living there
with him, my father made arrangements that I could always go back and borrow
money from my uncle if I ran out of money.
It was a most interesting
summer and was truly one of those "rites of passage" that we can all look
back on in our lives. Baumann was right. It was a real experience.
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GS: Did you spend all your time in Germany?
Hammer: No, I landed in Rotterdam on a ship called the Volandam
on the Holland-America line. It was an unreconverted troop ship on which
for 250 bucks you could travel both ways. There was one class — 'bad.'
After one night in the five-tier berth, I slept on deck. I found it fairly
pleasant, although the crossing was a bit rough. A good many of us were
seasick. From Rotterdam, I went first thing to Germany to visit my uncle,
who was a colonel.
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GS: Hammer, I assume, is German. (It means hammer in English too.)
Hammer: The family came from Silesia where they were
apparently influenced by William Penn who came to Germany. They
went to the Rhineland and then to Wales and then to the United States.
My father's family came here I think it was 1700, my mother's family in
1750. Her family were Welsh. My suggestion would be that my people
were miners. That was one of the big industries in Silesia and in Wales.
The other day I received
a notice from someone who for money can get you a listing of all the people
of that name in the United States. I wasn't interested, but he said you
could also acquire some drinking glasses with your family crest. I figured
it will be interesting to see what kind of family crest I don't have, so
I sent my money in and they came back with a very nice crest with a lion
rampant holding a sword upright. The lady I bought them from said they'd
send me the genealogical basis for the crest. I didn't get it so I called
her, and did get it. And it is probably as specious as I originally thought.
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GS: Where was your uncle stationed in Germany?
Hammer: Bad Kissingen [east of Frankfurt, north of Nuremberg]
a few miles from the southwest border of the Russian sector. Many wives
chose to go back home but my aunt decided to stay and they were given pistol
practice since the invasion was regarded as being imminent.
When you're 19 or 20 you
don't worry about those things. I'd always wanted to go to Vienna, which
was behind the Iron curtain at that time. I did go there, and then to Venice.
Then I ran into a couple of American girls traveling on the train to
Monte Carlo. I accepted their invitation and went to Monte Carlo, then
to Switzerland, back to Germany, then to Paris, to London, and then back
to Holland, and returned to the United States. It was a long summer from
June to September.
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GS: How did you, a college student, afford it?
Hammer: Oh, I'd saved about $1,000 and blew it on the trip.
I also had PX privileges as a military dependent. I could also get military
currency that I regularly sold in basement rooms in Germany. That helped
support me. You wonder later how you got out alive. It was, of course,
quite illegal. I suppose my uncle could have gotten in trouble but he didn't
know about it. It was my Aunt Juana who was kind enough to provide for
me. She's a great lady — still alive. My uncle was a career Army man when
he met her down in Nicaragua before the war when he was 38 and she was
18. She left a convent school to elope with him. They were both very helpful
to me, very kind to me.
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GS: So you worked in high school and college and saved enough to travel?
Hammer: I worked in high school. In college, well, I guess I
did work. I had a corsage business. A home town friend who went to the
University of Indiana persuaded me there was money to be made if I hooked
up with a Chicago florist, a fellow named Burnett, now long dead. You'd
call a couple days before with a code, and you'd get boxed corsages with
numbers on them on the 5 a.m. train. A friend of my father's had a cold
storage plant near the railroad station where
I'd take the flowers in the morning. I'd give his wife an orchid every
now and then. I had salesmen in each hall. Here I was, a very young kid
with all these guys working for me who were GIs who needed the money.
It worked very well until
one year the flowers didn't come in on time due to a railroad foul up.
I had to go to the local florist, Bates, to fill my orders. He turned me
in for not having an Iowa retail sales license — not a very kindly man.
I learned a lot about "business"
from that flower operation. Bates inflated his prices and the only competition
was two old sisters who had a little old moldering greenhouse at the edge
of town. I went out to see them and in the best American business tradition
I struck a deal. "Look, we can both make more money if we don't compete
and sell our flowers for less than what Bates sells for. (Laughs.) That's
illegal restraint of trade. But fortunately it didn't have any
interstate boundaries, so we weren't violating — I later learned —
the federal legislation. But it was sort of interesting.
Audrey and I were married
in the college chapel and my wife's family went to Bates the florist. He
was not very pleased at having to sell flowers to somebody who had given
him a very bad time. The flowers were pretty ugly.
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GS: What was the best thing about Northwestern Law School?
Hammer: That law school had the pretension of looking beyond
the law. Before I arrived, Dean Havighurst, whom I very much liked, sent
a letter to those who'd been admitted saying: Here are the books we think
you should read: Bleak House (by Dickens), Orley Farm and
The
Eustace Diamonds (by Trollope) that have a lot to do with the law.
I did like that. I had a friend, who is a Sherlockian by the way — he may
be here this weekend — who is a professor of medicine at the University
of Iowa, and he has taught a course to doctors, both students and practitioners,
on the literature of medicine, trying to get doctors to broaden their narrow
perspectives. A good many lawyers have an interest only in the law and
have no interest in literature and art and music. I think it's all one
seamless web.
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GS: Where did you practice law on graduating from Iowa?
Hammer: I went to Dubuque where I still am, still restoring
defendants to their friends and relations.
GS: Let's move into your Sherlockian life. How did you happen to read
the stories?
Hammer: I still have that Doubleday edition of the stories I
had at home as a young kid. I probably read it earlier, but I vividly remember
reading it one summer when I was in college. I sold aluminum pots door
to door, a very discouraging experience. I read the Holmes stories because
the work was depressing.
But to answer what you're
asking, I didn't get on to it very seriously until one time Audrey and
I were in Egypt. The situation was very sticky, particularly between Egypt
and Israel and the Americans as well. Americans were not popular, and I
wanted to have somebody have a commercial interest in our whereabouts,
who was neutral — so we went on SAS via Denmark to get on the Egyptian
tour — an odd way to do it. I was talking to one of the people who was
on the tour, a very interesting lady who worked for SAS. We were having
drinks on the terrace of the hotel below which they were filming Agatha
Christie's "Death on the Nile" in Aswan, at the first cataract on
the Nile.
She said, "I can tell you
don't like tours. What kind of tours do you like?"
"Oh," I said, "I like going
through Scotland with Boswell and Johnson. She said that wouldn't sell.
"Well," I replied, "I'd
like to do the Sherlock Holmes places in England." She didn't say much
more and two weeks later I got a call from her. SAS had approved the Sherlockian
tour. "Where are the sites?"
I said, "Damned if I know.
If I knew I wouldn't take a tour."
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GS: So in the late 1970s or the early '80s you went looking, and that's
how your books got started?
Hammer: I had an interest because I wanted to go on the tour.
So I went through my Sherlock Holmes book. I tried to come up with places,
and I did, but realize now, it was pretty naive. I didn't have access to
any of the literature. It was there, but I didn't know it. I thought the
Baker Street Irregulars had ended with Morley's death and a few of the
others. It was only later that I realized that it probably had.
Those of us who came later lacked the credentials of those people.
But anyway, the tour was
advertised twice. It had to be pretty expensive as you had to go through
Denmark, which really knocked the hell out of the price. Those who signed
up to go were a family from New York, Audrey and me and our son, and a
neighbor boy. It wasn't a go.
But, I was interested then,
so every year, we spent part of the year, Audrey and I, going to Eng-land.
I'd work during the winter evenings to find what I could about where the
sites were. It was sort of stupid, in a way, looking for actual sites of
a fictional character. But, on the other hand, many of them were
there, and they were there because Doyle had gone there.
Susan Stahl & David Hammer
Scotland Yard Books (Chicago, IL - 4 March 99) |
GS: When did you begin to write about what you found?
Hammer: One year, we went to England a couple of times. We were
at dinner with some friends. He was chairman of the board of a British
publishing company and had been a Spitfire pilot during the Blitz. He asked
me why and I told him why, because I know it's there. He said his editors
might be interested. Why don't I write something on Sherlock Holmes?
I still have what I wrote.
It was pretty bad. All I did was give all the conclusions as to where the
places were and why they were the ones selected. I thought that to do anything
else, that is, to put yourself in it was a horribly arrogant and unnecessary
thing to do.
He wrote back, "My editors
just don't feel there is enough interest in Sherlock Holmes." I accepted
that as true. He was a good friend letting me down easily. I'd written
a bad book.
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GS: A book that lacked the famous idiosyncratic, personal Hammer voice.
Hammer: Somebody put me in touch with John Shaw; I don't
know who. And Shaw, by letter, got me in touch with Jack Tracy,
a Sherlockian publisher. Tracy was a lousy publisher. Some say dishonest.
My experience with Jack was that he wasn't dishonest by choice but by necessity.
I never got paid for the book he did publish. But nobody ever got paid.
The only one who came out ahead was Paul Herbert who took a lot
of books instead of money and sold them.
Tracy was an excellent editor.
Excellent. I remember one of his criticisms was, "Your wife surely has
a first name. What is it?" I figured out that what I had to do was a write
a story about how you got there, fill in the background, and the travail,
and so forth. That's what he finally published.
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GS: That was your first travel book? The Game is Afoot? Published
by Tracy's ...?
Hammer: Gaslight Press. Through Tracy, I met someone
who became a very good friend of Audrey and me — Michael Harrison.
He lived on his social security as there wasn't much coming in from his
books. He probably was the finest Sherlockian scholar I ever met. What
we would do is give money through various institutions, which is deductible,
with the understanding that they would bring Harrison over to be an artist
or writer in residence. He came to the University of Dubuque, then
Clarke
College, and other groups. We all gained from that.
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GS: A writer in residence?
Hammer: Yes. He'd speak on more than Sherlock Holmes. He'd written
about more than Sherlock Holmes.
At about that time, Tracy
had not paid Harrison for a book he'd written — which is probably the most
distinguished book in all Sherlockian history: A Study in Surmise.
The book came out at a prominent conference in Dubuque. Sherlockians came
from all over because Harrison was there. Tracy never paid him for that
book. He never paid me, but I didn't live on what I wrote.
So I formed a publishing
company, called Gasogene Press, which was as deceptively similar
to Gaslight as I could find. My thinking was that if there was an
honest press that published people and paid them, then the bad press would
disappear. — Well, I was quite wrong. It didn't work. And, I couldn't stay
mad with Jack Tracy as he was an engaging fellow.
With Gasogene Press,
I published stuff from Michael, because that was how he was getting income,
and I published stuff of my own, because they sold pretty well. Michael's
did too. I had some other people, for otherwise, Gasogene Press would be
a vanity press. I wanted to publish people who hadn't been published before.
And it was once referred to by one of the English writers as "the odd press."
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GS: Who else did you publish?
Hammer: I published a young woman from Kentucky, Deborah
Sage, who wrote some poetry. It got some slicingly bad reviews. That
was under the title of The Doggerel in the Night-Time. That
title came from my law partner, Angela Simon. I published a book
by Bill Goodrich in Chicago — my title — Good Old Index.
And there were some others. [Including John Bennett Shaw's delightful
quiz books, The Ragged Shaw and The Really Ragged Shaw.]
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