THE DAIN CURSE BY DASHIELL HAMMETT (1929)
FILM IN PHASE SPACE EPISODE 2
‘You’ve got a flighty mind. That’s no good in this business. You don’t catch murderers by amusing yourself with interesting thoughts. You’ve got to sit down to all the facts you can get and turn them over and over till they click.’ (p.320)
Now, after years of fascination, I’ve finally figured the book. The Dain Curse is not just a novel by Dashiell Hammett, published in 1929 emphasizing cynical attitudes and sexual motivations aimed at momentarily alleviating our existential despair. It is a fully realized theory of chaos and complexity that falsifies a large chunk of the physics section of the bookstore. This post begins with Isabelle Boof-Vermesse Secret Passage to Chaos: Dashiell Hammett’s well-known article. Outside of the corresponding TV tropes that I’m sort of reprinting with permission of the hive, the only other major and significant works consistent with this is James Gleick book on chaos
Complexity takes Chaos Theory further to argue that at certain point in the development of a system self-organisation spontaneously occurs, projecting the system to a more advanced level. At issue is whether we are independent agents or mere channels. Are we in control? Or are we simply obeying the dictates of a much larger force, hidden from us?
the book started as four connected stories in the ‘pulp’ magazine, Black Mask.
- Black Lives’ (November 1928)
- ‘The Hollow Temple’ (December 1928)
- Black Honeymoon’ (January 1929)
- ‘Black Riddle’ (February 1929)
Like The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901), it exploits a curse as an agent of causality: around the central female character, Gabrielle Leggett, in which three different adventures end with the death of three different would-be culprits, vindicating her claim that she is somewhat damned: It’s retroactive rather than chronological: the result of each action, the “output”, is introduced as the “input” of the following sequence, thus creating a feedback loop by each successive closure (a confession closely followed by the death of the culprit).
Part 1 The Dains: Black Lives
The anonymous “Continental Op” has been hired by an insurance company to investigate a diamond robbery committed at a Mr Leggett’s, a scientist — Leggett had been entrusted with the diamonds to conduct a series of experiences on color. The detective quickly finds a single diamond on the Leggett lawn, and proposes his first deduction:
the theft is an “inside job”
This is evidence that the culprit just pretended to have lost it in his or her flight. This first hint at the closure of the system echoes when it is established that one of the two suspects that have been seen watching the Leggett house looks like the detective. Gabrielle, Leggett’s daughter, remarks:
“It might have been you, for all I know”
Evil Redhead
Red hair was a mark of a witch and favored by Satan himself. In the Balkans, people born with red hair were targets of infanticide and were said to be doomed to rise as vampires after they died, if they weren’t vampires already.
The detective finds out that the jeweler had lent his diamonds to Leggett thanks to the mediation of a writer, Fitzstephan, an acquaintance of his who helped him in the past. But soon enough Leggett the jeweler is found dead with a confession letter where there’s a detailed account of his colorful life of crime overseas— reminiscent of the way the Sherlock Holmes novels long back stories in India (The Sign of Four, 1890) or among the Mormons (Study In Scarlet, 1887) or Buchan Richard Hannay adventure, The Island of Sheep (1936).
In an extended revelation scene the Op discovers that Mrs Leggett is one of two Dain sisters who, back in Paris, before the War, were in love with Maurice Pierre de Mayenne. He married the other sister, already pregnant with the daughter Gabrielle. In a tale of sister hatred, the current Mrs elaborately arranges for the little girl to shoot dead her mother.
The jeweller takes the rap and goes to Devil’s Island until he manages to escape and works his way to California and a new identity. The sister who planned the murder brings up Gabrielle, tracks the jeweller down, surprises him by arriving on his doorstep.
When Mrs Legget is confronted by 2 private dicks she’s hired to track him down but were now blackmailing her years later, she
a) kills them both
b) persuades Mr Leggett to shoot himself.
But the detective discovers a hole: Leggett’s claim that he sent for Alice and his daughter clashes with the housekeeper’s testimony describing his reaction upon their arrival.
He turned absolutely white, and [the housekeeper] thought he was going to fall down, he shook that bad.
Which means he was trying to escape and at the same time relentlessly pursued by the living sister. The letter is meant to shield Alice (237), concludes the detective, and the first plot ends: The detective accuses Alice Dain of the murder of the two “robbers”, the two men she had hired to find Mayenne-Leggett, and she, Mrs Leggatt née Lucy Dain, accuses Gabrielle of having accidentally killed her mother Lily.
“You’re her daughter,” she cried, “and you’re cursed with the same black soul and rotten blood that she and I and all the Dains have had; and you’re cursed with your mother’s blood on your hands in babyhood; and with your twisted mind and the need for drugs that are my gifts to you; and your life will be black as your mother’s and mine were black…”
At which point she makes a break for the stairs, is tackled by the Op and Gabrielle’s thick hunky boyfriend Collinson, and in the scuffle, the gun goes off and she is dead, killed by Fitzstephan. The evil godmother who initiates the cycle of the curse is immediately punished
A partner
Dr Watson is the archetype. In detective Fiction It’s just so convenient to have a partner, someone to deploy on missions when you can’t do everything yourself, someone to discuss the case with while it’s in mid-stream — and someone to mull over the loose ends with when it’s over.
In this one the Op conveniently runs into his old friend the novelist Owen Fitzstephan who helps out with a few minor errands but whose real purpose is the epilogue chapter at the end of each of the three parts, where they sit and piece together what happened and why. Until Fitzstephan himself becomes part of the story…
The dynamic system thus continues to move after the death of the first instigator. The initial value of an iterative mathematic function is called the “germ”; in The Dain Curse, the germ is Gabrielle’s fear of the curse, and it constantly retroacts on the family system, feeding the plot:
UNCANNY VALLEY
Uncanny Valley: Hammett gives a pretty good description of the phenomenon almost 50 years before it was named:
“There was warmth and there was beauty in her olive-skinned face, but except for the eyes, it was warmth and beauty that didn’t seem to have anything to do with reality. It was as if her face were not a face, but a mask that she had worn until it had almost become a face. Even her mouth, which was a mouth to talk about, looked not so much like flesh as like a too perfect imitation of flesh, softer and redder and maybe warmer than genuine flesh, but not genuine flesh.”
THE PLOT
In fiction as in science, crisis are thresholds into new world configurations. Stability is threatened precisely by extreme cohesion: iteration puts to the test the stability of any given system, as it magnifies tiny, imperceptible diversions. To be sure, interconnectedness ensures centrifugal acceleration and because retroaction or feedback contributes to creating new ones.
For the apparent randomness of the system, is eventually transcended by the revelation that in fact it was Alice Dain who deliberately taught her niece to play with the revolver, using her to get rid of her sister and to pressure Leggett. The apparently random, is part of a greater design
Randomness and determinism are simultaneously present, simultaneously predictable and unpredictable. The same kind of paradox arises in quantum mechanics such as ‘Schrodinger’s cat‘:
Lyotard made a similar point about systems
it is not true that uncertainty (lack of control) decreases as accuracy goes up; it goes up as well
In other words, more control equals less control. At every turn our preconceptions about the way systems work are subverted. What is also called into question is our ability to know our world in any depth.
A further problem arises which is that the very act of measurement alters the system we are dealing with, leading to what has been called the `collapse’ of the wave function.
PART 2 THE TEMPLE
Quasiperiodic behavior is a pattern of recurrence with a component of unpredictability that does not lend itself to precise measurement. In The Dain Curse, the superposition of several “cycles” produces something highly unstable.
The Dain Curse as a whole resembles a gothic novel, complete with family curses, sects, drug-induced hallucinations, dark sexual drives and motives, secret passages, hidden altars, human sacrifice, bodies falling, sublime cliffs, “cosmic chaos”
In this types of mystery/suspense stories the solution always revealed that the “horror” elements were not real and were the contrivance of the villain, who, usually out of the profit motive were trying to drive a young woman insane.
Gaslighting
The Temple
Gabrielle has insisted on going to stay at the San Francisco headquarters of a religious sect at the Temple of the Holy Grail, run by friends of her late father, the Haldorns. Her physician is alerted by the worsening of her condition. Her fiancé Collinson appoints the detective to look after her,
“my efficiency offset my brutality, or words to that effect”
The Op is installed there, with the sect owners’ agreement, but that night all hell breaks loose. The special effect used to arouse awe in the credulous members; the ghost that regularly visits their rooms is a mise en abyme of turbulence. The Op is drugged by dope fed into his room by secret pipes where he encounters the physical illusion,
Not more than three feet away, there in the black room, a pale bright thing like a body, but not like flesh, stood writhing before me. […] Its feet — it had feet, but I don’t know what their shape was. They had no shape, just as the thing’s legs and torso, arms and hands, head and face, had no shape, no fixed form. They whirled, swelling and contracting, stretching and shrinking.
The special effect consists in projecting a luminous image on a stream of vapor emitted by a device hidden in the secret network of piping the Haldorns have added to the house, which corresponds to a crude version of the hologram, a technology that relies on fractal representation.
The OP bumps into Gabrielle almost naked holding a blood-stained ornamental knife saying ‘I killed him’, finds the family doctor stabbed to death by said knife on the religion’s ‘altar’. The OP returns to find Collinson and Gabrielle gone, goes into the servant girl’s room and is overcome with fumes again, then attacked, then nearly knifed, then clubbed, then rushes back down to the altar to find the doctor gone and the lady of the house & cult (Mrs Haldorn) tied up on the altar by her husband.
Holdorn takes advantage of this state of affairs as in the operation of the wave function to overcome human limitations
A God Am I
“Because you are haughty of heart, you say, ‘A god am I! I occupy a godly throne in the heart of the sea!’”
— Ezekiel 28:2, The Bible
When a villain, gains superhuman abilities or achieves their dearest dream, one can expect them to gain delusions of godhood.
They will often give an over-the-top speech emphasizing just how far beyond ordinary humanity they have evolved, and how lowly they are compared with him. Cue the villain becoming a megalomaniacal Narcissist who is Drunk on the Dark Side and/or declaring that they will Take Over the World. But Pride cometh before the fall.
Joseph, having chosen that night of all nights to go beyond the cult they’d cooked up with theatrical robes, hypnotism and dope fed into the followers’ rooms, purely to make money, finally flips, thinks he genuinely is God, and is about to sacrifice her on the altar;
Rasputinian Death
The Op has to shoot him six times and then stab him through the throat before he goes down. The trope takes its name from a myth spread by Prince Felix Yusupov about the assassination of Grigori Rasputin in 1916. His killers wanted to portray him as a near-indestructible son of Satan, so they made up an elaborate story about how he survived poison, beating, and bullet wounds having attempted to claw through the ice that covered him, and to top it off, another version said that when they cremated him, his body was trying to get up again as it burned.
Recap
The outcome of the first section is processed by the second, fueling the machinery of the plot. Again, the germ that is re-injected in Gabrielle’s system: The curse in which Gabrielle believes is modified by the various uses the other characters make of it. In exploiting the curse, they actualize it and create a fresh system that quickly gets out of hand.
I don’t know how far he [Haldorn] had worked on her, nor even how he had worked on her, but I supposed he was sewing her up by using his hocus-pocus against her fear of the Dain curse.
Joseph’s madness is thus the result of period-doubling, the faster and faster alternation of two patterns, wake and hypnosis. After an exponential acceleration in the succession of the states, the system will simply refuse to return to any of the states. Oscillation is thus another passage leading to complex, unpredictable behavior which, upon reaching a critical point, ended up in total breakdown.
Going around hypnotized all the time, what brains he had — not a lot to start with, she says — had become completely scrambled.
COMPLEXITY THEORY
Systems are seen to have the ability, at critical points in their development (the edge of chaos), quite spontaneously to self-organize themselves to a higher level of operational complexity. The edge of chaos is where systems are at their most creative as well as most unpredictable. Being at the transition point between order and chaos not only buys you exquisite control -small input/big change.
PART 3 QUESADA
The Op is called off another case (again) by an urgent cable from Eric Collinson who has hurriedly married Gabrielle and spirited her off to a secluded coastal cottage in Quesada, rural California.
A favorite example of fractal theoreticians, the ragged coastline, whose dimension is between surface and volume (the more precisely you measure the coast, the exponentially higher the figure, which becomes potentially infinite if you take into account every single pebble on the shore) is here a metaphor.
On his way to their house, the detective finds Eric’s body, lying at the bottom of a cliff. Gabrielle has disappeared , and the detective is forced to tell the whole story to the sheriff:
“I’ve never thought we had an answer to either of the two mix-ups she’s been in. And not knowing the answer, how could you tell what to expect ?”… “There’s the curse, though,” he said.
The job of the detective is topological: he must ignore the metamorphosis of the various forms assumed by the system to concentrate on holes and intersections showing that the three cases are in fact one.
The first case has been stretched to produce the second case, which in turn includes the third case: In that account, the solution of the last problem (Eric’s death in the opening of the third section, “Quesada”) can only be found through going over the Leggett case and the temple business again, concentrating his efforts on the passage that connects them.
Any Love Interest that the hero meets is either wormfood or otherwise removed forever from his or her life by the end of the episode or arc. If the two of them wind up getting married, it’s even worse — chances are that the Love Interest won’t even make it to the honeymoon, or even through the ceremony!
A lot then happens. there are car chases and car smashes. The sheriff’s wife is discovered to be unfaithful to him with another police official, is found dead, with a confession letter accusing her lover, and revealing the location of the hiding place where Gabrielle is held prisoner.
Gabrielle has been hidden by her kidnapper behind the ledge, and within the ”v-shaped pocket“, her own hiding place is another recess:
Craning our necks, we could see that what we had taken for the shore-line on that side was actually a high, thin, saw-toothed ledge of rock, separated from the cliff at this end by twenty feet of water […] We went through the opening and turned down behind the saw-tooth ledge. were in a v-shaped pocket.
We saw Gabrielle Collinson cowering back in the corner of a narrow-mouthed hole in the rock wall — a long triangular cave whose mouth had been hidden from our view by the slant at which it was set.
The detective, Fitzstephan, and the police exchange shots with Whidden, killing him before he can talk. but is shot down before he can reveal who put him up to it…
The detective is convinced that he is facing the same dynamic system:
Gabrielle’s father, step-mother, physician, and husband have been slaughtered in less than a handful of weeks — all the people closest to her. That’s enough to tie it all together for me. If you want more links, I can point them out to you. Upton and Rupert [the men hired by Alice Dain to find Leggett] were the apparent instigators of the first trouble, and got killed. Haldorn of the second, and got killed.
Mrs Leggett killed her husband; Cotton apparently killed his wife; and Haldorn would have killed his if I hadn’t blocked him. Gabrielle, as a child, was made to kill her mother; Gabrielle’s maid was made to kill Riese and nearly me. Leggett left behind him a statement explaining — not altogether satisfactorily — everything, and was killed. So did and was Mrs Cotton. You’ll still have enough left to point at somebody who’s got a system he likes, and sticks to it.”
Strange Attractors
Order in chaos is barely perceptible at first: it takes all the ingenuity of the detective to see that what seems to be total randomness is in fact deterministic. A trajectory that diverges from the orbit might be caught by an attractor that is not yet visible. A good example is eccentric behavior the rationale of which is still hidden. For example Fitzstephan’s totally disproportionate reaction upon hearing the news of Gabrielle’s marriage :
…“And, as far as guarding her is necessary, her husband ought to be able to do that.”
“Her what ?”
“Husband.”
Fitzstephan thumped his stein down on the table so that beer sloshed over the sides.
“Now there you are,” he said accusingly. “You didn’t tell me anything about that.”
His outré, accidental gesture, metaphorizes the radical measures (murder and kidnapping) he will be forced to take in the third section to keep Gabrielle for himself, to get close to the attractor, to remain, so to speak, in the loop.
A WHODONUT
Any detective story can be described as the coupling of two periodic systems, the trajectory of the criminal and that of the detective — the latter is as close as possible to the former, but can never quite achieve perfect identity with it; hence quasiperiodicity rather than periodicity, especially in the American version of the formula, which involves detective participation in the action (rather than mere reconstruction of it a posteriori).
Alice Dain’s hatred and Haldorn’s madness were, though unstable single-minded enough. Fitzstephan’s motive and action, on the contrary, will go in all directions. His plan will then seem to go awry, but the Continental Op will eventually be able to make out the strange attractor that has apparently jumped off the groove.
Typically, the topological figure that represents the attractor of a quasiperiodic system is a donut, as the inner circle of one “cycle” is combined in a rotating movement with the wider spherical movement of the other. Any mystery novel’s action thus moves on the surface of this donut — revolving around a central hole, the “whodonut”.
A quasiperiodic movement is not stable (which is precisely what will cause the culprit’s undoing), it is typically a transition towards chaos, so that the donut, due to cascading period-doubling (and subsequent multiplication of attractors), is a figure that does not last as such but soon fragments itself into a myriad of points.
Red Right Hand
As the narrative is getting close to the end and Gabrielle is resting in a hotel room while the Continental Op and Fitzstephan are talking, Gabrielle thinks she is the attractor, the hidden point that attracts all the trajectories towards a deadly vortex:
“But can’t there be — aren’t there people who are so throughly — fundamentally — evil that they poison — bring out the worst in — everybody they touch?”
The phrase originally comes from Horace, a reference to Jupiter’s wrath, Milton’s translation of the term “rubente dextra” in Horace’s Ode i.2,2–3. John Milton, re-popularized the phrase in Paradise Lost (Book II, 170–174) is: “What if the breath that kindled those grim fires, / Awaked, should blow them into sevenfold rage, / And plunge us in the flames; or from above / Should intermitted vengeance arm again / His red right hand to plague us?”.
THE NOBLE DEMON
All her arguments are swept aside by the detective. A Noble Demon is a villainous character with a code of honour. He doesn’t care that he has a bad image — he may even actively cultivate and embrace it. However, every so often a situation presents itself and he’s just not willing to go the extra mile necessary to be completely evil. He shows her instead that she has inherited a remarkable mental balance from her father; as to her sex appeal, it seems excessive when seen against her own lack of appetite, due to drug addiction.
In fact, he shows her that superstition is retroactive, feeding on itself to be actualized: the donut-like attractor that results from the juxtaposition of her vision of the curse and Fitzstephan’s exploitation of it complexifies the quasiperiodicity inherent in detective fiction.
You’re Insane!
The hero confronts the Big Bad, his Watson, writer Fitzstephan. He describes unknown trajectories in the phase space of the system. During the confrontation, the villain eagerly justifies the Evil Plan they’ve carried out with repugnantly twisted logic that is devoid of any trace of humanity or ethics and is often about to commit his supreme atrocity with a wild grin.
In the first section he uses Alice Dain to introduce Gabrielle to the Haldorns, in the second he uses Haldorn who, falling in love with Gabrielle, decides to pursue his own aim, and it is Fink, Haldorn’s employee, a native of Quesada and a relative of Whidden, the murderer of Gabrielle’s husband, who decides to kill Fizstephan precisely because he was his accomplice in the Temple murder and he wants things to rest now.
Fitzstephan killed Alice Dain in the stairs not by accident but deliberately, he had doctor Riese killed because Riese had seen Fitzstephan and the Haldorns in conference, he hired Whidden in Quesada to kill Eric and to kidnap Gabrielle. He also disposed of Mrs Cotton and Leggett. Gabrielle’s confession that he has been courting her provides a motive for the mass assassination.
The hero reacts with outrage at this depraved justification with “You’re insane!”
Ironically, such an explanation does not invalidate the curse, but rather vindicates its existence as Fitzstephan reveals he is a Dain, thus spoiling the Great Detective’s moment of triumph:
I said: “And so ends the Great Dain Curse.”
He laughed then, as well as he could with one eye and a fraction of a mouth, and said: “Suppose, my boy, I were to tell you I’m a Dain?
The faint suggestion of incest metaphorizes the text’s self-similarity. Even closure is subjected to infinite regress. The conclusion to The Dain Curse thus presents itself as the exposure of a dynamic system turned chaotic (Fitzstephan’s plot), that encompasses and replaces another dynamic but periodical system (the imaginary curse).
The detective receives the visit of Fink, the special effects accomplice of the Haldorns; he gives the writer a small package, which the latter is forced to accept for fear a refusal might reveal his connection to the Haldorns via Fink. It is a bomb that explodes, reducing Fitzstephan to
a mangled pile of flesh and clothing in the middle of the room”
In this last development, the fractal dimension is hinted at, as the mastermind becomes nothing more than a victim. Fitzstephan thought he was the all-encompassing consciousness managing the system, while his sphere is but the limited section of a wider system, a system that encompasses him, a mere satellite, but that he cannot perceive, his perspective being too local.
