A stolen Ferris Wheel and Thou

The arrival in the mail of three indulgences, ancient paperback mystery novels from Dell, each containing a stylized map on the back cover, brought me the unanticipated answer to a personal enigma.

A helpful clue turned out to b the fact that all three of the ancient paperbacks were by Dashiell Hammett, a writer I have outgrown but never distanced myself from entirely. I'd ordered the books from a dealer in Staten Island out of affection and nostalgia for the Dell map mystery series, a series I unsuccessfully tried to revive when I was in their employ. "We want out books to reflect the future," I was told archly "not the past."

Nevertheless.

Browsing through the Continental Op stories, I was transported back to the past in which I came across an article by Hammett appearing in a writers' guide book. The article was a series of numbered sentences, perhaps twelve or fourteen of them, in which Hammett told of his experiences as an operative or op for the Pinkerton Detective Agency. "I was once sent," he wrote, "to track down a man who had stolen a Ferris wheel." The other sentences, approximately as short and enigmatic, were not held together by the glue of any logic or story arc, appearing merely as autobiographical facts. As much as anything I had read to that point in my life, that article spoke to me, promised me insights and understandings to the psyche of writing; it offered me a codex, a key, an instant understanding of what would guide me to the discovery of my own voice, my own enigmas, my own process as a writer. Had I been informed enough at the time, I would have also factored in my belief that by means of this very piece, Hammett had foreseen postmodernism.

Somehow the magazine with the piece got away from me. For years I have looked patiently in used book stores, in collections of the works of Hammett, in Google citations, Yahoo, and ask dot com, ever more convinced that were I to find it and take it in properly, my career as a writer would flourish in ways I had never dreamed.

Segue to approximately February of this year when Liz Kuball asked me when I was going to stop numbering the paragraphs of my blog entries. Segue to last night when, at a university function in Town and Gown, a number of colleagues variously inquired if I were using a formatting feature, attaching some numerological meaning to my blog essays, speaking in some kabbalistic code, or what.

The answer is to be found in the missing Hammett piece, which all these years later has helped me in ways I didn't realize. So taken with the piece was I and so energized was I that it became a way to improvise on themes, reaffirming not only the sound of my internal voice but finding a favored medium, somewhere between a poem, a short story, and. a dramatic monologue.

In a sense, though I have yet to find the Hammett piece, I have found a form I appreciate that allows spatial and attitudinal leaps, interlardings of a wild and spontaneous whim, and a sense of adventure. It is my narrative sonnet which I will call the Hammett Sonnet in his honor. I shall run the risk of boring Liz Kuball when I resort to the format, but Ishall not stop searching for the original Hammett piece, and I shall, I suspect, continue tweaking this thing of form I have created until it surrenders and gives up the essence of a sentient and boisterous epression of writerly joy, a narrative equivalent of a fugue.