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Meet Dashiell Hammett, Dean of the Hard-Boiled Mystery Novel

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I’ve been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.” — Dashiell Hammett

Over the more than 1,000 articles I have published on this site, I have written extensively about Ernest Hemingway, Somerset Maugham, and Carolos Ruiz Zafon. I have also written profiles of Bret Easton Ellis, Alexandre Dumas, Patrick Modiano, and Robert B. Parker. Thinking about that last author (who gave us the outstanding Spenser series for nearly four decades) has reminded me of a glaring omission from this list of author profiles, and I am correcting that today with a look at Dashiell Hammett, one of the great mystery authors of all time who has also been called the Dean of Hard-Boiled Fiction.

You may not recognize his name (even many avid mystery readers today won’t), but you will certainly recognize the title of his most famous novel, either from the book itself or the famous film adaptation staring Humphrey Bogart: The Maltese Falcon.

Samuel Dashiell Hammett was born on May 27, 1894, in St. Mary’s County, Maryland. Known as Sam by his family, he was baptized a Catholic (but did not remain one for long) and spent his childhood years in Philadelphia and Baltimore. In 1907, at the age of 13, Hammett dropped out of school and held several menial jobs until 1915 when he was, astonishingly given his age, hired by the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. He worked as a Pinkerton detective from 1915 to 1922, taking a year off to serve in World War I.

During World War I, he served in the U.S. Army Motor Ambulance Corps, which puts him among the ranks of the famed Literary Ambulance Drivers, a list that includes John Dos Passos, Somerset Maugham, and Ernest Hemingway. During this time, he also contracted the Spanish flu during the 1918–1919 pandemic and later tuberculosis.

Following his time with the Pinkerton Agency, Hammett published his first story in 1922. It was his experience as a detective that gave a gritty realism to his writing that readers had seldom, if ever, seen before. He was fairly prolific as a short story writer, with the majority of his work appearing in the magazine Black Mask, the leading crime fiction magazine of the era. This was a glorious time for writers of all genres, as nearly all magazines at the time published fiction and you could make a decent living just publishing short stories (if only that were still true today). F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example, made the majority of his money as a short story writer, not as a novelist.

Hammett once said that all his characters were based on people he either knew personally or had known about. His writing reflects not just his experience as a detective but his ability to write dialogue that actually sounds realistic, no small feat either then or now. Not until Hemingway burst on the scene would the flowery prose of the 19th century be banished completely, but Hammett was ahead of his time in his early stories.

As good as his short stories are, especially a series featuring an operative of the Continental Detective Agency (known only as the “Continental Op,” with no other name given), Hammett is best known for the five novels he published over the five years from 1929 to 1934. Those five novels were Red Harvest (1929), The Dain Curse (1929), The Maltese Falcon (1930), The Glass Key (1931), and The Thin Man (1934). The first two books featured the Continental Op, while The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man featured, respectively, Sam Spade and Nick and Nora Charles.

You might expect that with this type of rapid production and amazing protagonists, Hammett went on to write dozens more novels over the following decades. You would be wrong, though; The Thin Man was the last novel he wrote, a full 27 years before his death in 1961. Why did he stop writing fiction? No one really knows because he never addressed the question.

He did become deeply involved in left-wing politics, to the point of being blacklisted and even jailed briefly during Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare of the 1950s. He also served in the Aleutian Islands during World War II, making him a veteran of both World Wars. None of these things, however, would have prevented him from continuing to write novels, even if the blacklist would have temporarily delayed their publication.

The American playwright and screenwriter Lillian Hellman, with whom Hammett had a 30-year romantic relationship that would only end with his death, said she thought “Dash” (as he was called by his friends) wanted to do a new kind of work but because of illness or some other reason never started on that work.

Whatever his reason for stopping, the five novels he gave us, and the characters in those novels, were more lasting and influential than most writers can produce in a lifetime, in terms of quality if not quantity. How many mystery writers today crank out the same novel every year, with only a slight change of plot or character, that are forgotten even a day after reading them? Not so with Hammett.

In terms of a handful of wildly memorable mystery novels that could even be considered “literature,” the modern writer most like Hammett is the late John Dunning. Because of health reasons, Dunning only wrote five novels in his Cliff Janeway Bookman series of bibliomysteries, but those novels solidified his place in the crime fiction pantheon just as Hammett’s five books did for him.

Hammett had one serious stroke of good fortune that helped ensure his literary immortality. Humphrey Bogart perfectly embodied Sam Spade in the classic film adaptation of The Maltese Falcon, and William Powell and Myrna Loy immortalized Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man film series. The Thin Man is my favorite of Hammett’s five novels, partly because I love the films and partly because it’s his funniest book. But it is interesting that of his five books, it was Red Harvest that Time magazine included in its list of the 100 best English language novels published between 1923 and 2005. Being considered one of the 100 best books over an 80-year span is no small feat.

Dashiell Hammett died on January 10, 1961, at the age of 66 (1961 was a horrible year for great authors, being the year we lost Hammett, Ernest Hemingway, and James Thurber). As a veteran of two World Wars, Hammett is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. In true military fashion, the Army wrote his name on the tombstone as “Samuel D. Hammett.” No matter; we know who he was, and his books live on forever. If you’ve never read one of them, go get one today; you’ll be glad you did.

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