Writer, born in St Mary's Co, Maryland, USA. After serving in the army in World War 1, he went to San Francisco, where he became a Pinkerton detective and advertising copywriter. After the success of his first novels he became a Hollywood scriptwriter, and also published some short stories in The Black Mask. Most of his work came out in a five-year period, starting with Red Dust (1929) and ending with The Thin Man (1934). He effectively invented hard-boiled detective fiction with his lean prose style and cynical detective, Sam Spade, and his work was praised by many serious writers and critics. Long identified with left-wing politics, in 1951 he spent six months in jail for refusing to testify about the Civil Rights Congress, of which he was a trustee. In 1953, after refusing to answer questions from Senator Joseph McCarthy's committee, he was blacklisted by Hollywood. He lived the last 30 years of his life with the writer Lillian Hellman.
Samuel Dashiell Hammett (May 27, 1894 – January 10, 1961) was an American author of "hard-boiled" detective novels and short stories. Among the enduring characters he created are Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon), Nick and Nora Charles (The Thin Man), and the Continental Op (Red Harvest, The Dain Curse).
Early life
Hammett was born in St. Mary's County in Southern Maryland on the Western Shore of Maryland. His parents were Richard Thomas Hammett and his wife Annie Bond Dashiell (the name being an Americanization of the French De Chiel; "Dash" left school when he was 13 years old and held several jobs before working for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency.
During World War I, Hammett enlisted in the U.S. Army and served in the Motor Ambulance Corps.
After the war, he turned to drinking, advertising, and eventually, writing.
Hammett's Strengths
In The Simple Art of Murder, Hammett's successor in the field, Raymond Chandler, summarized Hammett's accomplishments as follows:
Hammett was the ace performer...Hammett's Weaknesses
Hammett's short story output, as opposed to his later novels, is very uneven.
Hammett has super-criminals both male ($109,000 Blood Money and The Big Knockover) and female (The Girl with the Silver Eyes, The House on Turk Street). In $109,000 Blood Money he has a super-crook who attacks not just a single bank but the entire financial district of San Francisco, with the help of hundreds of other criminals gathered together from all over the U.S. Then the super-crook turns around and wipes out most of his helpers in order to keep the loot for himself. Another character in The Dain Curse, a cult leader, has convinced himself that he is the Lord Jehovah incarnate, and when the Op barely manages to kill him after shooting him seven times and stabbing him in the throat, he thinks to himself "Thank God he wasn't really God".
The above is not intended to detract from Hammett's considerable accomplishments as a writer, but to indicate the disparity between his early work and his mature novels.
Later years
In 1931, Hammett embarked on a thirty-year affair with playwright Lillian Hellman.
In 1942, Hammett enlisted in the United States Army after the United States entered World War II.
After World War II, Hammett joined the New York Civil Rights Congress, a leftist organization that was considered by some to be a communist front. When four communists related to the organization were arrested, Hammett raised money for their bail bond.
During the 1950s he was investigated by the Congress of the United States (see McCarthyism).
Hammett died in Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, of cancer of the lungs, diagnosed just two months before his death.
In 1975, writer Joe Gores published Hammett, a novel in which a fictional version of the writer was sought out by an old Pinkerton associate to help him solve a case that drags him through the seamy underbelly of 1936 San Francisco.
Works
Red Harvest (published on February 1, 1929) The Dain Curse (July 19, 1929) The Maltese Falcon (February 14, 1930) The Glass Key (April 24, 1931) The Thin Man (January 8, 1934) Woman in the Dark: A Novel of Dangerous Romance (published in Liberty magazine in three installments in 1933) The Big Knockover (a collection of short stories) The Continental Op (a collection of short stories) Nightmare Town (a collection of short stories) Complete Novels (Steven Marcus, ed.) (The Library of America, 1999) ISBN 1-883011-67-1 Crime Stories and Other Writings (Steven Marcus, ed.) (The Library of America, 2001) ISBN 1-931082-00-6Quotes
"[Hammett] took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley...
Raymond Chandler, in The Simple Art of Murder"I have been asked many times over the years why he did not write another novel after The Thin Man. I do not know. But he was a man who kept his work, and his plans for work, in angry privacy and even I would not have been answered if I had ever asked, and maybe because I never asked is why I was with him until the last day of his life."
Lillian Hellman, in an introduction to a compilation of Hammett's five novels
User Comments Add a comment…