Dashiell Hammett

Dashiell Hammett (born May 27, 1894, St. Mary’s County, Maryland, U.S.—died January 10, 1961, New York City, New York) was an American writer who created the hard-boiled school of detective fiction in popular short stories and novels that pioneered the use of tough, slangy prose and realistic urban settings. Many of Hammett’s works were adapted into movies that became among the finest examples of film noir. Among his indelible characters are Sam Spade, the quintessential world-weary private eye, and Nick and Nora Charles, a dashing, cocktail-loving husband-and-wife team who solve murder mysteries.

Hammett left school at 13 and worked at a variety of low-paying jobs before working eight years as a detective for the Pinkerton agency. He served in World War I, contracted tuberculosis, and spent the immediate postwar years in army hospitals. He began to publish short stories and novelettes in pulp magazines and wrote two novels—Red Harvest and The Dain Curse (both published in 1929)—before writing The Maltese Falcon (1930), generally considered his finest work. It introduced Sam Spade, Hammett’s fictional detective creation, famously played by Humphrey Bogart in the film version directed by John Huston (1941), which became a classic of its genre.

Hammett also wrote The Glass Key (1931), a story of political corruption described by the The New York Times as written in “the tradition of Sherlock Holmes with the style of Ernest Hemingway.” The film version, released in 1942, starred Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake, and Brian Donlevy and is regarded as among the best early noir films. The novel also inspired the Swedish name of an award, the Glasnyckeln, bestowed annually since 1992 to crime novels written by Nordic authors; winners of the Glasnyckeln have included Norwegian writer Jo Nesbø and Swedish author Stieg Larsson.

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Hammett’s last novel, The Thin Man (1934), initiated a successful motion picture (1934; starring William Powell and Myrna Loy) and later a television series built around his detecting couple, Nick and Nora Charles. Nora was based on the playwright Lillian Hellman, with whom Hammett formed a romantic alliance in 1930 that lasted until his death. Her series of autobiographical portraits, Pentimento (1973), has an account of their life together.

Hammett spent some years in Hollywood writing scripts for film and radio, but after 1934 he increasingly devoted his time to left-wing political activities and to the defense of civil liberties. He served in World War II as an enlisted man and was later honorably discharged. In 1951 he went to jail for six months because he refused to reveal the names of the contributors to the bail bond fund of the Civil Rights Congress, of which he was a trustee. Two years later he refused to cooperate when he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee to testify about his ties to communism. He was subsequently labeled a subversive and blacklisted. Hammett spent his last years in relative isolation in New York and died of lung cancer in 1961.