Dashiell Hammett Biography and List of Works

American novelist, who also worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood. Hammett's best known books include THE MALTESE FALCON (1930), filmed three times. It introduced detective Sam Spade who investigates the murder of his colleague detective Archer. Spade runs foul of the police and finds himself involved with an odd assortment of characters, all searching for a black statue of a bird. Among them are gorgeous redhead Brigid O'Shaughnessy, her employer, Fat Man Casper Gutman, Joel Cairo, an agent of Gutman, and Wilmer Cook, a nervous, trigger-happy bodyguard.

"Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting V under the more flexible V of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another smaller V. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The V motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down - from high flat temples - in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan."
(from The Maltese Falcon)

With Raymond Chandler Hammett represented the early realistic vein in detective stories. His tough heroes confront violence with full knowledge of its corrupting potential. In his novels, Hammett painted a mean picture of the American society, where greed, brutality, and treachery are the major driving forces behind human actions.

Dashiell Hammett was born in St. Mary's Co, Maryland, as the son of Richard Hammett, a farmer and politician. He studied at the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute but left school at the age of 14.He worked as a newsboy, freight clerk, labourer, messenger, stevedore, and advertising manager before joining the Baltimore office of the Pinkerton Detective Agency as an operator.

During World War I Hammett was a sergeant in an ambulance corps. He contracted tuberculosis and spent the rest of the war in the hospital, and for much of his life suffered from ill health. He rejoined the agency and worked for them intermittently, when his damaged lungs permitted.

Most of Hammett's income during 1922-1926 came from writing advertising copy for a San Francisco jewellery store. At this time the investigator known as Continental Op made his appearance in the author's stories.

Hammett's first short story appeared in the magazine Black Mask of 1 October 1923, and his writing career as novelist ended in 1934. In Black Mask Hammett became along with Erle Stanley Gardner one of its most popular writers. Under the pseudonym Peter Collinson, Hammet introduced a short, overweight, unnamed detective employed by the San Francisco branch of the Continental Detective Agency, who became known as The Continental Op. In the three dozen stories between 1929 and 1930, featuring the tough and dedicated Op, Hammett gave shape to the first believable detective hero in American fiction. Drawing on his Pinkerton experiences, Hammett created a private eye, whose methods of detection are completely convincing, and whose character has a sense of depth beneath the surface. Op stories also appeared in hardcover form. RED HARVEST (1929) was a loosely constructed story about corruption and gangsters, set in 'Poisonville', and in THE DAIN CURSE (1929) Op unravels a mystery involving jewel theft, religious cults, a family curse, a bombing, and a ghost.

However, Hammett turned his attention to a new private eye, Sam Spade, who made his initial appearance in Black Mask in September, 1929. In The Maltese Falcon Spade became the personification of the American private eye, thanks in no small degree to Humphrey Bogart's portrayal of him in the 1941 film version of the novel. The first-person narration of the Op stories is left behind and Hammett views the detective protagonist in the book from the outside. This technique gives the story ambiguity - the most mysterious character in the detective.

"Ned Beaumont stood up. He picked up his overcoat. He took his cap out of his overcoat pocket and, holding it in one hand, his overcoat over the other arm, said seriously: 'You'll be sorry.' The he walked out in a dignified manner. The Kid's rasping laughter and Lee's shriller hooting followed him out."
(from The Glass Key)

THE GLASS KEY (1930) was apparently Hammett's favourite among his novels. The central character, Ned Beaumont, hanger-on to the political boss of a corrupt eastern city, was partly a self-portrait: a tall, thin, tuberculosis-ridden gambler and heavy drinker. THE THIN MAN (1934), Hammett's last novel, presented Nick Charles, a former detective who had married a rich woman. The book gained a commercial success and inspired a series of adaptations for film, radio, and TV. In 1934 Hammett began working as a scriptwriter for the comic strip Secret Agent X-9. Hammett's earnings from his books and their spin-offs allowed him to continue drinking and womanising.

In the 1930s Hammett became politically active: he joined the Communist Party and was a fierce opponent of Nazism. During World War II tubercular Hammett served three years in the US Army, editing a newspaper for the troops in the Aleutian Islands. In 1948 he was vice-chairman of the Civil Rights Congress, an organization that the Attorney General and F.B.I. deemed subversive.

For his communist beliefs, Hammett became a target during McCarthy's anti-communist witch-hunts. In 1951 he went to prison for five months rather than testify at the trial of four communists accused of conspiracy. He was blacklisted and when the Internal Revenue Service claimed that he owed a huge amount in tax, the federal government froze his finances. For a while the State Department pulled his books from the shelves of American libraries overseas.

For the rest of his life Hammett lived in and around New York, teaching creative writing in Jefferson School of Social Science from 1946 to 1956. Lillian Hellman cared for him in her Park Avenue apartment form 1956. Hammett died penniless of lung cancer on January 10, 1961.

Among Hammett's screenplay credits is the adaptation for WATCH ON RHINE by Lillian Hellman. She became Hammett's companion in 1930s. Hammett was first married to nurse Josephine Dolan, whom he met in a California hospital in the early 1920s. They had two daughters. Hammett abandoned his children early on. Formally they divorced in 1927.

See also: "hard-boiled" writers: Horace McCoy, Jonathan Latimer, Mickey Spillane.

American writers in Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s: James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, John Fante, Daniel Fuchs, Horace McCoy, Clifford Odets, Maxwell Anderson, Dorothy Parker, John Don Passos, Theodore Dreiser, Nathanael West, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald. - For further reading: An Unfinished Woman by L. Hellman (1969); Pentimento by L. Hellman (1973); Scoundrel Time by L. Hellman (1976); Beams Falling: The Art of Dashiell Hammett by Peter Wolfe (1980); Shadow Man: The Life of Dashiell Hammett by Richard Layman (1981); Dashiell Hammett: A Life by Diane Johnson (1983); Hammett: A Life at the Edge by W.F. Nolan (1983); Dashiell Hammett by D. Dooley (1985); Dashiell Hammett by J. Symons (1985); Private Investigations: Novels of Dashiell Hammett by S. Gregory (1985); World Authors 1900-1950, ed. by M. Seymour-Smith and A.C. Kimmens (1996)

Note: Hammett was portrayed by Jason Robards, Jr. in the film Julia (1977), dir. by Fred Zinnemann, based on Lillian Hellman's book Pentimento. - Another film, Hammett, dir. by Wim Wenders, based on Joe Gores's novel (1975), depicts Hammett in the 1920s as an ex-Pinkerton detective and now a struggling writer.

Screenplays:

RED HARVEST, (1929)
City Streets, (1931)