HAMMETT, (Samuel) Dashiell

Nationality: American. Born: St. Mary's County, Maryland, 27 May 1894. Education: Baltimore Polytechnic Institute to age 13. Military Service: Served in the Motor Ambulance Corps of the U.S. Army, 1918-19: sergeant; also served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps in the Aleutian Islands, 1942-45. Family: Married Josephine Annas Dolan in 1920 (divorced 1937); two daughters. Career: Worked as a clerk, stevedore, and advertising manager; private detective, Pinkerton Agency, 1908-22. Full-time writer from 1922; book reviewer, Saturday Review of Literature, New York, 1927-29; book reviewer, New York Evening Post, 1930. Lived in Hollywood, 1930-42; began long relationship with Lillian Hellman in 1930. Teacher of creative writing, Jefferson School of Social Science, New York, 1946-56. Convicted of contempt of Congress and sentenced to six months in prison, 1951. Member: Advisory Board, Soviet Russia Today; League of American Writers (presi-dent), 1942; Civil Rights Congress of New York, 1946-47. Died: 10 January 1961.

Publications

Collections

The Big Knockover: Selected Stories and Short Novels, edited by Lillian Hellman. 1966; as The Hammett Story Omnibus, 1966; as The Big Knockover and The Continental Op, 2 vols., 1967.

Short Stories

The Adventures of Sam Spade and Other Stories, edited by ElleryQueen. 1944; as They Can Only Hang You Once, 1949; selection, as A Man Called Spade, 1945.

A Man Named Thin and Other Stories, edited by Ellery Queen. 1962.

Novels

Red Harvest. 1929.

The Dain Curse. 1929.

The Maltese Falcon. 1930.

The Glass Key. 1931.

The Thin Man. 1934.

$106, 000 Blood Money. 1943; as Blood Money, 1943; as The Big Knockover, 1948.

The Continental Op, edited by Ellery Queen. 1945.

The Return of the Continental Op, edited by Ellery Queen. 1945.

Hammett Homicides, edited by Ellery Queen. 1946.

Dead Yellow Women, edited by Ellery Queen. 1947.

Nightmare Town, edited by Ellery Queen. 1948.

The Creeping Siamese, edited by Ellery Queen. 1950.

Woman in the Dark, edited by Ellery Queen. 1951.

The Continental Op, edited by Steven Marcus. 1974.

Plays

Watch on the Rhine (screenplay), with Lillian Hellman, in Best Film Plays of 1943-44, edited by John Gassner and Dudley Nichols. 1945.

Screenplays:

City Streets, with Oliver H. P. Garrett and MaxMarcin, 1931; Woman in the Dark, with others, 1934; After the Thin Man, with Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, 1936; Another Thin Man, with Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, 1939; Watch on the Rhine, with Lillian Hellman, 1943.

Other

Secret Agent X-9 (cartoon strip), with Alex Raymond. 2 vols., 1934.

The Battle of the Aleutians, with Robert Colodny. 1944.

Editor, Creeps by Night. 1931; as Modern Tales of Horror, 1932; asThe Red Brain, 1961; as Breakdown, 1968.

*

Bibliography:

Hammett: A Descriptive Bibliography by Richard Layman, 1979; Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler: A Checklist and Bibliography of Their Paperback Appearances by Gary Lovisi, 1994.

Critical Studies:

"The Black Mask School" by Philip Durham and "The Poetics of the Private-Eye: The Novels of Hammett" by Robert I. Edenbaum, both in Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties edited by David Madden, 1968; Hammett: A Casebook, 1969, and Hammett: A Life at the Edge, 1983, both by William F. Nolan; An Unfinished Woman, 1969, Pentimento, 1973, and Scoundrel Time, 1976, all by Lillian Hellman; Beams Falling: The Art of Hammett by Peter Wolfe, 1980; Shadow Man: The Life of Hammett by Richard Layman, 1981; Hammett by Dennis Dooley, 1983; Hammett: A Life by Diane Johnson, 1983, as The Life of Hammett, 1984; Hammett by William Marling, 1983; Private Investigations: The Novels of Hammett by Sinda Gregory, 1984; Hammett by Julian Symons, 1985; The Critical Response to Dashiell Hammett, 1994; The American Roman Noir: Hammett, Cain, and Chandler by William Marling, 1995.

* * *

Dashiell Hammett rose to fame as the leading exponent of the so-called "hard-boiled" school of crime, writing during a relatively brief period from 1922 to 1934. In just four years Hammett stamped his individual style on the American crime story, mostly in the Black Mask popular magazine, creating the figure of the private eye who moved through an urban landscape of corruption and violence, dispensing his own idiosyncratic brand of justice as he saw fit largely unimpeded by law enforcement agencies.

Hammett's career as a short-story writer probably reached it apotheosis in 1925 when he published no fewer than five of his best stories—"The Whosis Kid," "The Scorched Face," "Cork-screw," "Dead Yellow Women," and "The Gutting of Couffignal"—but he went on to write over 75 stories in all, as well as five novels built around the stories, often first appearing in the Black Mask magazine as novelettes and later joined together or, in the case of his most famous work The Maltese Falcon, as a five-part serial. After 1934 Hammett worked as a scriptwriter in Hollywood for a time, he created the comic-strip character "Secret Agent X-9," and he helped popularize his work in radio serials. He wrote little more, except for a late, unfinished autobiographical novel, "Tulip." In the space of little more than a decade, however, Hammett had virtually transformed the genre of the detective and crime story and was the acknowledged leader of a group of writers that later included Raymond Chandler, Horace McCoy, and Erle Stanley Gardner.

His most talented successor, Chandler, said of Hammett's characters that "he put these people down on paper as they are, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes." He was frequently compared to Hemingway—by André Gide, among others—and in Death in the Afternoon (1932) Hemingway pays a tribute to him by having his wife read his novel The Dain Curse to him when he was suffering from eye trouble in Spain.

Hammett worked as an operative during two periods in Pinkerton's National Detective Agency, and it is unquestionably this experience that helped give his stories an authenticity that the genre had never before had. The stories are filled with detailed accounts of how to shadow someone, of the use of fingerprints and varieties of poisons, and of long, boring waits outside houses and bars. They are intricately but for the most part plausibly plotted. Everything superfluous to them has been pared away, even to the descriptions of the San Francisco landscape, which is reduced to street signs and the names of joints.

His protagonist in the stories is unnamed; Hammett wrote later that "I didn't deliberately keep him nameless, but he got through 'Arson Plus' and 'Slippery Fingers' without needing a name, so I suppose I may as well let him run along that way." He is merely the Continental Op, a short, fat man of between 35 and 40 who nevertheless is extremely proficient with both his fists and a gun and who is not averse to taking justice into his own hands. At the end of "The Golden Horseshoe" (1924) the Continental Op chats with the murderer Ed Bohannon whom he has been unable to nail and tells him:

"I can't put you up for the murders you engineered in San Francisco; but I can sock you with the one you didn't do in Seattle—so justice won't be cheated. You're going to Seattle, Ed, to hang for Ashcraft's suicide." And he did.

Such brutal pragmatism is characteristic of the Op, whose allegiance is only to his agency and its representative, the equally cynical and amoral "Old Man": we are told in one of many similar references, "The mildness and courtesy he habitually wore over his cold-bloodedness were in his face and eyes and voice" ("$106, 000 Blood Money"). Women (or "girls" as they are invariably referred to) in the world of the Op are, like almost everyone and everything else, predatory and corrupt. Though the Op can be sensually attracted, he mostly lives a life of monastic simplicity. Sam Spade's famous abandonment of the woman he loves because she has murdered his despised partner and broken the Code in The Maltese Falcon is foreshadowed in many of the stories:

I also have an idea. Mine is that when the last gong rings I'm going to be leading this baby and some of her playmates to the city prison. That is an excellent reason—among a dozen others I could think of—why I shouldn't get mushy with her. ("The Whosis Kid")

Hammett changed forever the face of the American crime story and his lean, laconic, wise-cracking prose has had a host of imitators.

—Laurie Clancy