Hammett, Dashiell (1894-1961)

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Hammett, Dashiell (1894-1961)

For a writer who turned out only five novels, Dashiell Hammett made a strong and lasting impression on the twentieth century and is considered one of the founding fathers of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction, a tough, unsentimental style of American crime writing. In The Maltese Falcon he introduced Sam Spade; in The Thin Man it was Nick and Nora Charles. Four decades after his death all his novels remain in print along with many of the short stories and novelettes he wrote for the Black Mask detective pulp magazine. The Bogart film version of The Maltese Falcon (1941) can still be seen regularly on television or video. All six of the Thin Man films, starring the memorable team of William Powell and Myrna Loy, are also easily accessible.

Born in Maryland, Samuel Dashiell Hammett dropped out of school while in his early teens, later worked as an operative for the Pinkerton Detective Agency in Baltimore, and served as a driver in the Ambulance Corps during World War I. In the early 1920s, married and living in San Francisco, he began submitting stories to magazines and soon became a regular contributor to Black Mask. Using a restrained yet tough vernacular first-person style, he wrote a series about a plump, middle-aged operative anonymously known as the Continental Op who worked for the Continental Detective Agency in Frisco. Based in part on his own experiences as a Pinkerton, the stories offered considerable action, gunplay, romance, and melodrama. When Joseph T. Shaw took over as Black Mask editor in 1926, he quickly decided that Hammett was the best man he had; he promoted Hammett to star contributor and worked to persuade other writers to follow in his footsteps.

Of the several dozen stories Hammett wrote for the pulp, nearly thirty were about the Continental Op, and the fat private eye also figured in his first two novels. After being serialized in Black Mask, both Red Harvest and The Dain Curse were published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1929. The Maltese Falcon began that same year as a serial and was published as a book by Knopf in 1930, followed by The Glass Key in 1931. Hammett's final novel, The Thin Man, first appeared in Redbook in 1933 and as a book, with a few allegedly risqué lines restored, in 1934.

Both critics and readers were enthusiastic about the Hammett books, and his reputation soon spread beyond the pulpwood and mystery novel ghettos. The Maltese Falcon was early added to the Modern Library list and the little remaining fiction Hammett wrote was found in such glossy paper, and high-paying, magazines as Collier's. More important to Hammett's future and his finances was the fact that Hollywood took notice of him. The year after The Maltese Falcon was published, Sam Spade took his first step into another medium. The initial Warner Brothers version starred former Latin lover of the silents Ricardo Cortez as Spade, and the second, titled Satan Met a Lady and ineptly played as a comedy, featured Warren William as the sleuth. Finally in 1941 John Huston persuaded the studio to let him write and direct a new version that stuck closely to the Hammett original. That Maltese Falcon became the definitive one, gave Humphrey Bogart the role that helped rejuvenate his career, and helped establish the film noir genre. Hammett, who sold all motion picture rights to his book back in 1931, didn't profit directly from the later two adaptations.

The earliest radio Sam Spade was Edward G. Robinson, who played the role in a 1943 broadcast of the Lux Radio Theatre. Bogart himself repeated his role in an early 1946 half-hour version for a short-lived show called Academy Award. That same year The Adventures of Sam Spade became a regular weekly show. While this latest Spade was not exactly Hammett's Spade, he was a tough, whimsical, and appealing operative; and the show was a hit. Produced by William Spier, it was written for the most part by Gil Doud and Bob Tallman. Howard Duff, who hadn't yet begun his movie career, was cast as Spade. He had a distinctive radio voice and could sound hard-boiled and still get the most out of the gag lines that showed up often in this less gloomy recreation of Hammett's world. The show remained on the air until 1950, when Hammett's political troubles made sponsors and networks wary of him. The Adventures of the Thin Man radio show, which had been broadcast fairly regularly from 1941 to 1950, also fell victim to the greylisting of the era. A third Hammett radio show, The Fat Man, was heard from early 1946 to early 1951. Besides allowing his name to be tacked on the program and the nickname of the villain from The Maltese Falcon to be used as the nickname for a fat private eye, Hammett had nothing to do with the production. It, too, fell when the other shows did.

Hammett went to Hollywood in 1930 and remained there throughout the decade. According to one of his biographers, "during this period he was credited with one screenplay and contributed original screen stories on at least six credited productions." Some of those original screen stories were contributed to the Thin Man movies that followed the initial one. His other avocations were drinking and Lillian Hellman, neither of which contributed significantly to his well-being, although Hellman was supposedly the inspiration for Nora in the Thin Man series.

Hammett's literary reputation slipped during the 1930s and early 1940s, despite the branching out of his characters into movies and radio. But in the early 1940s Frederic Dannay, the literary half of Ellery Queen, began reprinting Hammett's old pulp stories in the new Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. That was followed by a series of several paperback reprint collections. These did a good deal to bolster Hammett's standing and gain a new audience for his written work.

Long suspected of being too liberal, Hammett was caught by a subpoena in 1951. As a bail bond trustee for an organization called the Civil Rights Congress, he was asked to provide the names of contributors to the fund. The questioning had to do with four suspected Communists who had jumped bail and vanished. Hammett, although he reportedly didn't know any, nevertheless refused to name names. Convicted for contempt, he spent nearly six months in a federal prison. After suffering from tuberculoses for much of his life, Hammett died in New York in 1961.

—Ron Goulart