HAMMETT, DASHIELL

Dashiell Hammett (May 27, 1894–January 10, 1961) was born on a tobacco farm in St. Mary's County, Maryland, and raised in Baltimore, where he attended school until the age of 14. He worked for several years in low-paying jobs before joining the Pinkerton National Detectives, where he gathered the detective lore that would be crucial to his later writing. During World War I, he served in the Army (though without leaving the United States) and contracted a case of tuberculosis that would compromise his health for the remainder of his life. In the mid-twenties, Hammett began publishing stories in the pulp magazine Black Mask, where the verisimilitude of his detective fiction soon made him the magazine's marquee writer. Leaping to the prestigious publishing house of Alfred A. Knopf, Hammett published four novels in quick succession: Red Harvest and The Dain Curse (1929), The Maltese Falcon (1930), and The Glass Key (1931). Widely praised for their streamlined construction and their coolly dispassionate tone, the novels made Hammett an instant literary celebrity, successful with popular readers and prominent intellectuals alike.

Yet, though he achieved fame during the early thirties and though he influenced writers who would become successful later in the decade, Hammett was not truly a writer shaped by the Depression. His most significant work was done during the late twenties and reflected the attraction to intellectual sophistication prevalent among intellectuals at the time. Emphasizing the professional skill of his detective heroes, Hammett's fiction placed great stress on the values of discipline and expertise and showed consistent doubtfulness about the intelligence of ordinary people. By 1931, his burst of creative energy was drawing to a close. After The Glass Key, Hammett published one additional novel, The Thin Man (1934), whose renowned wit barely conceals the fears of the novel's playboy detective that he is slipping toward decadence.

For the remainder of the thirties, the bulk of Hammett's energies were devoted to left-wing political activity, to which he and his lover, the playwright Lillian Hellman, were fiercely committed. During World War II, he served as an enlisted man on an Alaskan military base. In 1951, he served six months in federal prison for contempt of court after he refused to disclose the names of contributors to the bail bond fund of the Civil Rights Congress, an organization associated with the Communist Party, of which he was a trustee. Hammett died in 1961.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hammett, Dashiell. The Dain Curse. 1929.

Hammett, Dashiell. The Maltese Falcon. 1930.

Hammett, Dashiell. The Glass Key. 1931.

Hammett, Dashiell. The Thin Man. 1934.

Johnson, Diane. Dashiell Hammett: A Life. 1985.

Layman, Richard. Shadow Man: The Life of Dashiell Hammett. 1981.