Dashiell Hammett


Samuel Dashiell Hammett was an American author of hard-boiled detective novels and short stories. He was also a screenwriter and political activist. Among the enduring characters he created are Sam Spade, Nick and Nora Charles, and the Continental Op.
Hammett "is now widely regarded as one of the finest mystery writers of all time". In his obituary in The New York Times, he was described as "the dean of the... 'hard-boiled' school of detective fiction." Time magazine included Hammett's 1929 novel Red Harvest on its list of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005. His novels and stories also had a significant influence on films, including the genres of private-eye/detective fiction, mystery thrillers, and film-noir.

Early life

Hammett was born on a farm in Saint Mary's County, Maryland to Richard Thomas Hammett and his wife Anne Bond Dashiell. His mother belonged to an old Maryland family, whose name in French was De Chiel. He had an older sister, Aronia, and a younger brother, Richard, Jr. Known as Sam, Hammett was baptized a Catholic, and grew up in Philadelphia and Baltimore.
He left school when he was 13 years old and held several jobs before working for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. He served as an operative for Pinkerton from 1915 to February 1922, with time off to serve in World War I. He claimed that while with the Pinkertons, he was sent to Butte, Montana, during the union strikes, though some researchers doubt this really happened. The agency's role in union strike-breaking eventually left him disillusioned.
Hammett enlisted in the United States Army in 1918 and served in the Motor Ambulance Corps. He was afflicted during that time with the Spanish flu and later contracted tuberculosis. He spent most of his time in the Army as a patient at Cushman Hospital in Tacoma, Washington, where he met a nurse, Josephine Dolan, whom he married on July 7, 1921, in San Francisco.

Marriage and family

Hammett and Dolan had two daughters, Mary Jane and Josephine. Shortly after the birth of their second child, health services nurses informed Dolan that due to Hammett's tuberculosis, she and the children should not live with him full-time. Dolan rented a home in San Francisco, where Hammett would visit on weekends. The marriage soon fell apart; however, he continued to financially support his wife and daughters with the income he made from his writing.

Career and personal life

Hammett was first published in 1922 in the magazine The Smart Set. Known for the authenticity and realism of his writing, he drew on his experiences as a Pinkerton operative. Hammett wrote most of his detective fiction while he was living in San Francisco in the 1920s; streets and other locations in San Francisco are frequently mentioned in his stories. He said that "All my characters were based on people I've known personally, or known about." His novels were some of the first to use dialogue that sounded authentic to the era. "I distrust a man that says when. If he's got to be careful not to drink too much, it's because he's not to be trusted when he does".
The bulk of his early work, featuring a private investigator, The Continental Op, appeared in leading crime-fiction pulp magazine, Black Mask. Both Hammett and the magazine struggled in the period when Hammett became established.
Raymond Chandler, often considered Hammett's successor, summarized his accomplishments in The Simple Art of Murder:
Hammett was the ace performer... He is said to have lacked heart; yet the story he himself thought the most of, The Glass Key, is the record of a man's devotion to a friend. He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.

in 1935
In 1929 and 1930, he was romantically involved with Nell Martin, a writer of short stories and several novels. He dedicated The Glass Key to her, and in turn, she dedicated her novel Lovers Should Marry to him.
In 1931, Hammett embarked on a 30-year romantic relationship with the playwright Lillian Hellman. Though he sporadically continued to work on material, he wrote his final novel in 1934, more than 25 years before his death. Why he moved away from fiction is not certain; Hellman speculated in a posthumous collection of Hammett's novels, "I think, but I only think, I know a few of the reasons: he wanted to do new kind of work, he was sick for many of those years and getting sicker." In the 1940s, Hellman and he lived at her farm, Hardscrabble Farm, in Pleasantville, New York.

Politics and service in World War II

Hammett devoted much of his life to left-wing activism. He was a strong antifascist throughout the 1930s, and in 1937 joined the Communist Party. On May 1, 1935, Hammett joined the League of American Writers, whose members included Lillian Hellman, Alexander Trachtenberg of International Publishers, Frank Folsom, Louis Untermeyer, I. F. Stone, Myra Page, Millen Brand, and Arthur Miller. He suspended his anti-fascist activities when, as a member of the League of American Writers, he served on its Keep America Out of War Committee in January 1940 during the period of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.
Especially in Red Harvest, literary scholars have seen a Marxist critique of the social system. One Hammett biographer, Richard Layman, calls such interpretations "imaginative", but he nonetheless objects to them, since, among other reasons, no "masses of politically dispossessed people" are in this novel. Herbert Ruhm found that contemporary left-wing media already viewed Hammett's writing with skepticism, "perhaps because his work suggests no solution: no mass-action... no individual salvation... no Emersonian reconciliation and transcendence". In a letter of November 25, 1937, to his daughter Mary, Hammett referred to himself and others as "we reds". He confirmed, "in a democracy all men are supposed to have an equal say in their government", but added that "their equality need not go beyond that." He also found, "under socialism there is not necessarily any leveling of incomes."
In early 1942, following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hammett again enlisted in the United States Army. He was a disabled veteran of World War I, a victim of tuberculosis, and a Communist, but he pulled strings to be admitted. However, biographer Diane Johnson suggests that confusion over Hammett's forenames was the reason he was able to re-enlist. He served as a sergeant in the Aleutian Islands, where he edited an Army newspaper entitled The Adakian. In 1943, while still a member of the military, he co-authored The Battle of the Aleutians with Cpl. Robert Colodny, under the direction of an infantry intelligence officer, Major Henry W. Hall. While in the Aleutians, he developed emphysema.
After the war, Hammett returned to political activism, "but he played that role with less fervour than before". He was elected president of the Civil Rights Congress on June 5, 1946, at a meeting held at the Hotel Diplomat in New York City, and "devoted the largest portion of his working time to CRC activities".
In 1946, a bail fund was created by the CRC "to be used at the discretion of three trustees to gain the release of defendants arrested for political reasons." Those three trustees were Hammett, who was chairman, Robert W. Dunn, and Frederick Vanderbilt Field, "millionaire Communist supporter." On April 3, 1947, the CRC was identified as a Communist front group on the Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations, as directed by U.S. President Harry S. Truman's Executive Order 9835.

Imprisonment and the blacklist

The CRC's bail fund gained national attention on November 4, 1949, when bail in the amount of "$260,000 in negotiable government bonds" was posted "to free eleven men appealing their convictions under the Smith Act for criminal conspiracy to teach and advocate the overthrow of the United States government by force and violence." On July 2, 1951, their appeals exhausted, four of the convicted men fled rather than surrender themselves to federal agents and begin serving their sentences. The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York issued subpoenas to the trustees of the CRC bail fund in an attempt to learn the whereabouts of the fugitives.
Hammett testified on July 9, 1951, in front of United States District Court Judge Sylvester Ryan, facing questioning by Irving Saypol, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, described by Time as "the nation's number-one legal hunter of top Communists". During the hearing, Hammett refused to provide the information the government wanted, specifically the list of contributors to the bail fund, "people who might be sympathetic enough to harbor the fugitives." Instead, on every question regarding the CRC or the bail fund, Hammett declined to answer, citing the Fifth Amendment, refusing to even identify his signature or initials on CRC documents the government had subpoenaed. As soon as his testimony concluded, Hammett was found guilty of contempt of court.
Hammett served time in a West Virginia federal penitentiary, where according to Lillian Hellman, he was assigned to clean toilets. Hellman noted in her eulogy of Hammett that he submitted to prison rather than reveal the names of the contributors to the fund because "he had come to the conclusion that a man should keep his word."

Later years and death

During the 1950s, Hammett was investigated by Congress. He testified on March 26, 1953, before the House Un-American Activities Committee about his own activities, but refused to cooperate with the committee. No official action was taken, but his stand led to him being blacklisted, along with others who were blacklisted as a result of McCarthyism.
Hammett became an alcoholic before working in advertising, and alcoholism continued to trouble him until 1948, when he quit under doctor's orders. However, years of heavy drinking and smoking worsened the tuberculosis he contracted in World War I, and then according to Hellman, "jail had made a thin man thinner, a sick man sicker ... I knew he would now always be sick."
Hellman wrote that during the 1950s, Hammett became "a hermit", his decline evident in the clutter of his rented "ugly little country cottage", where "signs of sickness were all around: now the phonograph was unplayed, the typewriter untouched, the beloved foolish gadgets unopened in their packages." He may have meant to start a new literary life with the novel Tulip, but left it unfinished, perhaps because he was "just too ill to care, too worn out to listen to plans or read contracts. The fact of breathing, just breathing, took up all the days and nights." Hammett could no longer live alone, and they both knew it, so he spent the last four years of his life with Hellman. "Not all of that time was easy, and some of it very bad", she wrote, but, "guessing death was not too far away, I would try for something to have afterwards."

Death

Hammett died in Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan on January 10, 1961, of lung cancer, diagnosed just two months before.
A veteran of both world wars, Hammett was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

Legacy

Hammett's relationship with Lillian Hellman was portrayed in the 1977 film Julia. Jason Robards won an Oscar for his depiction of Hammett, and Jane Fonda was nominated for her portrayal of Lillian Hellman.
Hammett was the subject of a 1982 prime time PBS biography, The Case of Dashiell Hammett, that won a Peabody Award and a special Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America.
Frederic Forrest portrayed Hammett semifictionally as the protagonist in the 1982 film Hammett, based on the novel of the same name by Joe Gores.
Sam Shepard played Hammett in the 1999 Emmy-nominated biographical television film Dash and Lilly along with Judy Davis as Hellman.

Series

In this list, the two letter designations just before the description indicate that the story was included in particular collections of stories, as listed below. Neither the list of collected books, nor the list of which collected books the stories are in, are complete or comprehensive.
  1. "Arson Plus" . Suspecting insurance fraud, the Op investigates the burning of an isolated farmhouse and its reclusive inhabitant.
  2. "Crooked Souls" . A bullying lumber baron has lost a daughter to kidnappers, but the Op isn't convinced—of anything.
  3. "Slippery Fingers" . The Op and the police search for the owner of the fingerprints strewn over the scene of a gory murder.
  4. "It" . A reckless businessman plots theft and elopement, then disappears, until the Op locates him in a pitch-dark basement.
  5. "Bodies Piled Up" . Posing as a killer hunting a killer works too well as the Op gets caught in a crossfire.
  6. "The Tenth Clew" . A rich man is killed with a typewriter and the Op gets dumped into San Francisco Bay.
  7. "Night Shots" . In a lonely country house, the Op investigates pot-shots aimed at a sick old scoundrel.
  8. "Zigzags of Treachery" . When a prominent surgeon commits suicide and an unknown wife shows up, the Op and other agents follow suspect after suspect to untangle a decades-old conspiracy.
  9. "One Hour" . In a busy hour, a hit-and-run leads the Op to a print shop where he's mobbed.
  10. "The House in Turk Street" . Routine questions on a quiet street tumble the Op into a den of thieves.
  11. "The Girl with Silver Eyes" . Following on "Turk Street", a dead poet leads the Op to a dark night's shootout outside a rough-and-tumble roadhouse.
  12. "Women, Politics and Murder" . The Op shuttles between a hysterical wife and a dead-pan mistress, knowing both are liars, to learn who killed a city contractor.
  13. "The Golden Horseshoe" . The Op finds a hophead husband who ran away to Tijuana, but the wife he left behind turns up dead.
  14. "Who Killed Bob Teal?" . A fellow Continental detective was killed while shadowing a suspect, so the Op and a city cop retrace his steps.
  15. "Mike, Alec or Rufus?" . The cops are stumped by a robber who ran into an apartment house and didn't come out, but not the Op.
  16. "The Whosis Kid" . On a hunch, the Op trails a stick-up artist and worms his way into a "double-, triple- and septuple-cross".
  17. "The Scorched Face" . Hunting two missing daughters, the Op uncovers a rash of debutante suicides and disappearances.
  18. "Corkscrew" . The Op is appointed Deputy Sheriff of Corkscrew, Arizona, where cowboys keep getting killed.
  19. "Dead Yellow Women" . The Op braves the dark alleys of Chinatown to learn why a seaside mansion was raided by Asian strangers.
  20. The Gutting of Couffignal . On a wealthy summer island, the Continental Op tries to thwart an invasion when the lights go off and machine guns fire up.
  21. "Creeping Siamese" . A man dies in the Continental office without revealing who knifed him. The Op connects the crime with the victim's decade-old adventures in Asia.
  22. "The Big Knock-Over" . An army of imported gangsters raided two banks, and the Op dodges bullets and fists to find the mastermind.
  23. "$106,000 Blood Money" . In the aftermath of "The Big Knockover", the Op hunts the double-crossing mastermind, as do "half the crooks in the country".
  24. "The Main Death" . The Op ignores a suicide to get back $20,000 - at gun point.
  25. "The Cleansing of Poisonville". Summoned to "Poisonville", the Op finds his client was murdered. The dead man's father rules the town, so the Op strikes a deal to clean up the town "with a free hand". Dodging double-crossing cops and crooks, he exposes the murderer. And refuses to call off the "cleansing".
  26. "Crime Wanted - Male or Female". Stirring up trouble, the Op un-fixes a fight and investigates a year-old "suicide" of the police chief's brother, just as someone dynamites the City Hall holding cells. "Poisonville was beginning to boil out under the lid."
  27. "Dynamite". A raid on a bootlegger's roadhouse makes the cops miss a bank robbery. As the mob ruling "Poisonville" gathers for a "peace conference", the Op tosses "dynamite" that exposes multiple frame-ups and shatters the partnership.
  28. "The 19th Murder". Getting "blood simple as the natives", the Op wakes to find he may have ice-picked his female informer, so runs from the law while steering the mobs into a final battle for control of "Poisonville".
  29. "This King Business" . Seeking a wayward son in the Balkan country of Muravia, the Op learns the boy is funding a kingly coup.
  30. "Black Lives"
  31. "The Hollow Temple"
  32. "Black Honeymoon"
  33. "Black Riddle"
  34. "Fly Paper" . The Op finds a "wandering daughter" who liked rough "yeggs" and ended up dead.
  35. "The Farewell Murder" . The Op struggles to prove a vendetta-bent sadist wasn't nine hours away at the time of a grisly killing.
  36. "Death and Company" . Kidnappers collect ransom money from under the noses of the police, then kill their hostage. Death catches the culprit before the Op can.
Sam Spade
  1. The Maltese Falcon
  2. "A Man Called Spade"
  3. "Too Many Have Lived"
  4. "They Can Only Hang you Once"
  5. "A Knife will Cut for anybody"
Nick and Nora Charles
  1. The First Thin Man
  2. The Thin Man
  3. After the Thin Man
  4. Another Thin Man
  5. "Sequel to the Thin Man"

    Other short stories

Short fiction

Hammett authored only one produced screenplay:
For four other films, he received original story credits, but the screenplays were written by others:
In 2011, magazine editor Andrew Gulli found fifteen previously unknown short stories by Dashiell Hammett in the archives of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin.

Biography and criticism