Word: hammett
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Hammett wrote for people with a sharp, aggressive attitude toward life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street. Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish. He put these people down on paper as they were and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes. He wrote scenes that...
...Hammett was hardly unqualified. He had worked on and off, both before and after the first world war, for the famous Pinkerton detective agency; an agency which had started in the mid-19th century as a sort of freelance secret service, and by the 20s was the single largest and most famous private detective agency in the world. Their labors on behalf of big business, and their often distressing violent strikebreaking now gives the Pinkertons a hated name through much of the United States--but that was still only a small part of their business. Most of what they...
...probably remains, a strange lifestyle and one very close to the self-imposed exile one would need to be a writer. Not much is known about Hammett's work for Pinkerton, aside from the fact that he was involved in the strange case of tracking down a man who had stolen a Ferris Wheel, and that he was involved in the most famous of the 1920s West Coast celebrity trials--the case of Fatty Arbuckle, in which Arbuckle, a famous film comedian, was accused of raping a woman and subsequently killing her by the sheer weight of his enormous bulk...
...there in San Francisco that Hammett was forced to give up his detective work because of ill health. It was also there that he started working on his detective stories--the most famous of which, the Continental Op stories--were to make him a wealthy and famous man. The Continental Op, of course had all the qualities of a Great American Hero. He was cynical, callous, and streetwise. He was always making seedy jokes, but he harbored the heart of the romantic. Hammett's Op never had a name, but you could never forget the voice. In some ways...
...spoke in the voice of the nostalgically hard-bitten. As Hammett wrote of corporate thugs in Red Harvest...