Word: hammett
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When Dashiell Hammett returned from World War I--almost completely disabled with tuberculosis--detective fiction was still a relatively new, and relatively genteel thing. The roots of the form don't go back very far in American literature. It was Poe whose "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," started the whol thing in 1841. This was the first of three stories Poe was to write which featured C. Auguste Dupin, an amateur investigator who solved crimes through an extraordinary talent for analytic thinking. The stories were not terribly popular in the United States; indeed, Poe himself was not very popular...
...into this scene that Hammett came. As Chandler said...
...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...