Word: hammett
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Everyone knows about private detectives. Few realize that these tough-talking loners, made familiar through countless novels, films and television serials, were mostly cloned from a prototype invented during the 1920s by Samuel Dashiell Hammett. He is not a familiar figure, and in fact never was. His trade was writing mysteries; he kept the plot of his own life story largely to himself. He confided little to his lovers and less to his friends. Legal authorities, interested in his political activities with leftists and Communists, got nothing at all. Hammett's life began and ended in obscurity. For about...
Biographer Richard Layman has gathered most of the clues to this puzzling case. He got no help from Playwright Lillian Hellman, Hammett's friend and frequent companion during the last 30 years of his life, but this handicap is not crippling. Hammett had done his best work by the time he met Hellman. The crucial years, when he raised pulp writing to the level of art, were already behind...
Born in 1894, Hammett grew up in Baltimore and quit high school after one semester to help bolster his family's income. He held some odd jobs and then joined Pinkerton's National Detective Agency in 1915 at a salary of $21 a week. Pinkerton's kept detective reports anonymous, so exactly what Hammett did in the line of duty cannot be checked. He later claimed that he was once sent out to find the thief who had stolen a Ferris wheel. He left Pinkerton's after three years to enlist in the Army, but less...
...fiction filled a gap between the elegant puzzles of the Conan Doyle school and the dumb gore and violence of the pulp magazines. Typical Hammett detectives, like the Continental op and Sam Spade, got their hands dirty but kept their minds alert. They often found that those who had hired them were criminal or corrupt; they prowled, lonely paladins of justice, through stark landscapes of betrayal and greed. Hammett's stories paid the rent. His novels, especially The Maltese Falcon (1930) and The Glass Key (1931), brought him an international reputation...
Even while critics hailed him as Hemingway's equal, Hammett was losing his drive and his touch. He discovered that he could live handsomely off subsidiary rights. The Thin Man (1934) was his last and most careless novel; it ultimately brought him almost $1 million from film and radio serializations. Hollywood kept recycling his material; the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon, with Humphrey Bogart and Sidney Greenstreet, was the third film based on that book in ten years. Hammett had always shown a streak of to-hell-with-it independence, and success made him increasingly reckless. He partied...