Word: hammetts
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...Hammett turned out a ton of these kinds of stories, before The Maltese Falcon was made into three different movie versions and made him famous. After that, he went out to Hollywood and lived the big life for a while, went broke, ran off to New York, lived in a hotel managed by Nathanial West and wrote The Thin Man--the book that would make him his second fortune. Nick Charles is the hero of The Thin Man, and he and his wife, Nora, are witty, urbane detectives who showed how much the sensibilities of the country had grown since...
...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...
...York Hammett drank with Faulkner, drinking so much that they often passed out together at swank parties and were steered to the coat room so as not to embarrass the guests. This was in the mid-thirties, and Hammett was at the height of his work--and of his political calling. Ever since Red Harvest his upbringing and sojourns among the scum that preyed on the poor had made him a devoted Marxist and remained devoted, giving time, money and writing to groups which sought to stamp out anti-Semitism and Fascism...
...surprisingly, then, he begged the Army to take him into World War II. Then in his fifties, he still served for two years. Yet when he got out, and before he could go back to writing--the Red Scare was here. Hammett was called in front of numerous committees to talk about his Communist activities. He spent 26 weeks in jail once for refusing to cooperate with one such committee and though the sentence was only for contempt of court, the time in prison irrevocably destroyed his health. Then, he was out again, only to be hauled in front...