Background

Samuel Dashiell Hammett was born on May 27, 1894 on a farm in St. Mary's County, Maryland. His parents were Richard Thomas Hammett and 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.

Education

Samuel Dashiell Hammett's only schooling was at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, which he left at fourteen after less than one year.

Career

Samuel Dashiell Hammett worked sporadically at odd jobs, including stints as freight clerk, stevedore, and railroad employee. At twenty he joined the Pinkerton National Detective Agency; his assignments ranged across the country and introduced him to the world of crime. In 1918-1919 he served in the Ambulance Corps and was stationed near Baltimore. He contracted tuberculosis, the first of a series of pulmonary illnesses which eventually caused his death.

In 1921 Hammett was employed by the Pinkerton branch in San Francisco, a city he called home for the next eight years. After a few months he quit the agency. Fearing that ill health would cut his life short and driven by a desire to write, he retreated to a cheap single room and wrote verses and sketches.

During 1922-1926, part of his support came from producing advertising copy for a local jeweler. Hammett now began to draw from his experiences with Pinkerton and the low life of San Francisco. In late 1922 he began to be published in the Smart Set and other journals, including Black Mask, a popular pulp-fiction magazine. In October 1923 Black Mask printed the first of many stories about the Continental Op, the prototype of the hard-boiled investigator most often associated with his work.

Between 1922 and 1934 Hammett produced over seventy short crime tales and was acknowledged as a master of the form. By 1927 he had also begun to develop serials in Black Mask, which he later published as novels. The first, featuring the Continental Op, were Red Harvest and The Dain Curse (both 1929). In 1930 he introduced Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon; Ned Beaumont appeared in The Glass Key (1931), and Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man (1934). Hammett had moved to New York City in 1929 but soon settled in Hollywood to work on film scripts. He continued to live in the self-destructive pattern set in the 1920's: periods of concentrated work were interspersed with bouts of drinking, womanizing, gambling, and reckless spending.

Hammett's career was meteoric and lucrative; but by 1934 most of his creative energy was spent. The decline was signalized by his next project, the story for a syndicated comic strip, Secret Agent X-9. He continued to do movie work, the most important of which was his screenplay for Watch on the Rhine (1943), based on Hellman's play.

Through frequent reprintings of his work, Hammett's name remained well known after 1934. His reputation was also enhanced by the film versions of a number of his stories, most notably The Thin Man (1934), its several sequels, and The Maltese Falcon (1941), with Humphrey Bogart. In September 1942 Hammett, at forty-eight, enlisted in the Army Signal Corps. He was stationed in the Aleutians, where he edited a paper and wrote the text of a pamphlet, The Battle of the Aleutians (1944). He was discharged in September 1945. Although Hammett developed three radio shows based on his fictional characters, in the postwar years he devoted most of his energy to politics. He became an official of the Civil Rights Congress (considered subversive by the attorney general) and taught at the Jefferson School of Social Sciences in New York City (1946-1947). In 1951 he was haled before the New York State Supreme Court as a trustee of the bail bond fund of the Civil Rights Congress. He refused to testify, was convicted for contempt of court, and was imprisoned from July to December 1951.

In April 1953 he appeared before Senator Joseph McCarthy's Subcommittee on Investigations. His increasing notoriety put him on the Hollywood blacklist, and his income began to shrink. The final blow was a judgment against him by the Internal Revenue Service for back taxes of over $140, 000; his earnings were attached for the rest of his life.

From 1956 on he was cared for by Lillian Hellman; he eventually developed lung cancer and died in New York City.

Achievements

• Samuel Dashiell Hammett is 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. " He created several well-known fictional characters, including Sam Spade from The Maltese Falcon, Nick and Nora Charles from The Thin Man, and the Continental Op from Red Harvest and The Dain Curse.
  
  The 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 detective fiction, mystery thrillers and film-noir.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Arson Plus

    ( "Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropp...)

  • Too Many Have Lived: Black Mask Audio Magazine

    (One of only three Sam Spade short stories, this one invol...)

  • The Glass Key

    (A one-time detective and master of deft understatement, D...)

  • Woman in the Dark

    (A young, frightened, foreign woman appears at the door of...)

  • The Thin Man

    (258 pp.)

  • The Thin Man
  • A man called Spade and other stories: Private detective mystery stories (A Dell mystery)
  • The Maltese Falcon

  • book

  • They Can Only Hang You Once

Politics

Political interests - especially the antifascism which engaged many writers of the time - were now occupying much of Hammett's time. He became a Marxist and by 1937 had joined the Communist party. His left-wing associations would bring him much trouble, but although often critical of party policies, he never wavered in his commitment.

Views

Quotations: “The problem with putting two and two together is that sometimes you get four, and sometimes you get twenty-two. ”

“He looked rather pleasantly, like a blonde satan. ”

“You're drunk, and I'm drunk, and I'm just exactly drunk enough to tell you anything you want to know. That's the kind of girl I am. If I like a person, I'll tell them anything they want to know. Just ask me. Go ahead, ask me. ”

“If you have a story that seems worth telling, and you think you can tell it worthily, then the thing for you to do is to tell it, regardless of whether it has to do with sex, sailors or mounted policemen. ”

“I don t mind a reasonable amount of trouble. ”

“I haven't laughed so much over anything since the hogs ate my kid brother. ”

“The people who lie the most are nearly always the clumsiest at it, and they're easier to fool with lies than most people, too. You'd think they'd be on the look-out for lies, but they seem to be the very ones that will believe almost anything at all. ”

“My way of learning is to heave a wild and unpredictable monkey-wrench into the machinery. ”

“He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him see the works. ”

“I distrust a man that says when. If he's got to be careful not to drink to much it's because he's not to be trusted when he does. ”

“The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter. ”

“The face she made at me was probably meant for a smile. Whatever it was, it beat me. I was afraid she'd do it again, so I surrendered. ”

Personality

Hammett had given up drinking in 1948 after a doctor's warning, but his pulmonary ailments left him physically debilitated.

Connections

In 1920-1921, while being treated for tuberculosis in hospitals on the West Coast, Hammett met a nurse, Josephine A. Dolan, whom he married on December 27, 1920. 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 TB, she and the children should not live with him full-time. Dolan rented a home in San Francisco, California, where Hammett would visit on weekends. The marriage soon fell apart, but he continued to financially support his wife and daughters with the income he made from his writing.

In November 1930 he met Lillian Hellman, then in film work and later a noted playwright. Their affair was stormy and punctuated by periods of living apart and by the taking of other lovers; but it lasted until Hammett's death.

Father:

Richard Thomas Hammett

Mother:

Annie Bond (Dashiell) Hammett

Spouse:

Josephine A. (Dolan) Hammett

Brother:

Richard Thomas Hammett Jr.

Sister:

Aronia Hammett

Daughter:

Josephine Hammett

Daughter:

Mary Jane Hammett

Partner:

Lillian Florence "Lilly" Hellman

She was an American dramatist and screenwriter known for her success as a playwright on Broadway, as well as her left-wing sympathies and political activism.

References

• Dashiell Hammett: Parcours d'une oeuvre
• Private Investigations: The Novels of Dashiell Hammett
• A Dashiell Hammett Companion:
• List of the Original Appearances of Dashiell Hammett's Magazine Work
• Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler: A Checklist and Bibliography of Their Paperback Appearances
• Prototypen der amerikanischen Kriminalerzählung: Die Romane und Kurzgeschichten Carroll John Dalys und Dashiell Hammetts (Regensburger Arbeiten zur ... Languages and Cultures) (German Edition)
• Dashiell Hammett, a Descriptive Bibliography (Pittsburgh Series in Bibliography) by Richard Layman (1979-08-30)