Dashiell Hammett is universally recognised as having pioneered hard-boiled crime fiction as a literary form, having written one or two or maybe three or four English-language novels that command the attention of serious readers, as well as being an early American practitioner of literary modernism and literary existentialism.
And for all that, he is still arguably underestimated as an author. The reasons for this are simple: Hammett wrote crime fiction mostly published initially in pulp magazines; his audience for much of his career was decidedly lowbrow; and his subjects were often though not always denizens of the mean streets. It took a while for the American literati to accept the fact that great literature need not be confined to ordered communities.
He dropped out of high school when he was 15 to help support his family. Three years later, he took leave to join the army, serving as a stateside ambulance driver in the medical corps during World War I, transporting soldiers returning from Europe with Spanish Influenza, which he contracted. He received a medical discharge in , and, after a year, attempted to return to the detective business in the Far West, but he was too ill to persevere.
Within two years, Hammett was hospitalised with tuberculosis, fell in love with his nurse, fathered a child, and moved to San Francisco to get married. Still limited by his health but with a family to support, he turned to the only option available to him: he wrote about what he knew and cared about — crime, the people who commit it, and those who try to stop it.
Black Mask was founded in by H. Initially Black Mask printed adventure stories without distinction. Hammett was a hit with Black Mask readers from the beginning, writing stories distinguished by their believability and their emphasis on the mechanics of detection.
But Black Mask was going through a growth spurt, and the new editors — part-timers without serious editing credentials — were formula-bound. Action, they insisted, was the key to improving sales; violent action was better, and a sprinkling of sex only added to the appeal.
As a new writer dependent on sales to feed his family, Hammett gave his editors what they wanted, even as he honed his skills with more carefully crafted characters and more complex plots. That fall, he sneaked out of the Pierre Hotel, leaving a thousand-dollar tab, and checked into a fleabag joint managed by Nathanael West, who rented out rooms to writers on the cheap; by May, , he had finished the manuscript.
The movie version, released the following year, starts rolling with the same photo of the author, looming high and handsome on the screen. If anyone appeared to be that man anymore, it was Lillian Hellman. In , Hammett suggested to Hellman that she try writing a play based on a story in a recent true-crimes collection, about two schoolteachers ruined by the lies of a vicious pupil.
By her own account, she owed much of her success to Hammett, who continued to read and advise and who sometimes demanded that she tear things up and start all over—so much did he know, and care. During his lifetime, it would seem that Hellman took the only revenge that she could, by means of the art that Hammett had taught her to perfect.
It would not have been difficult, at the time, for the world to overlook this silence, in the continuing swirl of glamour and secondhand success. It was the last year that Hammett commanded such easy and enormous sums, which was just as well, as a matter of principle if not of economics, for by this time he was almost undoubtedly a member of the Communist Party. But it was more likely the Spanish Civil War—and the intrepid involvement of Hemingway, among others—that offered him a chance to assert a moral course in the midst of his spectacular dissolution.
Moreover, his new political sympathies took nothing away from his national allegiance, and when the next opportunity for heroism arose, in the fall of , this forty-eight-year-old alcoholic with scars on his lungs and an F. These were to be his happiest years, too, as he recalled them, although he saw no combat and faced no tests of courage.
Nor did Hammett thrive on male camaraderie. But in the Army Hammett seems to have finally found peace. He was stationed in the Aleutian Islands—the farthest he was ever to travel—and his days consisted of tasks that were easy to fulfill, and of writing letters that fulfilled his personal obligations with a similar ease.
In , he told her that if he could stay on there he would be able to write a new novel; but after his transfer to the base near Anchorage, with its distracting bars and brothels, he gave it up. Cain and Ross Macdonald after him—paid tribute to Hammett but vigorously distinguished himself from his example. Mystery aficionados may rattle off the easy distinctions between Hammett and Chandler—San Francisco versus Los Angeles, Sam Spade versus Philip Marlowe, the stylistically bare versus the near baroque—but the essential difference is that Chandler displayed the recognizable goals of a gifted novelist with a lively interest in psychology and detail, while Hammett, at his best, was unlike any recognizable sort of writer at all.
The door popped away from us. We went through—down a flight of steps—rolling, snowballing down—until a cement floor stopped us. I stood up. He stood up. We seemed to be dividing the evening between falling on the floor and getting up from the floor.
What sort of style is this, poised between blank verse and slapstick? There is a strange sort of justice in the fact that the truculent antihero brought into existence by the traumas of the first World War should have provided the materials for the most swooningly romantic if no less truculent hero of the Second, and Hammett, in playing his part in this complex creation, performed a national service more significant than anything he did in the Army.
Camus, dark and handsome in his trenchcoat, told people how pleased he was whenever his resemblance to Humphrey Bogart was pointed out. At Christmas, , just a year after the adorably drunken William Powell took his final turn as Nick Charles, doctors at Lenox Hill told Hammett that his choices had narrowed to two: he could either give up drinking or die.
When Hellman later told him how he had defied all expectations, his reported reaction was wide-eyed surprise: he had given his word. Whatever he had used the liquor to drown had long gone under, and there was nothing left but time.
This was privileged information: the C. There is significant doubt that Hammett even knew the names that he refused to reveal. He himself never said one way or the other, and he pleaded the fifth to every question asked. The outcome was, as he had to know—given the example of others who had testified—almost inevitable: a verdict of contempt of court, and a sentence of six months in jail.
Lillian Hellman said she found it irritating when Hammett told people, as he always did, that his time in jail had not been bad at all: the conversation was no sillier than at a New York cocktail party, he liked to say; the food was awful but one could drink milk; and it was possible to be proud of work well done even when that work was cleaning toilets.
In fact, the months that Hammett spent in jail, mostly at the Federal Correctional Institution near Ashland, Kentucky, entirely broke his health; he was fifty-seven when he went in, and an old man when he came out. And his punishment was far from over. All radio shows based on his work were cancelled, and his books went out of print. The I. In , he was called before a Senate committee, chaired by Joseph McCarthy, that investigated the purchase of books for State Department libraries overseas.
Lung cancer was diagnosed in late , and he died just a few months later, in January, Hellman has written movingly of rubbing his shoulder when the pain came on, pretending it was only arthritis and hoping that he thought so, too.
According to Hammett, he was based on what all the detectives he had worked with would like to be — a shifty and hard person who is able to take care of himself no matter the situation and who can get the best of anybody.
The film is about a private detective investigating three people after the famous eponymous jeweled falcon. This portrayal was marked by his short stature and beige prose heavy depiction thus setting the most followed framework for film noir although it was very different from the portrayal of the character of Sam Spade in the novel.
There interactions are marked by smart banter and sharp repartee. In the novel, Nick is a former private detective married to wealthy heiress, Nora who herself was inspired by Lillian Hellman. Nick himself takes many cues from Hammett. The film adaptation was welcomed heartily by the public and was a resounding success. As a result, five sequels to the movie were produced while there was only one novel ever written. The films themselves revolutionized several aspects of portrayal of married couples in films.
This character remains unnamed throughout all the stories that he appears in. The Continental Op was the definitive character for the archetype of a hard- boiled private detective which was then developed into characters like Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe by Raymond Chandler among others.
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