American author Dashiell Hammett wrote only five novels during his entire career, but with those novels and more than 80 short stories he defined the crime fiction genre known as hard-boiled.
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| Dashiell Hammett |
His
character Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon epitomizes the tough, cynical PI,
perhaps lacking a moral compass but possessing a code of honor all his own. In
the novel, Spade pursues the murderer of Jeffrey Archer not because he liked
the guy, but because the victim was Spade’s partner. And he says in the novel
that when your partner is killed a PI has to be something about it. Spade epitomizes
the urban PI and became the model for numerous novels, television shows and
movies over decades.
The
Maltese Falcon (1930) enjoyed widespread success in print and with the 1941 film
starring Humphrey Bogart as Spade, who seemed to have walked off the pages
of the book into the movie. Hammett’s four other novels include: Red Harvest
(1929) The Dain Curse (1929), The Glass Key (1931) and The Thin Man (1934).
As a
writer Hammett drew on his experience as an operative for the Pinkerton
Detective Agency, which he joined at the age of twenty. He handled crime, murder, and political
corruption with crisp, terse prose, fast-moving story lines and dialogue
replete with gangster slang.
The
one exception to his most hard-boiled approach is The Thin Man. Nick and Nora
Charles are a charming, urbane couple, who might have been living during the height
of the depression but inhabited a world of glamour and wealth. A New York Times
article (August 8, 2005) pointed out that perhaps Hammett and his publishers
understood that readers needed escapism, wanting to read about “penthouses not
breadlines.” The Thin Man, like The Maltese Falcon was a huge success and led
to the film series starring William Powell and Myrna Loy. The dialogue
is fast, snappy and sprinkled with double entendre.
The
writer Raymond Chandler paid Hammett one of highest tributes an author can
receive. In his book The Simple Act of Murder, Chandler wrote: “He (Hammett)
was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he never did over and over again what only
the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have
been written before.”
In
many ways Hammett’s career was stymied by illness -- he suffered from both
tuberculosis and emphysema -- by heavy drinking and by his entanglement with the
McCarthy era hunt for Communists.
At the
time of his death in 1961 in New York City, Hammett had not published for a
decade and was nearly a forgotten writer. Today, most literary critics agree that
Hammett was one of the most influential American writers of the twentieth
century.
