Hard-boiled Dashiell Hammett

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.

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.