Hammett, Dashiell

HAMMETT, DASHIELL (1894–1961). Detective fiction owes its existence to the urban, industrialized society of the late nineteenth century. Earlier, Edgar Allan Poe had used several stories to show the wear and tear modernization exacted upon American culture, and such neo-Gothic radicals as George Lippard framed their novels around the investigation of crime. The last decades of the century saw the appearance of Cap Collier and other urban heroes wrestling with corruption and communism. Notwithstanding the politically ambiguous Sherlock Holmes at the center of Anglo-American detective fiction, detectives remained almost always the conservative defenders of existing laws and property.

Public disillusionment following the World War I changed the detective story forever. A group of writers around the new pulp publication Black Mask (1921–1954) “put murder back where it belonged,” out of the suites of the cerebral master sleuth and into the streets with the cynical, hard-working private eye. In this version, the evil of society itself confronts the detective, whose story becomes the vehicle for a penetrating social commentary.

The most important writer for Black Mask was Dashiell Hammett, the Left’s greatest detective novelist of any generation and also the novelist whose works were most successfully adapted to “Golden Age” film. The son of a clerk in Saint Marys County, Maryland, Hammett grew up both wild and intensely self-educated. He joined the Pinkerton Detective Agency, famous for its strike-breaking, in 1915. According to some accounts, he witnessed and even took part in the lynching of Wobbly militant Frank Little in Butte, Montana, in 1917. Embittered by his experience, Hammett joined the army, married a nurse, and decided to become a writer after seeing Black Mask. Novels and stories followed swiftly in the second half of the 1920s, including Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, and The Glass Key. Enormously popular, he was drawn to Hollywood, where he worked on various scripts and drank heavily. He also left his wife, moving in with Lillian Hellman and moving leftward with her into political activity. According to mutual friends of the two, Hammett also began rewriting Hellman’s work as his own literary inspiration dried up.

Hammett, working mostly behind the scenes in Hollywood, would remain famous for his literary celebrity. His writing impacted not only US but world crime literature. The crucial unknown factor of the mysteries that he helped invent as a genre can be found in the “fix,” the dilemma faced by the strong-willed protagonist who faces a darkened world with an optimism of the individual will. The dominance of business ideology and its inherent corruption, the exploitation of labor as the driving force of profit, cost him almost everything, as havoc explodes around him. In The Red Harvest, some two hundred named characters meet their death. Here, Butte, site of a Pinkerton Bureau massacre of miners, is known as “Personville” so that it can be pronounced “Poisonville,” where organized labor has been crushed, leaving victims hopelessly unable to defend themselves. “Dead Yellow Women,” a story of illegal immigration set in San Francisco, similarly revolves around the plight of Chinese women immigrants, part of the illegal passage of goods, including human flesh. The Thin Man, from which many successful films would be adapted, continually reveals the manipulation of less powerful people by more powerful ones.

Despite the aesthetic and box office success of Watch on the Rhine, for which he took playwriting and screenwriting co-credit, The Maltese Falcon and the Thin Man series, The Glass Key and several other film adaptations, Hammett’s best energies went into left-wing politics for the rest of his life. Enlisting overaged in the service, he edited a militantly anti-fascist GI newspaper from the Aleutian Islands. After the World War II he taught at the Jefferson School and gave countless speeches, served as president of the Civil Rights Congress, and donated large sums of money to left-wing causes. Imprisoned for contempt of Congress after his refusal to testify, blacklisted from Hollywood, and sued for back taxes, Hammett spent the rest of his life in physical decline. Since his death, he has been restored to the status of the “hard-boiled” detective novel’s key innovator, the stylization and plotting of his work the inspiration for countless books and movies.

Hammett, Jo. A Daughter Remembers. New York: Da Capo Press, 2001.

Johnson, Diane. Dashiell Hammett: A Life. New York. Ballantine Books, 1983.

Layman, Richard, ed. The Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett. New York: Counterpoint Press, 2002.

Shaw, Joseph Thompson, ed. The Hard-boiled Omnibus: Early Stories from Black Mask. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1948.

Dashiell Hammett Family Papers. Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. University Libraries. University of South Carolina. https://archives.library.sc.edu/repositories/5/resources/660