In all, he wrote only a handful of novels, concentrating his efforts on short stories and screenplays.
His first novel, Red Harvest, was published in 1929, followed by The Dain Curse that same year, and The Maltese Falcon the year after. After that, he published detective stories regularly. His first short story was published in 1923. He also worked part-time for the Pinkerton agency, when his health allowed. From 1922 to 1926, most of his living was made writing copy for advertisements. Hammett married Josephine Dolan, a nurse he met while recuperating, in 1921. Returning to civilian life, he settled in San Francisco, the city that has become associated with him through his works. During the war, he contracted influenza, which affected his health for the rest of his life. Hammett served as an ambulance clerk during World War I. Eventually, he became an operative for the Pinkerton Detective Agency, a nationwide franchise. That led to a series of positions, including store clerk, newsboy, machine operator, and stevedore. He attended the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, dropping out at age fourteen to help his family financially. Today he is respected as one of America's most important and original authors.īorn in 1894 in Saint Mary's County, Maryland, Samuel Dashiell Hammett grew up in Philadelphia and then Baltimore.
In his lifetime Hammett was considered an excellent detective writer, producing five novels, over eighty short stories, and numerous scripts for Hollywood and radio. A former detective himself, he wrote about the business with a sharp eye for procedural details, but he also showed a knack for engaging dialogue and understanding of the depths of the human soul. Hammett is considered one of those rare writers whose critical esteem has exceeded the small genre in which he wrote. Throughout the decades, countless writers have copied Hammett's themes and motifs, seldom able to come anywhere near his near-perfect blend of cynicism and excitement. In this book, Hammett invented the hardboiled private eye genre, introducing many of the elements that readers have come to expect from detective stories: the mysterious, alluring woman whose love may be a trap the search for an exotic icon that people are willing to kill for the detective who plays on both sides of the law to find the truth, but who ultimately is driven by a strong moral code and enough gunplay and beatings to make readers share the detective's sense of danger. Readers who have never picked up Dashiell Hammett's 1930 detective novel The Maltese Falcon nor viewed the classic 1941 film adaptation, which follows the novel practically word-for-word, might feel a strong sense of familiarity when they first encounter the story.
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