Dashiell Hammett - Rotten Tomatoes Celebrity Profile

Biography

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Samuel Dashiell Hammett (May 27, 1894 – January 10, 1961) was an American author of hardboiled detective novels and short stories. Among the enduring characters he created are Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon), Nick and Nora Charles (The Thin Man), and the Continental Op (Red Harvest, The Dain Curse).

Early life

Hammett was born in St. Mary's County in Southern Maryland on the Western Shore of Maryland. His parents were Richard Thomas Hammett and his wife Annie Bond Dashiell (the name being an Americanization of the French De Chiel; the Dashiells are an old Maryland family; it is pronounced "daSHEEL" not "dash'l"). He grew up in Philadelphia and Baltimore. "Dash" left school when he was 13 years old and held several jobs before working for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. He served as an operative for the Pinkerton Agency from 1915 to 1921, with time off to serve stateside in the Motor Ambulance Corps. However, the agency's role in union strike-breaking eventually disillusioned him. In Butte, Montana, Frank Little, a leading organizer for the radical Industrial Workers of the World union, was viciously murdered. Pinkerton agents were thought to be involved, although the crime was never solved.

During World War I, Hammett enlisted in the U.S. Army and served in the Motor Ambulance Corps. However he became ill with the Spanish flu and later contracted tuberculosis. He spent the war as a patient in a hospital in America.

After the war, he turned to drinking, advertising, and eventually, writing. His work at the detective agency provided him the inspiration for his writings.

Hammett's Strengths

In The Simple Art of Murder, Hammett's successor in the field, Raymond Chandler, summarized Hammett's accomplishments as follows:

Hammett was the ace performer... He is said to have lacked heart; yet the story he himself thought the most of is the record of a man's devotion to a friend. He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he 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.

Hammett's Weaknesses

Hammett's short story output, as opposed to his later novels, is very uneven. In his short stories he dwells heavily on the cliches of 1920's pulp fiction, especially on the theme of the Super-Crook, or Master Criminal.

Hammett has super-criminals both male ($106,000 Blood Money and The Big Knockover) and female ("The Girl with the Silver Eyes", "The House on Turk Street"). He amusingly depicts the Fu-Manchu like crime boss of Chinatown in "Dead Yellow Women". In "Nightmare Town" he has a criminal gang which plots to burn down an entire city for insurance reasons. In "The Gutting of Coufignal" he has a White Russian general who leads a military style operation to rob the cream of California society, gathered together on an isolated island for a wedding. In $106,000 Blood Money he has a super-crook who attacks not just a single bank but the entire financial district of San Francisco, with the help of hundreds of other criminals gathered together from all over the U.S. Then the super-crook turns around and wipes out most of his helpers in order to keep the loot for himself. In The Dain Curse, a mad poet's quest for revenge on a woman who has scorned him, leads directly or indirectly to the deaths or maimings of more than a dozen people. Another character in The Dain Curse, a cult leader, has convinced himself that he is the Lord Jehovah incarnate, and when the Op barely manages to kill him after shooting him seven times and stabbing him in the throat, he thinks to himself "Thank God he wasn't really God".

The above is not intended to detract from Hammett's considerable accomplishments as a writer, but to indicate the disparity between his early work and his mature novels.

Later years

In 1931, Hammett embarked on a thirty-year affair with playwright Lillian Hellman. He wrote his final novel in 1934, and devoted much of the rest of his life to left-wing activism. He was a strong anti-fascist throughout the 1930s and in 1937 he joined the American Communist Party.

In 1942, Hammett enlisted in the United States Army after the United States entered World War II. Though he was a disabled veteran of WWI, and a victim of tuberculosis, he pulled strings in order to be admitted into service. He spent most of WWII as a sergeant in the Army in the Aleutian Islands, where he edited an Army newspaper. He came out of the war suffering from emphysema.

After World War II, Hammett joined the New York Civil Rights Congress, a leftist organization that was considered by some to be a communist front. When four communists related to the organization were arrested, Hammett raised money for their bail bond. When the accused fled, he was subpoenaed about their whereabouts, and in 1951, he was imprisoned for 6 months for contempt of court after refusing to provide information to the court. "I cannot change my consciousness to follow this year's fashions", he said.

During the 1950s he was investigated by the Congress of the United States (see McCarthyism). Although he testified to his own activities, he refused to divulge the identities of American communists, and was blacklisted. His refusal to testify at the trial of four communists accused of conspiracy also led to him being sent to prison for five months. [1]

Hammett died in Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, of cancer of the lungs, diagnosed just two months before his death. As a veteran of two World Wars, he was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

In 1975, writer Joe Gores published Hammett, a novel in which a fictional version of the writer was sought out by an old Pinkerton associate to help him solve a case that drags him through the seamy underbelly of 1936 San Francisco. In 1982, a film version directed by Wim Wenders was released.

Works

Red Harvest (published on February 1, 1929)
The Dain Curse (July 19, 1929)
The Maltese Falcon (February 14, 1930)
The Glass Key (April 24, 1931)
The Thin Man (January 8, 1934)
Woman in the Dark: A Novel of Dangerous Romance (published in Liberty magazine in three installments in 1933)
The Big Knockover (a collection of short stories)
The Continental Op (a collection of short stories)
Nightmare Town (a collection of short stories)
Complete Novels (Steven Marcus, ed.) (The Library of America, 1999) ISBN 1-883011-67-1
Crime Stories and Other Writings (Steven Marcus, ed.) (The Library of America, 2001) ISBN 1-931082-00-6

Quotes

"[Hammett] took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley... [He] gave murder back to the kind of people who do it for a reason, not just to provide a corpse; and with means at hand, not with handwrought dueling pistols, curare, and tropical fish."

Raymond Chandler, in The Simple Art of Murder

"I have been asked many times over the years why he did not write another novel after The Thin Man. I do not know. I think, but I only think, I know a few of the reasons: he wanted to do new kind of work; he was sick for many of those years and getting sicker. But he was a man who kept his work, and his plans for work, in angry privacy and even I would not have been answered if I had ever asked, and maybe because I never asked is why I was with him until the last day of his life."

Lillian Hellman, in an introduction to a compilation of Hammett's five novels