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If you don’t know anything about Dashiell Hammett, just
dive into The Maltese Falcon or any of his numerous pulp magazine
stories, and you'll get a glimpse of his real life. Everything you
read, though. will be either partially true or flat-out wrong, depending on where you
stand.
Born on a Maryland farm on May 27, 1894, Samuel Dashiell (pronounced "dah-SHEEL, if you please) Hammett soon
dropped out of school and into a series of low-paying jobs. In 1915, he was
hired as an operative -- a "private eye"
-- by the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. While driving an ambulance
during World War I, he contracted tuberculosis, forcing him to choose a post-war career that was less
strenuous than tailing deadbeat husbands: writing.
His inspiration wasn't hard to find: using his experience as a Pinkerton, he
started writing short detective stories for the pulp magazine Black Mask,
becoming one of the fathers of "hard-boiled" fiction:
a genre
that revels in stories of violence, sex, and money that take place in the
meanest streets and shabbiest alleys of urban America. (Raymond Chandler -- no mean writer himself -- said that not only did Hammett create a new American language for
fiction, but also "gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it
for reasons, not just to provide a corpse.")
Hammett's first major creation was the otherwise-unnamed "Continental Op." In 1934, he wrote the blockbuster novel The Thin Man, which
introduced retired detective Nick Charles and his socialite wife Nora (based on his real-life longtime partner Lillian Hellman). Later that year, a blockbuster film was made of the novel, catapulting actors William Powell
and Myrna Loy into stardom and sparking a series of six films featuring
the Charleses. Hammett's most enduring creation was detective Samuel Spade,
who roamed the mean streets of pre-war San Francisco, where Hammett himself had lived. John Huston's 1941 film adaptation of the Falcon
made a superstar of Humphrey Bogart and turned San Francisco into the epitome
of the noir city, with its rolling fog adding to the mystery to the
plot.
Hammett’s writing career was short but lucrative. Although he wrote only
between 1922 and 1934, he turned out numerous short stories, and all of his
five novels (Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key,
and The Thin Man)
were turned into
successful films -- some more than once.
After years of drinking and womanizing in Hollywood, Hammett embraced
left-wing activism and joined the Communist Party in 1937. During World War
II, he pulled strings to enlist as a private in the U.S. Army at the age of 48, but his political convictions led him
to prison for five months in 1951, when he refused to testify at the trial of
four Communists accused of conspiring against the U.S. government. He was blacklisted
during the McCarthy era, chased by the IRS for back taxes, and died of lung cancer in 1961, in alcoholic poverty.
Ironically enough, despite being called an enemy of his country for his Communist
views, the veteran of two World Wars was awarded a burial plot at Arlington National Cemetery.
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