Famous Writers:
Dashiell Hammett
He Got It Right
The name he used is pronounced da-SHEEL, not DASH-el, as we usually hear it spoken. But it’s easy to see where the dash originated. With his suave good looks Dashiell Hammett might have stepped from the pages of one of his detective novels and onto the silver screen. However, plagued by chronic illness and alcoholism, the American writer’s life was not entirely the stuff that dreams are made of.
Samuel Dashiell Hammett was born on a Maryland farm in 1894 to Richard Thomas Hammett and Annie Bond Dashiell. Sam attended Baltimore Polytechnic Institute but quit school at 14 to help the family’s finances. He worked as a newsboy, freight clerk, laborer, messenger, stevedore, and advertising manager before joining the Baltimore office of the Pinkerton Detective Agency as an operator (1915-1921), with time off to serve in World War I. As a member of the ambulance corps in 1919, he contracted Spanish influenza and spent the rest of his service in the hospital and later developed tuberculosis.
After his discharge, he rejoined Pinkerton. While employed there, he declined an offer to kill the IWW labor organizer, Frank Little, who was later lynched. After the murder, Hammett resigned from Pinkerton's, but it was his work there that gave him inspiration for writing, earning him the later distinction of being called the finest mystery writer of all time. His obituary in the New York Times called him, “…the dean of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction.”
While at Pinkerton, Hammett held other jobs to support his wife and two daughters. His Army pension was small, and most of his income during 1922-1926 came from writing advertising copy for a San Francisco jewelry store. In 1923, he introduced a fictional unnamed investigator known only as the Continental Op in a collection of stories written under the pseudonym Peter Collinson for Black Mask magazine. The name was a variation of Peter Collins, underworld slang for a nobody. Writing for Black Mask, he became one of its most popular writers, along with Erle Stanley Gardner.
Dash, as his friends called him, wrote four of his novels and almost all his short stories between 1922-1931, with his fifth and final novel, The Thin Man, in 1934. Drawing on his Pinkerton experiences, Hammett’s heroes brought a realistic vein to detective stories and films. Hammett painted a portrait of the seamy side of American society, where greed, brutality, and treachery were the major forces behind human actions. The Continental Op moved into book form in the novels Red Harvest and The Dain Curse.
Turning his attention to another detective, Hammett created Sam Spade, who made his debut in Black Mask in 1929. A year later, Spade stepped into a novel, The Maltese Falcon. The 
description of Spade’s apartment, complete with a Murphy bed, was a replica of the one Hammett lived in at the time. The only difference was that Spade had a breakfast nook and apartments in that building did not. Today, Hammett fan Bill Arney maintains the apartment as it was when Hammett lived there, and he offers tours.
Reviewers of The Maltese Falcon called Hammett’s language, “…unsentimental, journalistic; moral judgments were left to the reader.” Ellery Queen later said, “Dashiell Hammett didn’t invent a new kind of detective story, he invented a new way of telling it.”
The Maltese Falcon was filmed three times; in 1931, in 1936 under the title Satan Met A Lady, and in 1941, starring Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade. Director John Houston later wrote in his autobiography, “We were having such a good time together on Falcon that at night after shooting, Bogie, Peter Lorre, Ward Bond, Mary Astor and I would go over to the Lakeside Country Club. We'd have a few drinks, then a buffet supper, and stay till midnight. We all thought we were doing something good, but no one had any idea that The Maltese Falcon would be a great success and eventually take its place as a film classic.” Today, reading Hammett’s work it’s difficult to not see and hear Bogart speaking the lines.
On the personal side, when doctors informed Hammett’s wife, Josephine, that she and the children risked being infected with tuberculosis, they moved into an apartment. Hammett visited on weekends, but the marriage eventually ended in divorce. Hammett became involved with Nell Martin, author of short stories and several novels, but the romance for which he is remembered is his thirty-year affair with playwright Lillian Hellman. It was not an exclusive relationship; they each had other lovers. He loved his wife (in a sisterly way) and he wrote to his daughters often. He supported the family financially until the 1950s, when his money ran out.
The Thin Man introduced Nick Charles, a former detective who married a rich woman, Nora Charles. The book was a commercial success and inspired a series of adaptations for film, radio and television. Hammett began working as a scriptwriter for a comic strip, Secret Agent X-9. With that job, and earnings from his novels and their spin-offs, he continued drinking and womanizing.
An ardent anti-Fascist, Hammett joined the American Communist Party in 1937, and as a member of the League of American Writers he served on its Keep America Out of War Committee. When Ernest Hemingway and other colleagues went to Spain to aid in the Civil War (1936-39), Hammett stayed behind. Hellman's career had taken off and, although Hammett was drinking heavily and had problems with his writing, he supported Hellman’s rising star. He received screenplay credit for an adaptation of her play Watch On The Rhine (1943).
Despite being a disabled veteran, when World War II came along he pulled strings in order to be admitted into the Army. He served most of his time in the Aleutian Islands as editor of an Army newspaper. After the war, returning to political activism, he served as vice-chairman of the Civil Rights Congress, an organization that the Attorney General and F.B.I. deemed subversive.
During the 1950s he was investigated by Congress. Although he testified to his own activities before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, he otherwise refused to cooperate with the committee. In 1951 he went to prison for five months rather than testify at the trial of four communists accused of conspiracy. He was blacklisted and when the IRS claimed he owed a huge amount in back taxes, they attached his income. For a while the State Department kept his novels off the shelves of American libraries overseas.
Hammett had come out of World War II with emphysema. He periodically tried writing again, but managed to produce only notes. For the remainder of his life he lived in and around New York City, sometimes teaching writing. From 1956 until his death from lung cancer in 1961, Hellman nursed him in her Park Avenue apartment. She didn’t fear tuberculosis, but was aware of the venereal diseases he’d had on occasion. Despite dying in penury and with a checqered political past, Samuel Dashiell Hammett is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
The author’s favorite among his novels was said to be The Glass Key (1930). He fashioned the lead character somewhat after himself: Tall, thin, tubercular, a gambler and heavy drinker. Hammet’s daughter once said that reading her father’s stories was like listening to him speak; that the dialogue was phrases he would have used.
Author Raymond Chandler, said, “Hammett was the ace performer. He is said to have lacked heart; yet the story he thought most of, The Glass Key, is a 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.”
Hellman said, “I’ve been asked many times 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 a new kind of work; he was sick for many of those years and getting sicker. But he 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.”
Reportedly, Hammett did quit writing detective novels because he wanted to write mainstream, serious fiction, but writer’s block kept him from attaining that goal. He once said, “I’ve been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.”
Time proved him wrong. More than seventy-five years later his books have been translated into 76 languages. In 1998, Modern Library placed The Maltese Falcon on its list of the top 100 novels written in the English language in the 20th Century.
Hammett himself belies his above statement. Brimming with confidence when he submitted The Maltese Falcon to Knopf, he told them, “I’ve got this one right, you guys. Don’t fiddle with it.”
Bogart, as Sam Spade, couldn’t have said it better.