Samuel Dashiell
Hammett was born in St. Mary's County, Maryland,
on May 27, 1894, and grew up in Philadelphia
and Baltimore. He left school
at the age of fourteen and held a variety of jobs, from messenger
boy to stevedore, and finally worked as an operative for the famous
Pinkerton's Detective Agency, a job that sent him west. In 1918,
World War I interrupted his sleuthing, although he was discharged
from the army in less than a year with tuberculosis. Spending time
in several veterans' hospitals, in one he met a nurse,
Jose Dolan, and married her in 1921. Settling in San Francisco, he resumed
detective work, and began to write. In 1922 he sold his first story,
to H. L. Mencken's Smart Set,
and quickly thereafter began to sell many to its spinoff that
featured mystery and crime fiction,
Black Mask. In the next
decade, Hammett became the unquestioned master of detective-story
fiction in
America. His first four novels--Red
Harvest (1929), The
Dain Curse (1929), The
Maltese Falcon (1930), and
The Glass Key
(1931)--exerted a powerful influence on American culture and
writing. His last novel, The Thin
Man (1934), introduced the sophisticated husband-and-wife
sleuthing team of Nick and Nora Charles.
In World War II, Hammett again served in the U.S. Army, as a
sergeant in the Aleutians for most
of his more than two-year stint. In 1951, he was blacklisted for his
left-wing political affiliations and jailed for six months. Tax
delinquency charges by the Bureau of Internal Revenue followed. He
never wrote again. Dashiell Hammett died on January 10, 1961.
The Continental Op was
published posthumously in 1974 by arrangement with his estate's
executor and longtime friend and companion, Lillian Hellman.
Some
of The Writings of Dashiel Hammett
Novels –
1929 –
The Dain Curse & Red Harvest
1930 – The Maltese Falcon
1931 – The Glass Key
1934 – The Thin Man
1988 – The Woman in the Dark (Published Posthumously)
Screenplays he wrote or co-wrote –
1931 –
City Streets
1935 – Mister Dynamite
1936 – After the Thin Man
1939 – Another Thin Man
1943 – Watch on the Rhine with
Lillian Hellman based on her play
Poems
–
1925
“Caution to Travelers” in The Lariat
1927 “Goodbye to a Lady” in
Stratford
Magazine
1927 “Curse in the Old Manor” in The Bookman
Short
Story Collections –
1944 – A
Man Called Spade and Other Stories
1945 – The Continental Op
1946 – Hammett Homicides
1947 – Dead Yellow Women
1948 – Nightmare Town
1950 – Creeping Siamese
1952 – Woman In the Dark
1962 – A Man Called Thin
1966 – The Big Knockover (edited and with an introduction by Lillian
Hellman)
2005 – Lost Stories (edited by Vince Emery with an introduction by
Joe Gores)
This is 21
long-lost stories, many appearing in book form for the 1st
time.