Almanac of Story Tellers: Dashiell Hammett

Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to the art of story telling -- in prose and poetry, in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books. 

Today is the story of May 27th

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    It is the 147th day of the year, leaving 218 days remaining in 2022.

    On this date in 1894, the author Dashiell Hammett was born.

 

   Hammett told his hard-boiled stories featuring private eyes and dashing dames on the mean streets, with but a nickel to their name and a penchant for trouble.

    Pulp detective fiction was its name, and while Hammett didn't invent the game, he sure as heck popularized it. With terse writing, rough-and-tumble action, realistic if dark settings, and plots filled with tough private dicks and dashing, duplicitous dames, Hammett quickly gained a reputation as a man who wrote what he knew.

    And he did. A one-time detective with the infamous Pinkerton Agency, Hammett wrote of a world of cynical detectives, ruthless criminals, and corruption all around. 

    He wrote dozens of serialized stories before The Red Harvest, his first novel, was published in 1929l. It drew on his time out west in the mines feuding with union leaders for the Agency, but it also showed Hammett's Marxist critiques of the system, along with his leftist leanings.

    His third novel, The Maltese Falcon, became Hammett's best work. It introduced Sam Spade, the prototype of the hard-boiled  detective. Written sparsely in the third-person, the writing follows the characters' actions and words. Their thoughts, feelings, or reasonings are left undescribed.

    The book regularly makes it on the lists of the top detective or crime-fiction novels, and has been adapted several times for films. The 1931 movie, starring Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, and Mary Astor, is considered a film noir classic.

    In later life, Hammett's politics led him to be investigated by Congress and the House on Un-American Activities Committee. While he testified, he refused to name names, and was subsequently blacklisted.

    Hammett died in 1961 in New York.