Dashiell Hammett
1 book analyzed
Biography
Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) worked as a Pinkerton detective agency operative for eight years before becoming a writer, and the authenticity of his crime fiction is inseparable from that experience. He interrogated labor organizers, worked strike-breaking operations, and once reported that he was offered five thousand dollars to assassinate labor leader Frank Little (he refused). He knew what criminal interrogation felt like from both sides. The Maltese Falcon was published in 1930, serialized in Black Mask magazine. Hammett was a radical leftist, a communist party member who would be jailed during McCarthy-era hearings for refusing to name names — a real-world Spade move. He and Lillian Hellman had a famously difficult thirty-year relationship. He stopped publishing fiction after 1934, never adequately explaining why.