American novelist who also worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood. Also wrote as Peter Collinson, Daghull Hammett, Samuel Dashiell, Mary Jane Hammett.

With Raymond Chandler Hammett represented the early realistic vein in detective stories. His tough heroes confront the violence with full knowledge of its corrupting potential. In his novels Hammett painted mean picture of the American society, where greed, brutality, and treachery are the major driving forces behind human actions.

Dashiell Hammett was born in St. Mary's County, Maryland, on May 27th, 1894, and died January 10, 1961, in New York, but his family soon moved to Philadelphia and later Baltimore. Here he studied at Baltimore Polytechnic but left school at 14 to help support the family. After having worked as paper boy, clerk, messenger and advertising manager, he became a detective in 1915 when he joined the Baltimore branch of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, housed in the Continental Building.

Hammett left the Pinkertons in 1918, and enlisted in the Army, but tuberculosis contracted while in service prompted his medical discharge less than a year later. In fact, Hammett suffered from poor health, including bouts of tuberculosis and alcoholism, for the rest of his life. He eventually rejoined the Pinks, and worked out of their San Francisco office. In fact, somewhere out there is an account of some of the more peculiar cases Hammett was involved in while he was a Pinkerton Op, including his confession that he knew a man who once stole a ferris wheel. However, the piece doesn't mention the murder of labour organizer Frank Little in the mining town of Butte, Montana, where Hammett was employed as a strike breaker, during a particularly brutal mining strike. The rumour is that the Pinkerton men may have played a part in Little's murder, and that it was this incident that hastened Hammett's departure from Pinkerton's, and possibly helped crystalize his left-leaning views (which later got him into so much trouble with McCarthy and his pals in the 1950's).

During the First World War he was a sergeant in the ambulance corps but spent most of the war in hospital following tuberculosis. Dashiell Hammett started writing detective stories in the 1920's, when the typical detective story was not well defined. After working as an operative at the famed Pinkerton Detective Agency, he took his experience to the written word. He and other early detective writers of this era made famous what is now known as the "hard-boiled" detective genre. The rough, rogue operative who was a step ahead of the law and not unlike many of the criminals he chased.

He married Josephine Dolan in 1921 and had two children (they divorced in 1927 mainly due to Hammett's health).

In 1923 the first short story by Hammett appeared in Black Mask and thanks to the adventures of the Continental Op Hammett became one of its most popular writers along with Erle Stanley Gardner. Under the pseudonym Peter Collinson, Hammet introduced a short, overweight, unnamed detective employed by the San Francisco branch of the Continental Detective Agency, who became known as The Continental Op. In the three dozen stories between 1929 and 1930, featuring the tough and dedicated Op, Hammett gave shape to the first believable detective hero in American fiction. Drawing on his Pinkerton experiences, Hammett created a private eye, whose methods of detection are completely convincing, and whose personality has more than one dimension. His first book, Red Harvest, a set of four linked stories all telling a common story of corruption and gangsters in a Montana mining town, was published in 1929 and followed shortly after by The Dain Curse both featuring The Continental Op. Starting with a pseudonym of "Peter Collinson", he later dropped the name to use his own Middle (Dashiell) and last name, rather than his first, "Samuel."

In September 1929, Hammett portrayed another character in a different narrative form (the first person narration was dropped and Hammett views the detective protagonist in the book from the outside), Sam Spade, the protagonist of one of the most famous detective stories ever written: The Maltese Falcon. Hammett's language was unsentimental, journalistic, moral judgments were left tot the reader. A beautiful woman, Brigid O'Shaughnessy, comes to the office of Spade and his partner Miles Archer. She asks them to trail a Floyd Thursby. Archer is murdered. His wife was seeking a divorce to marry Spade. Joel Cairo offers Spade a reward for the recovery of a statuette, the 'Maltese Falcon'. Also Casper Gutman, a fat man, seeks it, with the help of Wilmer, an evil young man. A lead imitation is found and Spade calls for the police to arrest Gutman, Cairo, and Wilmer. Brigid, who has been involved in the quest for the falcon, confesses that she killed Archer.

The Maltese Falcon was filmed first time in 1931 and then in 1936 under the title Satan Met a Lady, directed by William Dieterle and starring Bette Davis. John Huston's adaptation from 1941 starring Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade is the most famous.

The Glass Key (1931), and The Thin Man (1934) were also best sellers; and both went on to become successful films; in fact, a whole string of films, in The Thin Man's case. The central character of The Glass Key was, Ned Beaumont, was partly a self-portrait: a tall, thin, tuberculosis-ridden gambler and heavy drinker. In The Thin Man, Hammett's last novel, he presented Nick Charles, a former detective who had married a rich woman, Nora Charles. Her character was based on Lillian Hellman.

But by 1934 Hammett's career as a writer was almost over. He never wrote another novel, and he wrote few short stories. In the 1930s he moved to Hollywood and met Lillian Hellman, a script reader with ambitions to be a playwright, the previous autumn, and they would soon embark on a long, tumultous relationship, full of high drama and cocktails, politics and art. Hammett became politically active and joined the Communist Party and was a fierce opponent of Nazism. However, when Hemingway and a number of other writers went to Spain to help the Republicans in the Civil War (1936-39), Hammett remained in the U.S., but helped veterans after their return from the war. Hellman's star was at that time in rise. Hammett himself was drinking heavily and had problems with his writing, but his support was crucial for Hellman's own career. Always looking for money, he took a whack at something new: a comic strip, Secret Agent X-9, but only lasted a year. He wrote a few things for radio, or at least lent his nasme to them. Thanks to the success of the film versions of his work, his reputation preceded him in Hollywood, and he wrote a handful of screen stories.

During the Second World War he edited a newspaper for troops in the Aleutian Islands. The end of World War II saw the anti-Communist breakdown pinpoint him for his Communist beliefs.

In 1951, Hammett was called to testify in the trial of four communists accused of conspiring against the U.S. government. He declined, and went to prison for five months, despite his failing health. From 1946 to 1956 he autorbusght creative writing in Jefferson School of Social Science while the State Department kept his books away from the shelves of overseas US libraries, inland revenue claimed he owed huge amounts of tax and the federal government attached his income.

Hammett quickly depleted the fortune he had made as a successful writer and died a relatively poor man in 1961, of lung cancer.

Works of Dashiel Hammett:

• Red Harvest (1929)
  When the last honest citizen of Poisonville was murdered, the Continental Op stayed on to punish the guilty - even if that meant taking on an entire town. Red Harvest is more than a superb crime novel: it is a classic exploration of corruption and violence in the American grain.
• The Dain Course (1929)
  The Continental Op is a short, squat, and utterly unsentimental tank of a private detective. Miss Gabrielle Dain Leggett is young, wealthy, and a devotee of morphine and religious cults. She has an unfortunate effect on the people around her: they have a habit of dying violently. Is Gabrielle the victim of a family curse? Or is the truth about her weirder and infinitely more dangerous? The Dain Course is one of the Continental Op's most bizarre cases, and a autorbustly crafted masterpiece of suspense.
• The maltese falcon (1930)
  The quintessential hard-boiled detective, Hammett's Sam Spade is faced with a mystery that verges on the unraveling of everything he knows. A beautiful woman spins a tale of betrayal and backstabbing surrounding a mysterious black bird statue, and engages Spade's services in trying to retrieve it. But where does her lying end and the truth begin? And all the while, the police are after Spade for the murder of his partner Miles Archer - a murder that, somehow, Spade's client is bound up in. Hammett's tale of one man's search for order and truth is as close to a perfect mystery novel as anyone is going to get, and often rises above the genre as a tightly-constructed literary masterpiece, rich in both character and plot.
• The Glass Key (1931)
  Paul Madvig was a cheerfully corrupt ward-heeler who aspired to something better: the daughter of Senator Ralph Bancroft Henry, the heiress to a dynasty of political purebreds. Did he want her badly enough to commit murder? And if Madvig was innocent, which of his dozens of enemies was doing an awfully good job of framing him? Dashiell Hammett's tour de force of detective fiction combines an airtight plot, authentically venal characters, and writing of telegraphic crispness.
  
• Creeps by night (1931)
• Woman in the dark (1933)
  A young, frightened, foreign woman appears at the door of an isolated house. The man and woman inside take her in. Other strangers appear in pursuit of the girl. Menace is in the air. Originally published in 1933, Hammett's Woman in the Dark shows the author at the peak of his narrative powers.
  
• Secret agent X-9 (1934)
• The thin man (1934)
  Nick and Nora Charles are Hammett's most enchanting creations, a rich, glamorous couple who solve homicides in between wisecracks and martinis. At once knowing and unabashedly romantic, The Thin Man is a murder mystery that doubles as a sophisticated comedy of manners.
• Dashiell Hammett omnibus (1935)
• The complete Dashiell Hammett (1942)
• Blood money (1943)
• The adventures of sam Spade (1944)
• The battle of the Aleutians (1944)
• The Continental Op (1945)
  Short, thick-bodied, mulishly stubborn, and indifferent to pain, Dashiell Hammett's Continetal Op was the prototype for generations of tough-guy detectives. In these stories the Op unravels a murder with too many clues, looks for a girl with eyes the color of shadows on polished silver, and tangles with a crooked-eared gunman called the Whosis Kid.
  
• The return of the Continental Op (1945)
• Hammett homicides (1946)
• Dead yellow women (1947)
• Nightmare town (1948)
  In the title story, a man on a bender enters a small town and ends up unraveling the dark mystery at its heart. A woman confronts the brutal truth about her husband in the chilling story "Ruffian's Wife." "His Brother's Keeper" is a half-wit boxer's eulogy to the brother who betrayed him. "The Second-Story Angel" recounts one of the most novel cons ever devised. In seven stories, the tough and taciturn Continental Op takes on a motley collection of the deceitful, the duped, and the dead, and once again shows his uncanny ability to get at the truth. In three stories, Sam Spade confronts the darkness in the human soul while rolling his own cigarettes. And the first study for The Thin Man sends John Guild on a murder investigation in which almost every witness may be lying.
• The creeping siamese (1950)
  
• A man called thin (1962)
• The big knockover (1966, ed. by Lillian Hellman)
  Short, thick-bodied, mulishly stubborn, and indifferent to physical pain, Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op was the prototype for generations of tough-guy detectives. He is also the hero of most of the nine stories in this volume. The Op's one enthusiasm is doing his job, and in The Big Knockover the jobs entail taking on a gang of modern-day freebooters, a vice-ridden hell's acre in the Arizona desert, and the bank job to end all bank jobs, along with such assorted grifters as Babe McCloor, Bluepoint Vance, Alphabet Shorty McCoy, and the Dis-and-Dat Kid.
• The Continental Op: more stories from the big knockover (1967)
• Selected letters of Dashiell Hammett 1921-1960 (2001, ed. by Richard Layman with Julie M. Rivett)
  
  

Screenplays:

• City Streets (1931) - with Oliver H.P. Garrett and Max Marcin - dir. by Rouben Mamoulian
• Mister Dynamite (1935) - with Doris Malloy and Harry Clork
• After the Thin Man (1936) - with Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett
• Another Thin Man (1939) - with Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett
• Watch on the Rhine (1943) - with Lillian Hellman
  

Bibliography:

• Layman, R. (1979) Dashiell Hammett: A Descriptive Bibliography
• Wolfe, P. (1980) Beams Falling: The Art of Dashiell Hammett
• Lyman, R. (1981) Shadow Man: The Life of Dashiell Hammett
• Gregory, S. (1985) Private Investigations: Novels of Dashiell Hammett
• Metress, C. (1994, ed.) The Critical Response to Dashiell Hammett
• Mellen, J. (1996) The Legendary Passion of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett
• Seymour-Smith, M. and Kimmens, A. C. (ed.) (1997) World Authors 1900-1950
• Hammett, J. (2001) Dashiell Hammett: A Daughter Remembers

Films:

• Roadhouse nights (1930, USA)
  Based on the novel Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett and a story by Ben Hecht
• The maltese falcon (1931, Warner Brothers)
  Based on the novel by Dashiell Hammett. Starring Ricardo Cordez as SAM SPADE
• City Streets (1931, Paramount Pictures)
  Based on an original story by Dashiell Hammett. Screenplay by Oliver H.P. Garrett and Max Marcin. Directed by Rouben Mamoulian. Starring Gary Cooper and Sylvia Sidney
• Woman in the dark (1934, RKO)
  Based on the novella by Dashiell Hammett. Screenplay by Sada Cowan. Directed by Phil Rosen
• The glass key (1935, Paramount)
  Based on the novel by Dashiell Hammett. Directed by Frank Tuttle. Starring George Raft as Ned Beaumont
• Mister dynamite (1935, Universal Pictures)
  Based on the short story On the Make by Dashiell Hammett. Directed by Alan Crosland. Starring Edmund Lowe as Mister dynamite
• Satan met a lady (1936, Warner Brothers)
  Based on the novel, The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett. Starring Warren William as Ted Shane (Sam Spade)
  and Bette Davis as Valerie Purvis (Miss Wonderly)
• The thin man (1934, MGM)
  Based on the novel by Dashiell Hammett. Screenplay by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett. Directed by W.S. Van Dyke. Starring William Powell as Nick Charles and Myrna Loy as Nora Charles
• After the thin man (1936, MGM)
  Based on an original story by Dashiell Hammett. Screenplay: Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett. Directed by W.S. Van Dyke. Starring William Powell as Nick Charles and Myrna Loy as Nora Charles
• Secret agent X-9 (1937, Universal)
  Based on the comic strip created by Dashiell Hammett and Alex Raymond. Directed by Ford Beebe and Clifford Smith
  Starring Scott Kolk as Secret agent X-9
• Another thin man (1939, MGM)
  Based on an original story by Dashiell Hammett. Screenplay: Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett. Directed by W.S. Van Dyke. Starring William Powell as Nick Charles and Myrna Loy as Nora Charles
• The maltese falcon (1941, Warner Brothers)
  Based on the novel by Dashiell Hammett. Written and directed by John Huston. Starring Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade
• The glass key (1942, Paramount)
  Based on the novel by Dashiell Hammett. Screenplay by Jonathan Latimer. Directed by Stuart Heisler. Starring Alan Ladd as Ed Beaumont
• Shadow of the thin man (1941, MGM)
  Based on characters created by Dashiell Hammett. Directed by W.S. Van Dyke. Starring William Powell as Nick Charles and Myrna Loy as Nora Charles
• The thin man goes home (1944, MGM)
  Based on characters created by Dashiell Hammett. Directed by Richard Thorpe. Starring William Powell as Nick Charles and Myrna Loy as Nora Charles
• Secret agent X-9 (1945, Universal)
  13-part serial. Based on the comic strip created by Dashiell Hammett and Alex Raymond. Directed by Lewis D. Collins and Ray Taylor. Starring Lloyd Bridges as Secret agent X-9
• Song of the thin man (1947, MGM)
  Based on characters created by Dashiell Hammett. Directed by Edward Buzzel. Starring William Powell as Nick Charles and Myrna Loy as Nora Charles
• The fat man (1951, Universal)
  Based on a character created by Dashiell Hammett. Directed by William Castle. Starring J. Scott Smart as Brad Runyon
• The black bird (1975, Columbia)
  Based on characters created in The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett.
• No good deed (2002, Seven Arts Pictures)
  Based on the short story House on Turk Street by Dashiell Hammett. Adapted by Christopher Canaan and Steve Barancik. Directed by Bob Rafelson. Starring Samuel L. Jackson, Milla Jovovich, Stellan Skarsgard, Doug Hutchison