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A treasure worth killing for. Sam Spade,
a slightly shopworn private eye with his own solitary code
of ethics. A perfumed grafter named Joel Cairo, a fat man
name Gutman, and Brigid O’Shaughnessy, a beautiful and
treacherous woman whose loyalties shift at the drop of a dime.
These are the ingredients of Dashiell Hammett’s coolly
glittering gem of detective fiction, a novel that has haunted
three generations of readers.
Dashiell Samuel Hammett
was born in St. Mary’s County. He grew up in Philadelphia
and Baltimore. Hammett left school at the age of fourteen
and held several kinds of jobs thereafter—messenger
boy, newsboy, clerk, operator, and stevedore, finally becoming
an operative for Pinkerton’s Detective Agency. Sleuthing
suited young Hammett, but World War I intervened, interrupting
his work and injuring his health. When Sergeant Hammett was
discharged from the last of several hospitals, he resumed
detective work. He soon turned to writing, and in the late
1920s Hammett became the unquestioned master of detective-story
fiction in America. In The Maltese Falcon (1930)
he first introduced his famous private eye, Sam Spade. The
Thin Man (1932) offered another immortal sleuth, Nick
Charles. Red Harvest (1929), The Dain Curse
(1929), and The Glass Key (1931) are among his most
successful novels. During World War II, Hammett again served
as sergeant in the Army, this time for more than two years,
most of which he spent in the Aleutians. Hammett’s later
life was marked in part by ill health, alcoholism, a period
of imprisonment related to his alleged membership in the Communist
Party, and by his long-time companion, the author Lillian
Hellman, with whom he had a very volatile relationship. His
attempt at autobiographical fiction survives in the story
“Tulip,” which is contained in the posthumous
collection The Big Knockover (1966, edited by Lillian
Hellman). Another volume of his stories, The Continental
Op (1974, edited by Stephen Marcus), introduced the final
Hammett character: the “Op,” a nameless detective
(or “operative”) who displays little of his personality,
making him a classic tough guy in the hard-boiled mold—a
bit like Hammett himself.
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