Hammett, (Samuel) Dashiell

Hammett, [Samuel] Dashiell (1894–1961), born in Maryland, went to San Francisco as a Pinkerton detective and soon drew upon the city's atmosphere and his own business for the novels he began to write. Cool, tough, and hard‐boiled in attitude, his works employ Hemingway's mood and spare, realistic dialogue in the genre of the detective story. He took murder out of the settings of polite society and put it into a corrupt urban environment where, as his follower, Raymond Chandler, said, he gave it “back to the people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse.” Hammett's major works including Red Harvest (1929) and The Maltese Falcon (1930), also introduced a new kind of sleuth, the cynical, tough Sam Spade. These works, along with The Thin Man (1932), became very popular films, and Hammett himself moved to southern California to write scripts. When he refused to testify about so‐called un‐American activities in Hollywood he was sent to prison. His friend Lillian Hellman wrote about his stand and his era in Scoundrel Time (1976).