Ward tells of Charlie Siringo, an ex-op whose attempts to publish a memoir were stymied by the agency. Citing the confidentiality agreement Siringo had signed, the agency demanded that he give another name to his employer. But Hammett was writing fiction, not memoir, and so names had already been changed. That arrangement that would continue in various forms for many years. In the autumn of , Jose became pregnant with their second daughter. An eight-year period of astonishing productivity began.
Hammett dashed off a novella called The Big Knockover , which Shaw serialised, and started reviewing mysteries for the Saturday Review of Literature. In , Hammett was invited to a Los Angeles party honoring Gertrude Stein, who wanted to meet the master of the modern detective story.
Hammett would soon stop writing—or, as his daughter Jo more accurately put it, stop publishing. Newly rich, he partied hard and spent profligately. Hammett's terse, flat, unindicative writing evolved quickly from the slightly florid short stories that he began writing in the early '20s for Black Mask magazine.
Before Hammett, popular detectives were very much in the mold popularized by S. Hammett's writing career was very short, extending for little more than 10 years.
He wrote almost nothing after , preferring to spend his time drinking, arguing with his lover, Lillian Hellman, and nursemaiding her writing career. A frenetic start, then nothing. In the space of 4 years, Hammett wrote 6 novels. Then, almost nothing. The Thin Man was the last of Hammett's novels, and there is a noticeable falling off. Although the central characters are a delight, the book has no threatening resonance, no aftertaste, as all his previous novels do; the plot is just a puzzle, and not a particularly interesting one at that.
Because the book, and, especially, the William Powell-Myrna Loy movies were so successful, Hammett, like the agreeably alcoholic Nick Charles, could afford to sit back and relax.
Other than writing a few synopses for movie sequels, the only real writing Hammett did for the rest of his life involved signing his name on the back of checks. He had been a Pinkerton detective for 8 years, and, more importantly, was every bit as tough as his characters.
Comparisons to that sodden Momma's boy - if superior novelist - Raymond Chandler are instructive. In Hammett's work, sentiment is extinct, and innocence is long since lost. There's no begging, not from the author, not from the characters. Sam Spade is rough and lacking in charm, a negative man that Hammett casts in a positive role. Films keep his work alive. Oddly, the former has never been filmed, although Bernardo Bertolucci talked about doing it for years, with Marlon Brando. However, the plot mechanics, if not the atmosphere, have been so ruthlessly plundered by other films - most prominently Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars - that it might seem like a twice-told tale if it ever does get made.
Part of the reason Hammett has maintained his popularity are the films made from his work. A writer as fiercely controlled, as glamorously self-destructive as Hammett can make critics gush like adolescents at a rock concert; one has written that Hammett's treatment of San Francisco in The Maltese Falcon as "one of the great literary treatments of a city," right up there with Joyce's Dublin or Dickens'London.
Well, maybe, except that Spade doesn't have to exist in San Francisco in the sense that Sherlock Holmes has to exist in London. It's enough to echo Raymond Chandler, who was a good critic as well as a good writer. He wrote that Hammett "wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before. When WWII broke out, the year-old alcoholic enlisted, convincing the doctors that the tuberculosis scars on his lungs - contracted during svce in WWI - were of no account.
After the war, with Roosevelt dead, the witch hunters closed in and persecuted Hammett for his left-wing politics, shortly after a particularly bad case of the dt's caused him to quit drinking.
In front of a Congressional committee, he was asked to name contributors to a bail fund for Communists, for which he was a trustee. He flatly refused and was sent to prison for 5 months. As his always shaky health spiraled down, he took it stoically, without complaint. He died in and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. He had also served it in other ways, which were his own. After working as a Pinkerton detective for 8 years, he began publishing stories in Black Mask magazine after His Continental Op, the anonymous narrator of the first 2 books, and Sam Spade, the leading character of the third, became models of the hard-boiled private detective: unsentimental, making no moral claims, but bringing a ruthless honesty and dedication to the job.
His last novel, The Thin Man , introducing the sophisticated husband-and-wife sleuthing team of Nick and Nora Charles, became an enormously successful film He also did some screenwriting but was handicapped by a serious drinking problem and by being blacklisted for his left-wing political affiliations after Hammett's The Continental Op was also published posthumously.
Dashiell Hammett: A Daughter Remembers. Edited by Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett Carroll and Graf. Not so Dashiell Hammett. Born in St.
Mary's County, Md. In a short period, he penned five popular and critically acclaimed novels, some of which were constructed on variations on his serialized stories.
His appearance -- tall, rail-thin and urbane, with a shock of prematurely white hair -- was striking, undoubtedly contributing to his celebrity status.
He is credited with creating the tough, unsentimental and reportorial style of fiction known as hard-boiled. Never mind that hard-boiled pulp practitioners like Carroll John Daly had preceded him in Black Mask, or that Hemingway was developing his own brand of muscular, rhythmic, stripped-down prose at the same time.
Hammett wasn't the first realist in crime fiction, but he was the first to bring it up to the level of violent art. By his career as a novelist was done. Though he continued to write screenplays, criticism, comic strips and radio scripts, he never published another novel in his lifetime.
Throughout the '30s, he was involved in anti-fascist and Marxist organizations but was also an avowed patriot. In the s Hammett spent five years on Hollywood payrolls doing very little movie writing but living lavishly and flamboyantly, and occasionally involving himself in left-wing political causes. He also wrote stories for the better-paying slick magazines such as Collier's, Liberty, Harper's Bazaar, Esquire, and American Magazine.
Although he was one of the highest-paid writers of the s, his expenses usually exceeded his income. It was in Hollywood that he struck up an enduring friendship with playwright Lillian Hellman, whose work he encouraged and even occasionally revised; although a romantic legend sprang up around their love affair, Hammett remained very much a loner all of his life and lived apart from Hellman much more than with her.
The Thin Man , Hammett's last novel, was banned in Canada and was labelled "amoral" by a number of magazine editors who refused to serialize it. Nick Charles, an ex-private detective who retired after marrying into wealth, reluctantly investigates a man's disappearance and some related murders. Nick's investigative style is passive:he doesn't go out in search of anyone or anything—it all comes to him.
What scandalized the bluenoses was the image of a married couple, Nick and Nora, who seemed less than monogamous long before the voguish concept of the "open marriage". The characters who populate the novel mark a reduction in Hammett's customary energy level, but it is still an engaging, well-plotted suspense tale.
Ironically, though it was perhaps artistically the weakest of Hammett's novels, it was by far his greatest commercial success. An interesting sidelight was the public confusion as to the identity of "the thin man, " which was compounded by the photograph of the tubercularly thin Hammett on the novel's dust jacket and by the film persona created by the elegantly slim William Powell.
Actually, the sobriquet applied not at all to Nick Charles, but to the missing man that Charles was seeking. Perhaps a bigger mystery than any Hammett created was the virtual end, at age 39, of his career. Undoubtedly poor health exacerbated by dissipation was part of the story, but another part was his temperament. Hammett never took fame seriously, nor did extremes of poverty and affluence ever seem to affect him deeply.
Above all, he seems not to have been at all ambitious. Robert Colodny. He started writing but could not continue so because of his severe health conditions. There were claims against him for owing taxes and he was deprived of his income from any new work. Hammett went into disappearance from the public eye for nearly a decade till he died in at the age of
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