Dashiell Hammett

Lore & Background

Hammett was born near Great Mills on the 'Hopewell and Aim' farm in Saint Mary's County, Maryland, to Richard Thomas Hammett and his wife Anne Bond Dashiell. He had an elder sister, Aronia, and a younger brother, Richard Jr. Known as Sam, Hammett was baptized a Catholic and grew up in Philadelphia and Baltimore. He dropped out of school at age thirteen in 1908 to support his family. He worked for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency from 1915 to February 1922, with time off to serve in World War I. He enlisted in 1918 and served in the United States Army Ambulance Service.

He married Josephine Dolan on July 7, 1921, in San Francisco. They had two daughters, Mary Jane (born 1921) and Josephine (born 1926). The marriage fell apart due to his tuberculosis. He wrote most of his detective fiction while living in San Francisco in the 1920s.

He was romantically involved with Nell Martin in 1929–1930, and from 1931 had a 30-year relationship with playwright Lillian Hellman. He joined the Communist Party in 1937. He wrote his final novel in 1933. He died on January 10, 1961.

The Craft of the Hard-Boiled Page

Settling in San Francisco, he drew heavily on his years as a Pinkerton operative, weaving the grit of real investigations into fiction that felt unflinchingly grounded. His nameless private investigator, the Continental Op, became a fixture of the pulp magazine Black Mask, where both author and publication were still finding their footing.

A pay dispute with editor Philip C. Cody in 1926 briefly pulled him away from the page and into a copywriting gig at a San Francisco jewelry firm, until new editor Joseph Thompson Shaw lured him back. From that point, his novels—Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, and The Thin Man—were serialized in Black Mask before Alfred A. Knopf polished them into book form. Hammett insisted he pulled most of his characters straight from real life, and his dialogue carried a naturalism that was rare for the era.

From Maryland Soil to the Pinkerton Files

The family relocated to Baltimore when Sam was four, and that city remained his home until he left for good in 1920. He later recalled being dispatched to Butte, Montana, during a miners' strike, though some scholars question whether that posting actually occurred. What is certain is that the agency's strike-breaking work soured him on the profession.

Love, Illness, and the Long Farewell from Fiction

But the tuberculosis that had plagued him since his Army service made cohabitation dangerous; health officials advised that Dolan and the children should not share a home with him full time. She rented a separate apartment in San Francisco, and Hammett would visit on weekends. The strain proved too much, and the marriage dissolved, though he never stopped financially supporting his wife and daughters through his writing income.

In the late 1920s he became romantically involved with fellow writer Nell Martin, to whom he dedicated The Glass Key. Hellman later speculated that his departure from fiction stemmed from a desire for new creative work compounded by worsening illness. In the 1940s the couple settled at her Hardscrabble Farm in Pleasantville, New York, where Hammett spent his remaining years away from the typewriter.

The Dean of Hard-Boiled and a Lasting Shadow on Cinema

The New York Times obituary called Hammett 'the dean of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction,' a title that has endured. In 1990 the Crime Writers' Association selected three of his five novels for its Top 100 Crime Novels list, and in 1995 the Mystery Writers of America ranked The Maltese Falcon second on its Top 100 Mystery Novels, with Red Harvest, The Glass Key, and The Thin Man also making the cut. His influence stretched well beyond the printed page; the hard-edged, morally ambiguous world he built in his novels and short stories became a foundational template for the style that came to be known as film noir. The French novelist André Gide singled out Red Harvest as 'the last word in atrocity, cynicism and horror,' and compared Hammett's layered, deceptive dialogues favorably to those of Hemingway.

Did You Know?

• Hammett served in the United States Army Ambulance Service during World War I, not the Red Cross Ambulance Service.
• He wrote his final novel, The Thin Man, in 1933, more than 25 years before his death.