Samuel Dashiell Hammett (May 27, 1894 – January 10, 1961) was an American author of hardboiled detective novels and short stories. Among the enduring characters he created are Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon), Nick and Nora Charles (The Thin Man), and the Continental Op (Red Harvest, The Dain Curse). In addition to the significant influence his novels had on film, Hammett has been credited with the invention of modern American hardboiled detective novel.

Hammett was born in a house off Great Mills Road, St. Mary's County, in southern Maryland. His parents were Richard Thomas Hammett and Annie Bond Dashiell. (The Dashiells are an old Maryland family, the name being an Americanization of the French De Chiel; it is pronounced "daSHEEL", not "dash'l".) He grew up in Philadelphia and Baltimore. "Sam," as he was known before he began writing, left school when he was 13 years old and held several jobs before working for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. He served as an operative for the Pinkerton Agency from 1915 to 1921, with time off to serve in World War I. However, the agency's role in union strike-breaking eventually disillusioned him.

During World War I, Hammett enlisted in the U.S. Army and served in the Motor Ambulance Corps. However, he became ill with the Spanish flu and later contracted tuberculosis. He spent the war as a patient in a hospital in America. He married a nurse, Josephine Dolan, in 1921 and had two daughters with her: Mary Jane, born in 1921 and Josephine, born in 1926. The couple began living apart shortly after the birth of Josephine. Hammett supported his wife and daughters financially with the income he made from his writing.

Hammett turned to drinking, advertising, and eventually, writing. His work at the detective agency provided him the inspiration for his writings.

Hammett's short story output, as opposed to his later novels, is very uneven. In his short stories he dwells heavily on the clichés of 1920s pulp fiction, especially on the theme of the Super-Crook or Master Criminal. (See Archvillain.)

Hammett has super-criminals both male ("$106,000 Blood Money", "The Big Knockover") and female ("The Girl with the Silver Eyes", "The House on Turk Street"). He amusingly depicts the Fu Manchu – like crime boss of Chinatown in "Dead Yellow Women". In "Nightmare Town" he has a criminal gang which plots to burn down an entire city for insurance reasons. In "The Gutting of Coufignal" he has a White Russian general who leads a military-style operation to rob the cream of California society, gathered together on an isolated island for a wedding. In "$106,000 Blood Money", he has a super-crook who attacks not just a single bank but the entire financial district of San Francisco, with the help of hundreds of other criminals gathered together from all over the U.S. Then the super-crook turns around and wipes out most of his helpers in order to keep the loot for himself. In The Dain Curse, a madman's quest for revenge on a woman who has scorned him leads directly or indirectly to the deaths or maimings of more than a dozen people. Another character in The Dain Curse, a cult leader, has convinced himself that he is the Lord Jehovah incarnate, and when the Op barely manages to kill him after shooting him seven times and stabbing him in the throat, he thinks to himself "Thank God he wasn't really God".

As Hammett's literary style matured, he relied less and less on the super-criminal and turned more to the kind of realistic, hardboiled fiction seen in The Maltese Falcon or The Thin Man. In The Simple Art of Murder, Hammett's successor in the field, Raymond Chandler, summarized Hammett's accomplishments as follows:

:Hammett was the ace performer... He is said to have lacked heart; yet the story he himself thought the most of <nowiki>[</nowiki>The Glass Key<nowiki>]</nowiki> is the record of a man's devotion to a friend. He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.

From 1929 to 1930 Dashiell was romantically involved with Nell Martin, an author of short stories and several novels. He dedicated The Glass Key to her, and in turn, she dedicated her novel Lovers Should Marry to Hammett.

In 1931, Hammett embarked on a thirty-year affair with playwright Lillian Hellman. He wrote his final novel in 1934, and devoted much of the rest of his life to left-wing activism. He was a strong anti-fascist throughout the 1930s and in 1937 he joined the American Communist Party. As a member of the League of American Writers, he served on its Keep America Out of War Committee in January 1940 during the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact.

In 1942, after Pearl Harbor, Hammett enlisted in the United States Army. Though he was a disabled veteran of WWI, and a victim of tuberculosis, he pulled strings in order to be admitted to the service. He spent most of WWII as an Army sergeant in the Aleutian Islands, where he edited an Army newspaper. He came out of the war suffering from emphysema.

After World War II, Hammett joined the New York Civil Rights Congress, a leftist organization that was considered by some to be a Communist front. When four people who were related to the organization were arrested for being suspected Communists, Hammett raised money for their bail bond. When the accused fled, he was subpoenaed about their whereabouts, and when in 1951 he refused to provide that information, he was imprisoned for five months for contempt of court.http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/dhammett.htm

During the 1950s he was investigated by Congress (see McCarthyism). Although he testified to his own activities, he refused to cooperate with the committee, and was blacklisted.

Hammett died in New York City's Lenox Hill Hospital, of lung cancer, diagnosed just two months before his death. As a veteran of two World Wars, he was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

* Red Harvest (published on February 1, 1929) * The Dain Curse (July 19, 1929) * The Maltese Falcon (February 14, 1930) * The Glass Key (April 24, 1931) * Creeps by Night; Chills and Thrills (Anthology edited by Hammett, 1931) * The Thin Man (January 8, 1934) * Woman in the Dark: A Novel of Dangerous Romance (published in Liberty magazine in three installments in 1933) * The Big Knockover (a collection of short stories) * The Continental Op (a collection of four short stories with "Meet the Continental Op", an introduction by Ellery Queen) (published as Dell mapback #129 * The Return of the Continental Op (a collection of five short stories with "The Return of the Continental Op", an introduction by Ellery Queen) (published as Dell mapback #154) * Nightmare Town (a collection of four short stories) (published with an introduction titled "A Letter from Ellery Queen" as Dell mapback #379) * Blood Money (two novellas) (published as Dell mapback #53 and #486) * A Man Called Spade (five short stories, only three Sam Spade stories, with "Meet Sam Spade", an introduction by Ellery Queen) (published as Dell mapback #90 and #411) * Dead Yellow Women (four Continental Op stories, two other stories, and an introduction titled "A Letter from Ellery Queen") (published as Dell mapback #308) * Hammett Homicides (four Continental Op stories, two other stories, and an introduction titled "A Letter from Ellery Queen") (published as Dell mapback #223) * The Creeping Siamese (three Continental Op stories, three other stories and an introduction titled "A Letter from Ellery Queen") (published as Dell mapback #538)

* Complete Novels (Steven Marcus, ed.) (Library of America, 1999) ISBN 978-1-88301167-3. * Crime Stories and Other Writings (Steven Marcus, ed.) (Library of America, 2001) ISBN 978-1-93108200-6.

"[Hammett] took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley... [He] gave murder back to the kind of people who do it for a reason, not just to provide a corpse; and with means at hand, not with handwrought dueling pistols, curare, and tropical fish." :Raymond Chandler, in The Simple Art of Murder

"I have been asked many times over the years why he did not write another novel after The Thin Man. I do not know. I think, but I only think, I know a few of the reasons: he wanted to do [a] new kind of work; he was sick for many of those years and getting sicker. But he kept his work, and his plans for work, in angry privacy and even I would not have been answered if I had ever asked, and maybe because I never asked is why I was with him until the last day of his life." :Lillian Hellman, in an introduction to a compilation of Hammett's five novels

In 1975, writer Joe Gores published Hammett, a novel in which a fictional version of the writer is sought out by an old Pinkerton associate to help him solve a case that drags him through the seamy underbelly of 1929 San Francisco. In 1982, a film version directed by Wim Wenders was released.

Jason Robards portrayed Hammett in the 1977 film Julia, based on the true story of Lillian Hellman.

A fictionalized version of Hammett appears in "Locked Rooms" by Laurie R. King. The novel is about Sherlock Holmes and his wife, Mary Russell, who travel to San Francisco in 1924 to settle Russell's parent's estate. While there Holmes meets, and hires, Hammett to do some investigative work.

In the Coen brothers' avante-garde film The Big Lebowski, the main character, The Dude, drinks White Russians, a reference to Hammett's short story "The Gutting of Coufignal," which features a White Russian general. The Coen brothers are big fans of detective fiction in general and Hammett in particular-- one of their films, Blood Simple, is named after dialogue uttered by the narrator in the novel Red Harvest: "This damned burg's getting me. If I don't get away soon I'll be going blood-simple like the natives."

* CLUES: A Journal of Detection 23.2 (winter 2005). Guest ed. Richard Layman. Theme issue on Dashiell Hammett. http://www.heldref.org/clues.php * Hammett, Jo, A Daughter Remembers, 2001, Carroll and Graf Publishers.

* The Apartment of Dashiell Hammett and Sam Spade * February 2005 Library of Congress lecture by Hammett estate trustee and biographer Richard Layman on the 75th anniversary of The Maltese Falcon * Dashiell Hammett Checklist showing where every story has appeared.