Perhaps most notorious of Hellman’s claims about Hammett are that in 1917 while dispatched to Butte, Montana as a strikebreaker during a particularly brutal miners strike, the young detective turned down an offer of $5,000 to murder labour organizer Frank Little. Years later, playwright Lillian Hellman, Hammett’s off-and-on friend and lover, who also occasionally had an off-and-on relationship with the truth, wrote of “the bad cuts on his legs and the indentations in his head from being scrappy with criminals.” He learned the racket from an older man, a short, squat, tough-talking fellow operative whom Hammett came to idolize and mythologize as “Jimmy Wright” (and who would later supposedly serve as the inspiration for The Continental Op).Ĭertainly, detecting was no easy racket. So Hammett not only talked the talk but he walked the walk - he actually was a private detective.

He became a detective at the ripe old age of nineteen when he joined the Baltimore branch of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, housed in the Continental Building. He grew up, a working class kid, on the streets of Philadelphia and Baltimore. His name appeared in the credits to The Fat Man, and other radio shows featuring his characters, and alongside Alex Raymond’s on the private eye/spy daily comic strip Secret Agent X-9. As if creating the archetypical private eye Sam Spade in The Maltese Falconwasn’t enough, he was also responsible for The Continental Op and The Thin Man, the novel that introduced husband and wife sleuths Nick and Nora Charles to the world, and became the basis for a string of incredibly popular movies. In between, he was one of the seminal creators in crime fiction a distinctive and influential stylist. Mary’s County, Maryland, on May 27th, 1894, and died January 10, 1961, in New York, New York. “Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons.”ĭ ashiell Hammettwas born in St. Pseudonyms include Peter Collinson, Daghull Hammett, Samuel Dashiell, Mary Jane Hammett

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