Dashiell Hammett's Advice To Detective Writers

I’ve been a Dashiell Hammett aficionado since I was a teenager. 

I’ve read nearly all of his published work, including The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, and his other classic crime fiction. And I’ve covered collections of his novels and short stories in my On Crime column for the Washington Times. 

The Library of America, the publisher of a double set of his work, offers a piece on the advice Hammett gave detective story writers. 

You can read the piece via the below link:  

Story of the Week: Suggestions to Detective Story Writers (loa.org)

You can also read my Washington Times On Crime column on The Big Book of the Continental Op via the below link: 

Paul Davis On Crime: A Look Back At The Late, Great Crime Writer Dashiell Hammett 

From Street To Paper: On This Day In History Crime Writer Dashiell Hammett Was Born

On this day in 1894 Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man and other crime classics, was born.

"The contemporary novelist's job is to take pieces of life and arrange them on paper. And the more direct their passage from street to paper, the more lifelike they should be" - Dashiell Hammett.

You can read about his life and work via the below link:

https://www.biography.com/people/dashiell-hammett-9326903

You can also read my Washington Times review of Dashiell Hammett’s The Big Book of the Continental Op via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2018/05/the-gritty-early-stories-of.html 

And you can read my Crime Beat column on Dashiell Hammett via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2016/05/my-crime-beat-column-from-street-to.html 

The Gritty, Early Stories Of An Incomparable Crime Writer: My Washington Times Review Of Dashiell Hammett's 'The Big Book Of The Continental Op'

The Washington Times published my review of Dashiell Hammett's The Big Book of the Continental Op.

Some months ago I visited my daughter and her Air Force husband in California. We visited San Francisco and saw Alcatraz, Fisherman’s Wharf, Chinatown and other well-known attractions. Although I had never been there before, I had a sense of familiarity. This was Dashiell Hammett’s town. I grew up reading Mr. Hammett’s crime stories and San Francisco appeared prominently in many of the stories.

The late Dashiell Hammett, the author of “The Maltese Falcon,” “The Thin Man” and other classic crime novels, began his writing career punching out short stories for Black Mask magazine.

Before he wrote about his more well-known detectives Sam Spade and Nick and Nora Charles, he created a nameless detective who narrated his early short stories. The detective, also called an operative, or Op, worked for the Continental Detective Agency. The Op was a short, fat fellow, unlike Mr. Hammett, who was tall, lean and in his youth looked like a “blonde Satan,” which is how he described Sam Spade in “The Maltese Falcon.”

In “The Big Book of the Continental Op,” fans of crime fiction can read a collection of all of Mr. Hammett’s Op stories. The book was edited by Richard Layman, the president of Bruccoli Clark Layman, producers of the “Dictionary of Literary Biography,” and Julie M. Rivett, Mr. Hammett’s granddaughter, who is a Dashiell Hammett scholar and spokesperson for the Hammett estate.

“The long awaited volume you hold in your hands is the first and only collection to assemble every one of Dashiell Hammett’s pioneering Continental Op adventures — twenty-eight stand-alone stories, two novels, and Hammett’s only known unfinished Continental tale.” writes Ms. Rivett in her introduction. “It is truly definitive. And it has been many decades in the making.

“At the time of this writing, the first Op story is ninety-four years old and the last one is seventy-nine, not including ‘Three Dimes,’ an undated draft fragment conserved in Hammett’s archives, first published in 2016.

“The gritty sleuth Hammett described as ‘a little man going forward day after day through mud and blood and death and deceit’ has weathered gunshots, grifters, criminal conspiracies, class struggles, temptations, neglect, and more. This volume is testament to his tenacity. He is a survivor, a working-class hero, and a landmark literary creation.”

As Ms. Rivett notes, Dashiell Hammett was a Pinkerton detective and the Continental agency was modeled on Pinkerton. Mr. Hammett worked on cases involving forgeries, bank swindles and safe burglaries, which Ms. Rivett’s states was a solid factual basis for the Op’s fictional stories.

... Despite Dashiell Hammett’s foolish sympathy for the American Communist Party and other character flaws, he was a patriot who served in the U.S. Army in both world wars. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

You can read the rest of my review via the below link:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/may/13/book-review-the-big-book-of-the-continental-op-by-/

"The contemporary novelist's job is to take pieces of life and arrange them on paper. And the more direct their passage from street to paper, the more lifelike they should be" - Dashiell Hammett (seen in the above photo).

You can also read my Crime Beat column on Dashiell Hammett via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2016/05/my-crime-beat-column-from-street-to.html 

On This Day In History The Late, Great Crime Writer Dashiell Hammett Was Born

As History.com notes, on this day in 1894 Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon, The Dain Curse, The Thin Man and other crime classics, was born.

You can read about Dashiell Hammett via the below link:

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/hard-boiled-mystery-writer-dashiell-hammett-is-born?cmpid=email-hist-tdih-2017-0527-05272017&om_rid=de5e4076c942a595dbda53f758321d197499484f6d117f61b6ac5c08e0d6f0aa&om_mid=189438423&kx_EmailCampaignID=12938&kx_EmailCampaignName=email-hist-tdih-2017-0527-05272017&kx_EmailRecipientID=de5e4076c942a595dbda53f758321d197499484f6d117f61b6ac5c08e0d6f0aa

You can also read my Crime Beat column on Dashiell Hammett via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2016/05/my-crime-beat-column-from-street-to.html

My Crime Beat Column: From Street To Paper: A Look Back At Dashiell Hammett, Crime Writer & Detective

Happy birthday to one of my favorite writers, the late, great Dashiell Hammett, who was born on this date in 1894.

"Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish," wrote Raymond Chandler, another late, great crime writer, and another one of my favorite writers. "He put these people down on paper as they were, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before."

I've been reading and rereading Hammett's crime novels and short stories since I was a teenager. Despite his foolish admiration of the communist dictator and mass murderer Stalin and his naive attachment to the American Communist Party, I've come to admire him as a man and writer.

One has to admit he had the courage of his convictions, and he served honorably in the U.S. Army in both world wars. But it was his time as a Pinkerton detective that provided Hammett with the material for an original body of work that draws each new generation of crime fiction aficionados to him.  

I've read a couple of biographies of Hammett over the years and a short while back I read Nathan Ward's excellent book on Hammett, The Lost Detective: Becoming Dashiell Hammett.

I enjoyed the book and I liked his idea of covering his life before his fame as a writer, before his relationship to writer Lillian Hellman (an awful person, in my view), before his six-months in prison, and before his IRS difficulties and testimony before the McCarthy hearings on American communists.

Ward's book informs us that Hammett left school at 14 and joined the Pinkerton Detective Agency as an operative in 1915. He left in 1918 to serve in the U.S. Army during WWI, where he contacted tuberculosis, and he returned to the Pinkertons the following year and stayed as a detective until 1922.

"A good detective has to be brave, vigorous, damnably clever, tireless - altogether a real person! His is an extraordinarily complicated mechanism" - Dashiell Hammett.

As Ward notes in his book, his tuberculosis forced him to give up being a detective, but it may well have prompted him to become a literary legend. The journey on that hard road is what Ward's The Lost Detective is all about.

"While Hammett's life on center stage has been well-documented, the question of how he got there has not," Bloomsbury, Ward's publisher, writes. "That largely overlooked phase is the subject of Nathan Ward's The Lost Detective: Becoming Dashiell Hammett. Hammett's childhood, his life in San Francisco, and especially his experience as a detective deeply informed his writing and his characters, from the nameless Continental Op, hero of his stories and early novels, to Sam Spade and Nick Charles. The success of his many stories in the pulp magazine Black Mask following his departure from the Pinketons led him to novels; he would write five between 1929 and 1934, two of them, The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man, are now American classics."

Ward researched the Pinkerton archive at the Library of Congress, which holds sixty thousand documents and several hundred boxes of operative reports, along with agency employee records and other papers. Unfortunately, Ward was unable to discover any of Hammett's reports.

"But even after an hour spent reading through the reports of other operatives gives a good idea of the experiences and format that formed Hammett as a writer," Ward writes in his book.

"I decided to become a writer. It was a good idea. Having had no experience whatever in writing, except letters and reports, I wasn't handicapped by exaggerated notions of the difficulties ahead" - Dashiell Hammett.

If you've read and enjoyed Hammett's stories over the years, as I have, you might enjoy reading Ward's insightful and informative book.

"The contemporary novelist's job is to take pieces of life and arrange them on paper. And the more direct their passage from street to paper, the more lifelike they should be" - Dashiell Hammett.

"Maltese Falcon' Flies Again On Local Big Screens

John Timpane, my editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, reports on John Huston's classic crime film The Maltese Falcon appearing once again on the big screen.

It's the best movie ever made about a paperweight that just sits there and does nothing.

The Maltese Falcon turns 75 this year. This 1941 Warner Bros. film was (amazingly) John Huston's first directing turn; he wrote the script, too, largely from the hard-boiled dialogue in Dashiell Hammett's 1929 smash-hit novel.

Now you can see it on the big screen - and you really should. The Maltese Falcon will fly Sunday and Wednesday on more than 650 big-screen theaters across the land.

Local venues include the UA Riverside Plaza, the University 6, the Ritz 16 in Voorhees, Movies 16 in Somerdale, the King of Prussia 16, the Neshaminy 24. For theaters, times, and ticket prices, visit here.

It's part of the year-long Fathom Events and Turner Classic Movies Big Screen Classics series. They've already done Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and next month, from on high, The Ten Commandments.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://mobile.philly.com/beta?wss=/philly/entertainment&id=369266861

The Lost Detective: Separating Fact From Fiction In Dashiell Hammett’s Life And Work

Art Taylor reviews Nathan Ward's The Lost Detective: Becoming Dashiell Hammett in the Washington Post. 

The story goes that in 1917, Dashiell Hammett was offered $5,000 by an officer of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company to kill labor union organizer Frank Little, who had come to Butte, Mont., to stir up striking miners. Hammett, who was working for the Pinkerton Detective Agency as a strikebreaker, declined the offer. Little was killed, and it was believed that other Pinkertons may have been behind his lynching. Despite it all, Hammett stuck with the Pinkerton job.

The story has become pivotal for many people attempting to understand Hammett and his work, which includes the novels “Red Harvest,” “The Maltese Falcon” and “The Thin Man,” and many short stories. Hammett’s longtime lover Lillian Hellman once called the tale “a kind of key to his life,” and novelist James Ellroy linked the episode to “the great theme of [Hammett’s] work.”

Trouble is, the story probably isn’t true.

And that’s not news, by the way. Hammett’s biographer Richard Layman called the story “implausible” in his 1981 book “Shadow Man,” and Ellroy has labeled it “mythic.” But in his new book, “The Lost Detective,” Nathan Ward analyzes and dismantles the claim in more detail, part of an extensive bid to clarify Hammett’s early years and his transformation into one of the most influential crime writers of all time.

... In connecting fact and fiction, the most interesting argument of the book is that Hammett’s years as a detective contributed not only to the plots and themes of his work, but also to his landmark style: “If anything taught Hammett to write pithily and with appreciation for the language of street characters it was not discovering an early Hemingway story in the Transatlantic Review, but doing his scores of operative reports for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency.” Indeed, while reading documents in the Pinkerton archive at the Library of Congress, Ward discovered that the “reports were written to a certain understated standard, presenting a collection of rogues rendered matter-of-factly, with a surprisingly light touch.” Ward likens Pinkerton supervisors to editors and the submission of reports to a kind of streetwise training in the craft of writing. 

You can read the rest of the review via the below link: 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/separating-fact-from-fiction-in-dashiell-hammetts-life-and-work/2015/09/09/f69f30a2-477c-11e5-8ab4-c73967a143d3_story.html

Late, Great Crime Writer Dashiell Hammett's Papers Aquired By University Of South Carolina

 

The Washington Times offers a piece on the papers of the late, great crime writer Dashiell Hammett.

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) - A major collection of letters, photos and publications of the late crime fiction author Dashiell Hammett has been acquired by the University of South Carolina and will be made available to students and scholars within the coming year.

Hammett was a high-school dropout who created such iconic American characters as the gritty gumshoe Sam Spade in “The Maltese Falcon,” and the witty and worldly couple Nick and Nora Charles in “The Thin Man.”

University officials spoke with The Associated Press about the acquisition prior to its announcement, which is scheduled for Wednesday in Columbia at the Thomas Cooper Library.

Dean of Libraries Tom McNally said the collection includes hundreds of family letters, photographs, personal effects and documents from Hammett’s daughter Josephine, 89, and two of his grandchildren. It is bolstered by more than 300 Hammett books and rare first editions, as well as dozens of screenplays, files, documents and serialized magazines compiled by Hammett biographer and Columbia publisher Richard Layman.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/may/24/crime-caper-kingpin-dashiell-hammett-papers-home-a/

The Guardian's 100 Best Novels: No 54 - "The Maltese Falcon" By Dashiell Hammett (1929)

Robert McCrum at the British newspaper the Guardian offers a piece on Dashiell Hammett's classic crime novel The Maltese Falcon, which comes in at number 54 in the newspaper's 100 Best Novels series.

Raymond Chandler, who has yet to appear in this series, once said: “Hammett is all right. I give him everything. There were a lot of things he could not do, but what he did, he did superbly.” He added, in a summary that helps define Hammett’s achievement: “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.” He also gave his characters a distinctive language and convincing motivations in a genre that had grown stereotyped, flaccid and uninvolving.

The Maltese Falcon is the Hammett novel that jumps from the pages of its genre and into literature. It’s the book that introduces Sam Spade, the private detective who seduced a generation of readers, leading directly to Philip Marlowe. Dorothy Parker, never a pushover, confessed herself “in a daze of love” such as she had not known in literature “since I encountered Sir Lancelot” and claimed to have read the novel some 30 or 40 times.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/29/100-best-novels-the-maltese-falcon-dashiell-hammett-sam-spade-raymond-chandler  

You can check out the Guardian's list of 100 Best Novels via the below link:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/series/the-100-best-novels

Peter Lorre: One Of Cinema's Most Deliciously Sinister Presences

Anne Billson at the Telegraph looks back at the late actor Peter Lorre.

It's 50 years since the death, on March 23, 1964, of one of cinema's most deliciously sinister presences. Peter Lorre was born in 1904, of Jewish Austro-Hungarian descent, and attracted international attention in 1931 with his terrifying but weirdly sympathetic portrayal of a child murderer in Fritz Lang's M, the mother of all serial-killer movies.

Lorre used to tell the story that after he'd left Germany following the Nazi rise to power, he received a telegram from Joseph Goebbels, praising his performance in M and asking him to return. To which Lorre wrote back, "There is no room in Germany for two murderers like we are, Hitler and I."

In London, for Alfred Hitchcock, he was a charming baddie (learning his English dialogue phonetically) in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1924) before swapping over to the side of the good guys to play an exuberant spy with moustache and earring in Secret Agent (1936).  

In Hollywood his accent and slightly bug-eyed look landed him signature roles as a mad scientist, a Japanese detective, and, most memorably, as the slippery Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon. And, of course, he was a vital part of one of the greatest supporting casts ever assembled, in Casablanca.
 

After the war, his movie career seemed to go off the boil (though he made a welcome contribution to Disney's fabulous 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea) but he did plenty of television. He was the screen's first ever Bond villain, Le Chiffre, in CBS's Casino Royale (1954), and played opposite Steve McQueen in the classic Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode, Man from the South, adapted from a Roald Dahl story.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/starsandstories/10703031/Peter-Lorre-one-of-cinemas-most-deliciously-sinister-presences.html

 

Unread Dashiell Hammett Stories To Be Released By Author's Granddaughter

The late great Dashiell Hammett is one of my favorite writers, so I was interested in reading Richard Guzman's piece in the San Bernardino County Sun on a new book of short stories by Hammett, and I look forward to reading the book.

Fans of crime novels and hard-boiled fiction are bound to know the work of Dashiell Hammett. 
 
The Maryland-born writer has been credited with creating the genre that’s defined by its gritty realism and urban settings with stories that usually center on a private investigator as the tough cynical protagonist and narrator.

Among his best-known crime novels are “The Maltese Falcon,” which was turned into a 1941 hit film starring Humphrey Bogart, and “The Thin Man,” which also became a film. Both were published in 1930.

But it’s his lesser-known work, which includes very few crime stories, that is the focus of a new book about the late author set to be released Monday by Mysterious Press-Grove/Atlantic.

Co-edited by his granddaughter Julie Rivett, “The Hunter and Other Stories” is a collection of 17 short stories and three screenplays that, until now, have either never been published or have rarely been published. The stories illustrate Hammett’s desire to be known as more than a crime writer.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below links:

http://www.sbsun.com/lifestyle/20131031/unread-dashiell-hammett-stories-to-be-released-in-book-by-authors-local-granddaughter

Dashiell Hammett's San Francisco Hotel Suite

Alan Pierleoni at the Sacramento Bee wrote about his stay at the San Francisco hotel the great crime writer Dashiell Hammett once called home.

Recently, we camped at the Hotel Union Square, a refurbished showplace built in 1913 for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition.

... One very special room is No. 505, the Dashiell Hammett Suite. It's been staged to evoke the memory of Hammett, a pioneer of "hard-boiled" detective fiction ("The Maltese Falcon," "The Continental Op," the lighter "Thin Man" series).

In the 1920s, Hammett worked across the street in the Flood Building as a PI for the Pinkerton Detective Agency. For a while, he lived in Room 505 at the then-Golden West Hotel, where he sat at a desk overlooking the streets below and typed his San Francisco-based mysteries.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.sacbee.com/2012/07/15/4627841/you-can-almost-see-dashiell-hammett.html

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/07/15/4627841/you-can-almost-see-dashiell-hammett.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/07/15/4627841/you-can-almost-see-dashiell-hammett.html#storylink=cpy

San Francisco Film Noir Festival Celebrates Crime Writer Dashiell Hammett

G. Allen Johnson at the San Franciso Chronicle reports on the 10th San Franciso Noir City Film Festival. The festival will show films written by or based on work written by the late great crime writer Dashiell Hammett.

"It's amazing - as the sun sets and you sit in this room, it really starts to feel like Sam Spade's apartment," said Muller, referring to Dashiell Hammett's hero in his novel "The Maltese Falcon."

"It is a trip to read that book in this apartment. It makes your head spin. You feel it, you really feel it."

We are sitting in the apartment where Hammett lived in the late 1920s. Here, at 891 Post St., Hammett, a struggling writer who worked at Samuel's Jewelers on Market Street, wrote his first three novels: "Red Harvest," "The Dain Curse" and, of course, "The Maltese Falcon," in which Sam Spade's living quarters and office in the novel was based on Hammett's apartment.

You can read the rest of the story via the below link:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/01/11/DD2U1MKQV0.DTL

John Huston: Courage And Art

Todd McCarthy at the Hollywood Reporter wrote an interesting review of Jeffrey Meyer's biography of the late great film director John Huston.

Jeffrey Meyers has very little new to say about the 40 films John Huston made, but he does have quite a bit to add to the record about the many women who swam through the late director's life. Huston was a rake of an elevated order; so wide a swath did the charismatic, charming, difficult, passionate, intellectual and sadistic swashbuckler cut that a more fitting title for this particular biography might have been The Sultan of St. Clerans, a reference to the Irish manor house that was the defining Hustonian domain. Much has been written about him over the years but, for those still intrigued about who did what to whom in Hollywood's heyday, Meyers has not been shy about doing some detailed record-keeping.  

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/john-huston-courage-art-258544

John Huston directed some of my favorite films, such as The Man Who Would Be King and The Maltese Falcon.

U.S. Postal Service Celebrates John Huston - And Baltmore's Dashiell Hammett - With A Classic-Filmmaker Stamp

 

The late, great film director John Huston was honored by the U.S. Postal Service with a stamp.

The Classic-Filmmaker stamp also honors the late, great crime writer Dashiell Hammett, as Hammett's character Sam Spade, holding the Maltese Falcon, is behind Huston.

Huston, of course, directed the classic film version of Dashiell Hammett's classic crime novel The Maltese Falcon.

You can read the Baltimore Sun's report on the Huston stamp via the below link:

http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/movies/blog/2011/08/huston.html

Dashiell Hammett: The Bull of Baltimore

 

Lauren Weiner at The Weekly Standard states the case for Baltimore's claim to crime writer Dashiell Hammett.

Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man and other crime classics, was a private detective before he became a writer, and he did much of his detective work in Baltimore.

Baltimore, Weiner notes, shaped Hammett's art and his worldview.

Hammett is one of my favorite writers, despite his foolish admiration of mass murderer Stalin and his foolish attachment to the American Communist Party.

You can read Laurn Weiner's piece via the below link:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/bull-baltimore_516136.html