Dashiell Hammett

Born in Maryland in 1894, Hammett grew up poor.  Although he eventually discovered that he could work his way out of poverty (indeed, into flashy, superfluous wealth) by writing advertising copy, then short stories, novels, and Hollywood story ideas and screenplays, poverty would haunt him into adulthood, on occasion during even his period of celebrity, and for the final years of his life.  His father was, according to neighbours, “pure Hammett,” which meant that “he drank whisky prodigiously, never refused a fight, played a sharp game of poker, and womanized all night” (Marling 2), and at thirteen Dashiell dropped out of highschool in his first year to pursue a series of odd jobs and support his family.  None of these lasted long, but at nineteen he discovered what he later called “an enigmatic want ad [that] took [him] into the employ of the Pinkterton’s National Detective Agency” (qtd. in Marling 4); he worked on and off over the course of the next six years for this famous and successful “private eye” agency.  While many of his later personal anecdotes about tailing famous suspects and searching for caches of money are considered the fabrication of his storyteller’s instinct (Marling 13-15), he was apparently a good detective and remarkably able to follow a suspect undetected, despite his strikingly tall and thin build (6).  Most importantly for his eventual fame, his work securing arrests and breaking strikes, and his exposure to the language, the tricks, the rule-breaker’s attitude and the cynical, detached perspective of the private detective’s trade all provided him with the material for his “Continental Op” detective stories and his famous novels (Jo Hammett 32; Marling 6-7).  His final brief period of work for Pinkerton’s was in San Francisco – between which city and New York City he would shuttle for much of his adult life – in 1921, when he was a new father at 25.  Like the job itself, the city’s lively mixture of people and sub-legal activity would provide inspiration for his fiction:

San Francisco was the metropolis of the West, the focal point of immigration, mining, industry, export […] Prohibition was regarded as an incentive to commerce rather than as law […] speakeasies bought the consent of local authorities […] prostitution flourished […]. The Bay area attracted German and Italian immigrants, the latter clustering along the waterfront.  An entire Chinese society, complete with criminal gangs, holy men, and a social hierarchy developed in a twenty square block area downtown.  Government had not really taken hold in San Francisco. (Marling 12)

As journalist Herb Caen put it, “San Francisco was a Sam Spade city” (qtd. in Marling 12).

His work as a “Pinkerton” suggests physical vitality and “toughness”; this, remembers his daughter Jo, was a quality that he valued and that “would take him through the last bad years [of his life] – [despite] prison, sickness, money problems” (Jo Hammett 74).  He bore physical scars from his dangerous work with Pinkerton’s, and he was determinedly careless with his own health:  he smoked continuously, drank heavily for much of his adult life (except during phases when he was working hard on his writing), repeatedly contracted venereal disease, and barely ate for stretches at a time.  But if he was tough, it was mentally, not physically:  he had been exposed to tuberculosis as a child, and contracted it himself during the first World War, when he worked in the Maryland ambulance corps.  (He was discharged due to this sickness after a few months in the army, and met his wife-to-be Jose Dolan while she nursed him at a Public Health Service hospital in Washington state.  At the age of 48, despite his emaciation, he would eventually persuade health officials to admit him again into the army in order to serve as a private during WWII.)  For much of his life he was rendered weak and ill by his lung disease, and although he twice attempted to take up work again for Pinkerton’s after his WWI service – hoping to support his new wife and baby – he was unable to hold a job there because of his health, and the young family lived with very little money.  In 1926, the possibility that he might infect his children forced him to move away from his family (Jo Hammett 49) during their infancy, but although he continued to support his wife even after they finally divorced in 1937 he never returned to live with them.  His daughter speculates that as well as the widely-suspected motive of wanting freedom to gamble and entertain women, he remained apart for “the peace and privacy to write and be alone.  My father was a man who always loved and needed solitude” (50).

This solitary streak in Hammett’s nature (except when drunk), along with his toughness and sense of honour, his experience with Pinkerton’s, and what one biographer calls an “aloofness and pride” (a need to “identify and reject the inauthenticities” he detected in other people [Marling 23]) and an uneasiness about emotion (24) – are all considered to have contributed to the characteristics of the literary voice and set of fictional detectives that made him so famous:  the Continental Op and Sam Spade are “tough, realistic, unsympathetic, knowing, and engaging” (Jo Hammett 8).  Biographer and critic William Marling also asserts that, although Hammett did not become politically active until after an attempt to recover from alcoholism in 1949, “he had been camouflaging a materialism close to Marxism since his early stories” (115), and that this contributed to his literary work

an unseen ballast of social concern to mitigate the apparently ruthless or uncouth actions of the hero[es].  Hammett began [writing], in fact, with extraordinary insight into the lives of the office worker, the labourer, the underdog, and the misfit. (24)

Although his work stands aloof from emotional empathy, Marling argues, it betrays Hammett’s interest in “the larger social mechanism,” an interest which had prompted him to read Marx early in his life, and return to him in his forties.  (He taught at the Jefferson School of Social Science, a Marxist college [Jo Hammett 144] upon his return to America after non-combat service in WWII.  He also made contributions to the Communist Party of America, and was jailed for six months when he decided to remain silent in front of a cold war-era trial concerning his political activity [Jo Hammett 9; Marling 122].)

By the time he died of lung cancer at the age of 67, he had been living quietly since returning from jail, his celebrity faded, his fortune squandered (and its remaining amounts collected by the IRS upon discovery that he owed over $100 000 in taxes), and his health poor.  He seemed to be unable to complete a final novel; his productive years were far behind him, having elapsed after the five novels and numerous stories written during his thirties.  (Working as a scriptwriter for Hollywood movies studios during his forties he was frequently fired and re-hired, his hard partying taking its toll on his working reputation [Marling 113]).  His most constant companion for much of his life had been another man’s wife whom he met in Hollywood, playwright and script reader Lillian Hellman; she remained with him during his final years, arranged for his burial, and wrangled with his family for control of his copyrights (Marling 126; Jo Hammett 11-12).  Perhaps partly due to Hellman’s creative management of his public image, but also due to the sensational success of his literary work; his stylishness, good looks, and personal elegance; his code of manly “toughness” and honour; and his extravagance with money, he left behind the image of yet another glamorously embittered American writer-hero (alongside Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner, the former and latter of whom he admired and drank with), and another recklessly alcoholic Hollywood celebrity.  He also left behind that image’s shadow:  that of a frequently poverty-stricken, sickly and irresponsible man, a man “pure Hammett” in his gambling and alcohol abuse and faithlessness with women.  There are other after-images as well – of the loving, patient, solitary, but disappointing father that his daughter Jo Hammett remembers, and of the self-taught but brilliant innovator of hard-boiled detective fiction that critics and fans recall to this day. (SB)

Works Cited

Hammett, Jo.  Dashiell Hammett:  A Daughter Remembers.  Ed. Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett.  New York:  Carroll and Graf Publishers, 2001.

Marling, William.  Dashiell Hammett.  Boston:  Twayne Publishers, 1983.