Dashiell Hammett

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Dashiell Hammett was the first great writer of the hardboiled school. Even today, almost seventy years since he wrote his last mystery fiction, he is one of the most prominent and influential writers of detective and suspense fiction, and The Maltese Falcon remains the best-known hardboiled detective story. Hammett was himself a Pinkerton detective for many years before becoming a writer. He left the firm after an assignment as a strikebreaker in Butte, Montana, when he was offered a large bribe to kill Frank Little, a labor leader. He later recycled his experiences in Red Harvest.

Hammett pioneered both a taut, spare prose style and a hero who is coldly dispassionate, who possesses violence but also discipline, who bends to no will but his own. There are differences between the Continental Op, Sam Spade, Ned Beaumont, and even Nick Charles, but there are many similarities. Each has a rigid, though extremely personal, moral code. Each can be tough and even brutal when called for. None are sentimental in the least.

These heroes mostly inhabit a bustling San Francisco, where they crisply go about their business (compare with Raymond Chandler's languorous Los Angeles). These men are primarily job holders; work is their reason for being, the center of their life, and they get not just a salary but satisfaction from it. The Op in particular doesn't get emotionally involved in his cases; it's who he is, but it's also his job.

Though Chandler's Philip Marlowe was more often emulated, Hammett's ground-breaking style ensure his continuing popularity: the collection Nightmare Town was a best-seller nearly forty years after his death.