Dashiell Hammett
Man of Mystery
-
- $18.99
-
- $18.99
Publisher Description
Dashiell Hammett changed the face of crime fiction. In five novels published over five years as well as a string of stories, he transformed the mystery genre into literature and left us with the figure of the hard-boiled detective, from the Continental Op to Sam Spade—immortalized on film by Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon—and the more glamorous Thin Man, also made iconic with the aid of Hollywood. A brilliant writer, Hammett was a complex and enigmatic man. After 1934 until his death in 1961, he published no more novels and suffered from a writer’s block that both shamed and maimed him. He is identified with his tough protagonists, but his tuberculosis compromised his masculine identity and alcoholism may have been his answer. A former Pinkerton detective who valued honesty, he was attracted to women who lied outrageously, most notably Lillian Hellman, with whom he conducted a thirty-year affair. A controversial political activist who stood up for civil liberty, he was also a very private man. In this compact new biography, Sally Cline uses fresh research, including interviews with Hammett’s family and Hellman’s heir, to reexamine the life and works of the writer whom Raymond Chandler called “the ace performer.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dashiell Hammett, author of such firmly canonized works of detective fiction The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man led a personal life as troubled as those of his protagonists. This new, streamlined biography by Cline (Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise) takes us from his military service in WWI and career as a young private detective, through his uneasy literary stardom, and finally through his battles with ill respiratory health, and a case of writer's block that prevented him from producing any substantial work for most of his later life. Most uncomfortable are accounts of Hammett's uneasy relationships with the two major female figures in his life, his wife Josephine, and playwright Lillian Hellman, a mentee who, in a twisted way, seems to have added love and purpose to the last part of a rather unhappy life, despite his scandalous infidelity and cruelty to her. Told in a style that sometimes mixes verifiable fact with informed speculation about the subject's state of mind and inner turmoil, Cline makes the case for Hammett as a literary stylist on par with his contemporaries Hemingway and Faulkner, and convincingly parallels the known facts about his youth to the themes of his writing.
