Dashiell Hammett

Dashiell Hammett was an American writer, born in Baltimore on 27 May 1894 and died on 10 January 1961. Before turning to fiction he worked for a private detective agency, and that experience gave his stories a sharp, practical feel for crime, money and moral compromise. He wrote for pulp magazines in the 1920s, then published a run of novels between 1929 and 1934 that changed the detective story. His prose is spare, objective and unsentimental, and his detectives are working men rather than polished gentlemen amateurs. The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man remain his best-known books, and both reached a wide audience through film. Hammett helped shape the hard-boiled tradition that later writers such as Raymond Chandler developed in their own ways. He wrote little fiction in his last decades, but his influence on crime writing and on American popular culture has lasted.