Hammett's hard-bitten hero, Sam Spade, portrayed here by Humphrey Bogart in the film version of The Maltese Falcon, epitomises the genre
As BBC Radio 4 begins a series of programmes on the writer Raymond Chandler, Strand magazine's Andrew Gulli explains the joy of "noir" and his discovery long-lost short stories by Chandler's literary inspiration, Dashiell Hammett.
If Dashiell Hammett had never been born, you probably wouldn't have read or heard of writers like Michael Connelly, Robert B. Parker, Georges Simenon, Elmore Leonard, or Sue Grafton.
These, and scores of other best-selling authors past and present, owe a debt to Hammett for taking crime and murder out of genteel country estates and bringing it into the mean streets.
Hammett created a world where moral clarity is as foggy as daybreak in San Francisco; the setting for one of his most famous works, The Maltese Falcon, and the home of one of the greatest anti-heroes in detective fiction.
Hammett's PI Sam Spade is cold, cynical, and cunning, and yet his idiosyncratic code of honour forces him to condemn a woman he loves for murdering his partner, whom he didn't like.
No less than the dean of cynicism, W. Somerset Maugham, described Spade as "a nasty bit of goods".
Hammett's haunted characters have been said to be a reflection of his self, described by some as an embittered cynic. True, his life was full of conflict and pain, but a great deal of that occurred because of his idealism.
Dashiell Hammett: Master of the slickly-paced detective novel
A member of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, Hammett volunteered to fight in World War I. Returning to Pinkerton after the war, he found the agency's "union busting style" offensive and quit, supporting his family as a jewellery store clerk and copy editor.
Despite frailty and illness, Hammett also served in World War II on the Aleutian Islands. But the country he came home to this time was very much at odds with his Marxist views and he fell victim to the Red Scare; in 1951, he was thrown in jail for five months for refusing to betray a friend. Perhaps the deepest cynics are born from the most hopeful idealists.
It is impossible to speak about Hammett without the name of Raymond Chandler coming up. In the noir genre, the two writers were what Leonardo and Michelangelo were to the Renaissance. Hammett got the ball rolling... and Chandler picked it up and ran away with it.
Chandler's most famous creation is the wise-cracking PI Philip Marlowe, who always acts out of the best of intentions; greed and personal gain never influence him, yet his strong sense of chivalry at times leaves him disillusioned.
After helping cover up a murder in one of Chandler's most renowned novels, The Big Sleep, Marlowe says: "You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was. But the old man didn't have to be."
Chandler was also a master at employing humour and colourful characters, but his worldview was as dark as Hammett's: in the end, the wealthy and corrupt always end up on top, and those that aren't crushed by others' ascent to power grow bitter and world-weary.
Interactions among artists are replete with rivalries, yet by all accounts Hammett and Chandler respected each other.
"I believe this style," Chandler wrote, "can say different things [the writer] did not know how to, or feel the need of saying. In [Hammett's] hands it had no overtones, left no echo, evoked no image beyond a distant hill… He wrote scenes that never seemed to have been written before."
Chandler's statement was echoing inside my mind when I was going through scores of fragments and short stories written by Hammett.
I spent more than a hundred hours referencing and cross-referencing all the short pieces of fiction that Hammett wrote, until I realized that I had 15 unpublished short stories in my possession.
The golden years of noir coincided with a rise in gangsterism in the US
I felt like I had stumbled upon buried treasure. And not only were these works unpublished, they were fantastic. The stories reflected Hammett's knack for terse dialogue, sharp characterization, sly humour, and page-turning suspense.
From a selfish point of view, I was happy that I could play a small part in trying to bring Hammett back into the mainstream.
These past two years have felt like editing heaven for me; I've managed to publish a previously unpublished novella by Graham Greene, as well as short stories by Mark Twain, Agatha Christie, and PG Wodehouse. Now with a story by Dashiell Hammett, that heaven is lasting a little longer.
Hammett and Chandler died two years apart, Chandler in 1959 and Hammett in 1961, yet in the hearts and minds of mystery fans around the world they'll live forever, if anything in the past half century their legacy has not only endured but soared.
Tens of thousands of copies of both writers' works are sold every year, their books have been adapted into highly successful films, and they continue to inspire and influence hundreds of writers
Not bad for a kid who dropped out of school when he was only 13 (Hammett) or, in Chandler's case a former oil executive who published his first novel when he was 51.
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