美国硬汉派侦探小说作家DASHIELL HAMMETT

he dropped out of school at the age of thirteen. He worked a succession of low-paying jobs including freight clerk, railroad laborer, messenger boy, and stevedore. In 1915 he began working on and off as a detective for the Pinkerton Agency. In less than ten years he would be turning these experiences into some of the most popular detective stories of his time. Unlike the intellectualized mysteries of earlier detective novels, Hammett’s less-than-glamorous realism transformed the genre into a serious response to the urban culture of the times.

Hammett spent his early twenties working as a detective in San Francisco before enlisting in the army during World War I. He became a sergeant in the Motor Ambulance Corp, where he contracted tuberculosis. Upon returning from the service, he realized that his ailing health made it impossible to continue as a detective. uitting the agency, he tried his hand at writing. His first story was published in 1922 by the

upscale society magazine THE SMART SET. His new gritty style of detective story, however, was better suited to the pulp crime magazines of the time. In 1923, one of the most popular, BLACK MASK, published his story “Arson Plus.”

For the next several years Hammett would hone his skills as a storyteller in the pages of BLACK MASK. There he introduced a nameless character referred to only as “the Continental Op.” This down-to-earth operative working for the Continental Detective Agency was the

antithesis of the glamorous all-knowing investigators that made up much of the detective genre. The “Op,” with his rough speech and matter-of-fact attitude, was incredibly popular. In 1928 he wrote a full-length novel with the “Op,” incorporating much of what he had seen at the Pinkerton Agency. RED HARVEST was a psychological thriller narrated in a voice both penetrating and off-the-cuff. It was the raw, unadorned style of Red Harvest that would come to be known as “hard boiled.” Within a year Hammett published his second book, THE DAIN CURSE. By 1930 he had built a strong following, and decided to branch out with a new character.

For his next novel, Hammett created Sam Spade, a rough and solitary man who worked outside of the law. This independent detective made his first appearance in what was to become Hammett’s most famous book, THE MALTESE FALCON (1930). A story of greed and betrayal, THE MALTESE FALCON went into seven printings in its first year. In the 1941 movie version Humphrey Bogart played a reluctant, yet idealistic detective who epitomized the “hard boiled” hero. He tackled society’s corruption with an unyielding search for the truth, and a lack of concern for what it took to find it.

Hammett followed THE MALTESE FALCON a year later with THE GLASS KEY, a story of political intrigue focused on the social relations of the rich and the corruption of power. The N