Hard-boiled detective writer Dashiell Hammett was born on May 27, 1894. From the age of 21-23, he worked as a Pinkerton detective and then joined the army. But he developed tuberculosis and the military discharged him shortly after joining. In 1920, he moved to Spokane, again to work for the Pinkertons. There, he served as a strikebreaker in the Anaconda miners’ strike. However, when the Pinkertons enlisted him to assassinate Native American IWW organizer Frank Little, he refused, and quit the agency.
Hard-Boiled Detective Novels
His first stories were published in the early 1920s. And his 1929 novel, “Red Harvest,” was inspired by the Anaconda Road massacre, a 1920 labor dispute in the mining town of Butte, Montana, when company guards fired on striking IWW miners, killing one and injuring 16 others. During that strike, vigilantes lynched Frank Little, the same man Hammett refused to murder. André Gide called Red Harvest “the last word in atrocity, cynicism, and horror.” Time magazine named it one of the top 100 novels of the 20th century. Even so, Hammett is most famous for The Maltese Falcon (1930) and The Thin Man (1934), which were both made into successful Hollywood films.
Leftist Politics
In 1937, Hammett supported the Anti-Nazi League and the Western Writers Congress. He also donated to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, fighting the fascists in Spain. He was a socialist and served as president of the Communist-sponsored Civil Rights Congress of New York. In 1951, the authorities sentenced him to six months’ imprisonment for refusing to cooperate with the US House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities’ (HUAC) inquiries into domestic “subversion.” Playwright Lillian Hellman, his long-time companion and lover, said that he submitted to prison rather than reveal the names of comrades because “he had come to the conclusion that a man should keep his word.”
McCarthy subpoenaed him again in 1953, during his anti-Communist witch hunt. And again, in 1955, Congress called him to testify about his role in the Civil Rights Congress. Though he served no more jail time, they blacklisted him. A judge also convicted him in absentia in 1932 of battery and attempted rape. He died in 1961, of lung cancer.