"I'm one of the few--if there are any more--people moderately literate who take the detective story seriously," Dashiell Hammett wrote to his publisher in 1928 at the beginning of his novel-writing career. "I don't mean that I necessarily take my own or anybody else's seriously--but the detective story as a form. Some day somebody's going to make 'literature' out of it . . . and I'm selfish enough to have my hopes." In fact, Hammett did just that; he made real literature out of crime fiction by removing it from the drawing room where British and other mystery writers had cosseted it since the time of Edgar Allan Poe and giving it a realistic edge with hard-hitting action and slangy dialogue. His novels, Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Glass Key, The Maltese Falcon, and The Thin Man, were bestsellers when published in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and have remained...