Biography Essay

In March 1928, just after Dashiell Hammett had submitted his first novel for publication, he wrote to his editor, Blanche Knopf, that unlike most moderately literate people, he took detective fiction seriously: "Some day somebody's going to make 'literature' out of it ... and I'm self- ish enough to have my hopes." Hammett wrote only five novels and fifty-five short stories in his twelve-year writing career, but it is generally acknowledged that his impact on detective fiction is unequaled in this century.

When Hammett began writing in 1922 there was an abundance of mystery writers who satisfied a growing hunger among American readers for stories of murder and intrigue. Even so, the mystery was written largely by untrained and unskilled writers or by professionals as a diversion from their serious work. It was commonly agreed that the sole purpose of the mystery was to present a problem, usually a...