SOURCE: "Dashiell Hammett: Themes and Techniques," in Essays on American Literature in Honor of Jay B. Hubbell, edited by Clarence Gohdes, Duke University Press, 1967, pp. 295-306.

In the following excerpt, Blair offers an overview of Hammett's career, noting many similarities between the works of Hammett and Ernest Hemingway.

The influence of subliterary works (sentimental fiction and poetry, popular humor, melodrama, and the like) on literary works, or the ways literary works shape subliterature often are fascinating. Without Gothic fiction Poe and Hawthorne would have been impossible; without Scott and Dickens nineteenth-century American humor, with all its vulgarity, could not have been written. An instance is the career of Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961), writer of detective fiction. Two uncertainties furnish difficulties but add interest to a consideration of him: (1) the possibility that Hammett's writings, despite their genre, are good enough to classify not as subliterature but as literature, and (2) the...