Hammett attended the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, but left when he was only 14 to help support his family. He held various jobs before joining the Pinkerton Detective Agency as an operator, much of his knowledge of detective procedures would have been gleaned from this experience. He resigned from Pinkerton's after the murder of Frank Little, an IWWW labour organiser. He served in the ambulance corps during WWI and contracted tuberculosis, which affected his health for the rest of his life. He rejoined Pinkerton's after the war and also wrote advertising copy to supplement his income. His first story, Arson Plus, appeared in Black Mask magazine in 1923 and introduced the Continental Detective agency and the detective Continental Op which would figure in many of his subsequent stories. In 1929, he introduced his now famous detective, Sam Spade, in The Maltese Falcon. Hammett's writing career was short-lived and ended in 1934 with The Thin Man. He continued after this writing screenplays in Hollywood and many of his novels were screened. During the 1930's, he joined the Communist Party and became a fierce opponent of Nazism. During WWII, he served for three years as a newspaper editor for the U.S. Army in the Aleutian Islands. In 1948, he became the vice-chairman of the Civil Rights Congress, an organization that the FBI was investigating for subversion and when, in 1951, the McCarthy witch hunts began, this came back to haunt him. He spent four months in prison for refusing to testify against party members, was blacklisted by the government which even went so far as to keep his books off the shelves of overseas American libraries. His income was attacked by the Internal Revenue and he suffered extreme difficulties in supporting himself. The remainder of his career was spent teaching creative writing at the Jefferson School of Social Science in New York, until 1956 when he became too ill to continue. He died of lung cancer in 1961, completely penniless. His other works included Nightmare Town (1925), Red Harvest (1929), The Dain Curse (1929), The Glass Key (1931), Woman in the Dark (1933) and Secret Agent X-9 (1934). |
