Author

Books by Dashiell Hammett

Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961) worked as a Pinkerton operative before becoming the central figure in American hard-boiled crime fiction. His five novels — Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, and The Thin Man — defined a genre and a prose style that influenced Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, and virtually every crime writer who followed. He was blacklisted during the McCarthy era for his political views and spent his later years writing little. His influence on crime fiction is comparable to Hemingway's on literary fiction.