The Thin Man

Autoreninformationen

Dashiell Samuel Hammett was born in St. Mary's County, Maryland. He grew up in Philadelphia   and Baltimore. Hammett left school at the age of fourteen and held several kinds   of jobs thereafter-messenger boy, newsboy, clerk, operator, and stevedore, finally   becoming an operative for Pinkerton's Detective Agency. Sleuthing suited young Hammett,   but World War I intervened, interrupting his work and injuring his health. When Sergeant   Hammett was discharged from the last of several hospitals, he resumed detective work.   He soon turned to writing, and in the late 1920s Hammett became the unquestioned   master of detective-story fiction in America. In The Maltese Falcon (1930) he first   introduced his famous private eye, Sam Spade. The Thin Man (1932) offered another   immortal sleuth, Nick Charles. Red Harvest (1929), The Dain Curse (1929), and The   Glass Key (1931) are among his most successful novels. During World War II, Hammett   again served as sergeant in the Army, this time for more than two years, most of   which he spent in the Aleutians. Hammett's later life was marked in part by ill health,   alcoholism, a period of imprisonment related to his alleged membership in the Communist   Party, and by his long-time companion, the author Lillian Hellman, with whom he had   a very volatile relationship. His attempt at autobiographical fiction survives in   the story "Tulip," which is contained in the posthumous collection The Big Knockover (1966, edited by Lillian Hellman). Another volume of his stories, The Continental   Op (1974, edited by Stephen Marcus), introduced the final Hammett character: the   "Op," a nameless detective (or "operative") who displays little of his personality,   making him a classic tough guy in the hard-boiled mold-a bit like Hammett himself.

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