Literary Birthday – 27 May – Dashiell Hammett
Dashiell Hammett was born on 27 May 1894 and died on 10 January 1961.
Dashiell Hammett Quotes
- I’ve been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.
- If you have a story that seems worth telling, and you think you can tell it worthily, then the thing for you to do is to tell it, regardless of whether it has to do with sex, sailors, or mounted policemen.
- I found I was repeating myself. It is the beginning of the end when you discover you have style.
- When you write, you want fame, fortune and personal satisfaction. You want to write what you want to write and feel it’s good, and you want this to go on for hundreds of years. You’re not likely ever to get all these things, and you’re not likely to give up writing and commit suicide if you don’t, but that is — and should be — your goal. Anything else is kind of piddling.
- What I try to do is to write a story about a detective rather than a detective story.
Read: Dashiel Hammett’s 24 Rules For Detective Writers
Dashiell Hammett was an American author of hardboiled fiction and a political activist. He wrote hardboiled detective novels, short stories, and screenplays. He is well known for creating Sam Spade, the quintessential world-weary private eye, from The Maltese Falcon
, and Nick and Nora Charles, a dashing, cocktail-loving husband-and-wife team who solve murder mysteries, from The Thin Man. Many of Hammett’s works have been adapted for film and they became fine examples of film noir. Hammett is now regarded as one of the finest mystery writers of all time. In 1951 he went to jail for six months because he refused to reveal the names of the contributors to the bail bond fund of the Civil Rights Congress, of which he was a trustee. Two years later he refused to cooperate when he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee to testify about his ties to communism. He was labelled a subversive and blacklisted.
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