Army ambulance driver in WWI who acquired tuberculosis. How did Hammett go from being a Pinkerton Detective to writing detective novels? Hammett was a High School dropout and a U.S. The ideal detective, thought agency founder Allan Pinkerton, was 'a knight who could pass as a rogue.Much has been written about Hammett (1894-1961), but this book covers a little known period of his life and helps answer a question I have wondered about over the years. (He) sneaked out to town and smoked drank, and helled around,' believing that his disease 'respected toughness, a quality that my father admired greatly.' This attitude fit right into the Pinkerton mold.

His illness, thought his daughter Jo, 'caused him to conclude that it was useless to take good care of himself …. A case of Spanish flu developed into tuberculosis. He joined the already legendary Pinkerton Detective Agency in 1915, taking leave in 1918 to enlist in the Army. Sam was a voracious reader, everything from classic European literature to American pulp. His mother called him 'Da-SHEEL' to most of his friends he was Sam. … It was how he came to the writing life at all.' He was born Samuel Dashiell Hammett in southern Maryland in 1894. Hammett's last book was published in 1934, but as Ward puts it: '(T)he lasting mystery of Dashiell Hammett was not why he stopped writing. Ward shadows the author of 'The Maltese Falcon,' 'Red Harvest' and 'The Thin Man' from a Philadelphia and Baltimore boyhood to his years out West as a Pinkerton detective to California as a writer of crime novels and screenplays.

In 'The Lost Detective: Becoming Dashiell Hammett,' Nathan Ward shows that Hammett's innovative style did not, as it may have seemed, spring fully formed like Athena from the head of Zeus. In his oft-quoted essay on the American detective story, 'The Simple Art of Murder,' the creator of Philip Marlowe wrote that the creator of Sam Spade and Nick and Nora Charles 'gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish.'Ĭhandler was crediting Hammett with creating a new kind of crime story that contrasted sharply with the genteel formula fiction of Edgar Wallace and Agatha Christie. Raymond Chandler, the man who walked through the door Dashiell Hammett kicked open, paid him the sincerest homage.

The Lost Detective by Nathan Ward