The following is an article that I wrote a few years ago on the life and work of Dashiell Hammett.  Looking at it again in order to refresh my memory on  some points, I discovered that for some reason, it had never been  posted on Political Affairs. 

For that reason I am posting it here. In terms of Hammett's place in U.S. Literature and in the history of CPUSA members contributions to that literature, his role has not been diminished, even though his political work and postwar repression are in establishment sources relegated to footnotes

Norman Markowitz

Dashiell Hammett  wrote about the class struggle in America in works of popular fiction in the 1920s and 1930s and fought as a partisan of socialism and the working class in real life from the 1930s to his death in 1961. .  He was many things: A Pinkerton Detective or “fink” paid to do vicious things during and after WWI;  the creator of the American private detective in literature; a  Communist party, USA activist who lent his name to anti-fascist, pro labor and Civil Rights causes; a political prisoner in the 1950s under McCarran “Internal Security” Act for refusing to turn over the membership lists of a mass organization to the government.

Hammett was a writer for the working class(not for himself, not for art, and, although he did many things to make money, not primarily for money) He was an artist   who learned from his life experiences and applied those experiences in both literature and life. 

Because he was a Communist for the last decades of his life, he became after his imprisonment in the early 1950s  something of an “unperson,”  often denied serious credit for the genre he created and subject to condescending putdowns by anti-Communist critics across the political spectrum. They wrote and taught that  was an alcoholic (among distinguished artists he was in very good company)  They wrote and taught that  h e had writers’ block (he was also in very good company)  They wrote and taught that his work wasn’t really “political” in an overt way (if it was of course, it would have been condemned as “party line” and agitprop”).  The message was that it was all right to watch the Maltese Falcon or the Thin Man movies, but don’t take Dashiell Hammett seriously, don’t read his works to find out how much Hollywood left out, and certainly don’t relate his art to his politics 

They also wrote and taught Raymond Chandler(of Philip Marlowe fame) was a better writer than Hammett. Chandler also was a heavy drinker and didn’t produce a huge amount of work but was politically a liberal and no threat in the postwar era.  Whether he was a better or worse writer than Hammett  is irrelevant since without Hammett there would not have been a Chandler or a John MacDonald or even that comically crude and rightwing Hammett imitator, Mickey

 Spillaine, whose Mike Hammer novels transformed reflected the world and the world-view of Joe McCarthy. 

This was pretty much the conventional wisdom about Dashiell Hammett when I was in college and graduate school in the 1960s.  Even though, Hammett would appear as a character in the film, Julia, in the 1970s, and be the subject of a PBS dramatization of his life in      many continue to hold to this one dimensional view..

Samuel Dashiell Hammett was born in Maryland in 1894 in the midst of a depression. Dashiell was his mother’s family name and as he grew up in Baltimore and then Philadelphia, everyone called him Sam.

            1894 was a depression year, one in which the Cleveland administration smashed  American Railway Union and imprisoned its leader, Eugene V. Debs, to break a strike  that the Union, a comprehensive industrial union, had undertaken to support industrial workers making Pullman cars in the company town of Pullman, Illinois.  Two years earlier, a small army of Pinkterton “detectives” (strikebreakers and scabs) had fought it out with unionized steel workers at Homestead, Pennsylvania in another strike that ended in a major defeat for the working class.

            Hammett left school when he was thirteen and bounced around for the next  eight years in the working class. However, his experiences didn’t lead him to develop the class consciousness that Jurgis, the protagonist in Upton Sinclair’s classic socialist agitational novel of that period, The Jungle, did.  Instead, he joined the class enemy, becoming a detective for the Pinkerton agency at the age of twenty-one in 1915.

            Here Hammett found himself involved in brutal Pinkerton espionage, provocations, and strikebreaking against labor, particularly against the radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in the West.  In 1917 in Butte, Montana, Hammett was offered five thousand dollars to murder the anti-war IWW leader, Frank Little, who was leading a strike of miners against Anaconda.  He refused.  Little was subsequently lynched by band of masked men who were generally believed to be either Pinkerton’s or in the pay of the agency.  The police of course did nothing to apprehend the culprits.

            Hammett volunteered to serve in WWI and served as an ambulance driver until he contracted both the global flu epidemic which was to kill millions at the war’s  end and in the immediate postwar period.  He also contracted  tuberculosis.  While he survived, TB would remain a chronic problem for the rest of his life and help produce t further respiratory problems.

            Hammett went back to working for Pinkerton after the war, but with a commitment to use his work to write and become a writer.  He also began to drink heavily, perhaps as self-medication because of his health and/or  the wretched nature of his work.

            Hammett left the agency in 1921 and began to write crime fiction his experiences in magazines, including Black Mask, the best known magazine of crime fiction.

Unlike earlier and contemporary  crime solvers, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s Hercules Poirot and later protagonists, not to mention the Lord Peter Whimseys, Charlie Chans, Mr. Motos, etc., Hammett’s detectives were neither elite figures or exotic characters.  The central character  in the early stories was a nameless detective called the “Continental Op” In 1928, Hammett published his first novel,  Red Harvest.  Another, The Dain Curse, followed, and readers of detective fiction began to realize that he represented something that was both new and remarkable

  The elite and exotic figures in Hammett’s stories were usually the criminals and they often had powerful allies in the establishment to assist them.  Also, the motif of the stories, even if they often took wild unrealistic turns,  was not to unravel the mystery but to follow the action as the detective, who,  with a sense of honor and justice even if his employers had neither, sought to due his  job. As Hammett developed as an artist, his villains also became more realistic.

In 1930, Hammett wrote what is still his best known novel, The Maltese Falcon introducing Sam Spade, who would be the prototype for the American “Private Eye” for generations.  The Maltese Falcon would be made into two movies before the classic 1941 version starring Humphrey Bogart.  Spade Spade would also have his own radio show and would eventually influence Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, Mickey Spillaine’s misanthropic  Mike Hammer and movie and television private eyes like Richard Diamond, Mannix and many others from the 1930s to the 1970s.

The search for a mythical treasure leads to betrayal and murder in The Maltese Falcon.   In Hammett’s next novel, The Glass Key  (1931) (made into a successful film starring Alan Ladd in 1942) the authorities and the criminals operate through the worlds of business and politics as a kind of interlocking directorate.

The Glass Key gained Hammett a major literary reputation and entry into literary circles.   Coming to Hollywood in 1930 after The Maltese Falcon, he met the playwright Lillian Hellman, and  established a relationship with her which lasted  for the rest of his life.   In 1934, his last major work  The Thin Man was published and became a great success.

The Thin Man  led of course to a series of movies starring William Powell and Myrna Loy  Eventually its upper class New York amateur detectives created another genre character which spawned many imitators,  many imitators, from the 1950s television series, The Norths to the better  known 1970s television series, Hart to Hart(co-starring, ironically, the blacklisted actor Lionel Stander, who had gone to Italy in the 1950s to work in Italian films after he blasted HUAC as a very unfriendly witness).

While some have seen The Thin Man as in the tradition of English upper class sleuths, especially the Agatha Christie’s Tommy and Tuppence characters of the 1920s,  Nick particularly has a complicated relationship with many underworld characters (who aren’t that different than the cops) and, while they do exude glamour, the alcoholic haze in which they wander makes them less sterling representatives of their class than characters to be either  laughed at or pitied for their their aimlessness  as much as admired.

After the rise of Hitler in Germany, Hammett was to devote much of his energies in the 1930s and 1940s to the struggle against fascism and for workers rights.  He became a leader of the League of American Writers, the mass organization that the CPUSA played a leading role in creating in the 1930s and which sought to both represent writers as workers and also to encourage pro working class and anti-fascist work.

Hammett political work and personal integrity limited his success as a screenwriter in the Hollywood studio system.  Although his political enemies would mock him for his drinking and partying(portraying him in many respects as a kind of real life Nick Charles, which he didn’t especially mind) he worked to fight fascism, racism, and anti-Semitism, while they spent these time criticizing the policies and members of the Communist party.

Old myths died hard  and  this one, similar to rightwing attacks on “radical chic” in the 1960s and “politically correct” artists today, served the interests of those who wished to either condemn and/or dismiss Hammett’s work and his politics.   

While CPUSA members like Hammett  and close allies of the party worked in Hollywood’s studio system as writers directors and actors (there were even technical people who were scenic designers, cameramen, etc) they did so because their work, particularly those who made had performed in films that were sympathetic to the urban working class, were commercially and artistically successful for the studio owners. 

It was always much easier and much more lucrative to be a B movie actor like Ronald Reagan or a B movie writer or director and produce work for the studio system based on establishment formulas.

 Communists and their allies, whatever the quality of their work, often sought to work within those formulas to to make films that portrayed the working class more positively.  They  always faced substantial harassment from conservative elements in the Hollywood industry, from labor racketeers in the technical unions to right-wingers among the writers and directors themselves(a substantial group whose organization and influence scholars are just beginning to seriously study) to the studio owners themselves, who fought the Communist-led left’s successful campaign to unions of writers, actors, and directors as actively as capitalists everywhere in the 1930s fought the campaigns to organize workers in all industries.

Hammett was part of this struggle and his popularity as a writer made it easier for others to join in and become activists. 

During WWII, Hammett actually fought to rejoin the service (an incredibly courageous albeit quixotic act, given both his age (he was forty six) and the fact that he had suffered chronic disabilities from his World War I service.  He served in U.S. army the Aleutian Islands in the Pacific where he edited the local army newspaper. The service intensified his respiratory problems, adding emphysema to his list of ills

His wartime service as a writer and organizer contributed to the war effort.  In the postwar era though, he and his comrades would become the hunted, as Frank Little and his IWW comrades were hunted at the end of WWI.  After the war, U.S. government agencies and the military began to remove his books from U.S. libraries through the world.

Although he was very famous, Hammett taught courses at the  CPUSA supported Jefferson School of Social Science, in which teachers, many of whom had already been victims of blacklisting, provided working class people with an open, non competitive college education, from 1946 to 1956 . Hammett became active as a supporter of the Civil Rights Congress, a new left led militant Civil Rights organization(see Gerald Horne’s splendid work, Communist Front).

 Although far less so than his lifetime companion, Lillian Hellman, Hammett participated in the circles of artists and intellectuals to mobilize opposition to postwar Red Scare, which, albeit less violent and terroristic physically than the post WWI Red Scare in the U.S.  was to be far much comprehensive and of much longer duration, because it served as a major foundation for the global cold war, as it expanded and intensified into the NATO alliance, the nuclear arms race, the Korean War, and a “defense” budget that rose from twelve billion shortly after WWII to over forty billion a decade later.

Hammett served five months in federal prison in 1951 for his refusal to name names, hand over lists, collaborate with HUAC

Under the McCarran “Internal Security” Act,(1950) a “Subversive Activities Control Board” was created in effect to institutionalize HUAC’s use of media to red-bait and “hearings” to intimidates its prey for a national audience.  The Board had the power to demand that organizations  labeled “Communist front” groups register with it and turn over their membership lists.   Refusal to comply meant prison sentences which theoretically could be of long duration and huge fines which practically could bankrupt the organization.

 Besides these effects, the purpose of the legislation was to intimidate members of such organizations(the mass organizations of the left) into withdrawing membership and dissuade potential members from joining, to consolidate and institutionalize a political climate of repression, since any organization could be listed by the board and the only way  for organizations to “protect themselves” was to do the work of the state inquisition by carrying out internal purges of their own and steering clear of militant positions and mass protest tactics. 

Hammett refusal to name names, turn over lists, etc, should be seen in this context. .  After his release, the IRS  continued the work of  HUAC and SACB to attach whatever he had left financially and leave him financially dependant on Lillian Hellman as TV continued to produce series based on or derived from his work.

  Having been in ill health since WWI, Hammett spent the last decade of his life living with Lillian Hellman, who continued to work in the New York Theater after her blacklisting and became a heroine to anti-McCarthyites because of her eloquent resistance to HUAC in 1952.  Hammett died in 1961 of long cancer as the literary genres that he largely created continued to attract large audiences among readers of crime fiction, movie goers, and most of all, television viewers.  He was, as a veteran of both world wars, buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Artists often resent critics greatly the way workers resent managers and supervisors in all walks of life because critics make judgments about and profit the work of artists without producing any work themselves.

 Although Hammett joined the CPUSA shortly after he completed all of the work for which he is justly famous, many critics who either ignored or qualified his major literary contributions and disparaged his lifestyle, singling him out from among the legions of successful writers and artists who lived that way, did that consciously or unconsciously because they could not, even within the limitations of their own critical standards, deal seriously  with  Communist artists. 

They would have to either ignore his political convictions, commitments and associations, as American critics usually did with the Irish playwright Sean O’Casey and the Spanish artist, Pablo Picasso, both world famous cultural figures and members, respectively of the Communist Party of Ireland and the Communist Party of France, or find ways to disparage and trivialize his work.

 Hammett however,  received and continues to receive tribute from his peers,  the writers that he influenced whom conventional wisdom has treated more respectfully .  Ross MacDonald, whose crime novels were among the most successful commercially and aesthetically of the postwar era(the Lew Archer novels particularly) said of Hammett: “as a novelist of realistic intrigue, Hammett was not surpassed in his or any other time….We all came out from under Hammett’s black mask”{a reference to the crime fiction magazine that he wrote for in the 1920s). 

Tony Hillerman, known for his remarkable crime novels which portray with sensitivity and great insight contemporary  Native American people, wrote “if not the greatest, Dashiell Hammett is certainly the most important American mystery writer of the twentieth century…and second in history to Edgar Allen Poe, who essentially invented the genre (with the mid-nineteenth century Murders in the Rue Morgue and the first fictional detective, Arsine Lupine).

Donald Westlake, contemporary mystery novelist(Point Blank,  The Hot Rock) and screenwriter(The Grifters), considered his reading of The Thin Man as a young teenager “a defining moment” in his development as a writer.   “It was a sad, lonely book that pretended to be cheerful and of good fellowship….three dimensional writing like three dimensional chess.  Nabakov was a master at that.” 

Finally, Raymond Chandler, who also made his way into the Hollywood studio system and whom critics have placed above Hammett in the literary pantheon, sometimes to the point of giving Chandler more credit for the development of the Private Detective genre than Hammett against all evidence, looked at it very differently. “Hammett,” Chandler wrote, “wrote…for people with a sharp aggressive attitude to life.  They weren’t afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there….Hammett gave murder back to the people who commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse…he put these people done on paper as they were…”

If literary realism is important, than Dashiell Hammett is an enormously  important writer.  If the experiences of the class struggle in forming the consciousness of an artist are important then Dashiell Hammett who took his experiences with the Pinkerton Detective Agency and  made it the basis for a literature in which greed, exploitation, and corruption were motivations for both criminals, elites, and authorities, is an enormously influential writer. 

If artists should, as many did in the 1930s in the U.S. and subsequently, use their success and celebrity to work actively for social progress and social justice, not to achieve more fame and celebrity, then Dashiell Hammett is enormously significant  writer  whose experiences on the “wrong side” of the class struggle led to major literary work that reached many millions throughout the world in the stories and novels themselves, movies, and television and to a life of political commitment to the Communist movement that put him on the right side of the class struggle. 

It is very likely that Hammett’s achievements as a writer will grew in significance and prestige as more and more readers and critics understand his importance to the interdependent worlds of art and politics and as both his art and his politics are better understood and appreciated.