Ep 7 – Dashiell Hammett and the Hard-Boiled Paperback
Show Notes
Although Dashiell Hammett is a major influence in mystery fiction, his novels and stories (with the sole exception of The Maltese Falcon) are often left unread. It’s a shame because they all hold up well even in 2022. I urge you to get one of Hammett’s paperback novels and just sit down and read. Believe me, they will entertain you. Red Harvest (his first novel) might be a good place to start if you’ve never read him.
This podcast was several months in the making. My thanks to Richard Brewer for sharing his thoughts on The Glass Key with me. He is a delight to converse with.
I took most of the biographical information on Hammett from Nolan’s excellent Shadow Man biography, but also from a lesser know biography by Sally Cline called Dashiell Hammet: Man of Mystery. A word of warning: many biographies suffer from the heavy hand of Lillian Hellmen who spun her own mythology of Dashiell Hammett, most of it made to make her (and him) look good.
Another outstanding work, if you want to know about his political activities, is Hardboiled Activist: The Work and Politics of Dashiell Hammett by Ken Fuller. It’s an eye-opening book that not only lays open Hammett’s political history but looks at the novels from a political perspective. I can’t praise this book high enough.
Hammett Paperbacks
Dell was Hammett’s first major paperback publisher. The covers of these books are wonderful, but also expensive in fine condition. There have been many Hammett paperbacks over the years. Currently, Random House vintage has all of his novels in quality (larger sized) paperbacks out which might be the best was to simply read Hammett. I prefer the ’70s mass market paperbacks as they are easy to find and inexpensive. The British Penguin crime series (green covers) have some marvelous covers, but they are also fairly expensive.
Be sure to look at the paperback covers gallery which is on this blog and is meant to accompany the podcast.
LINKS
The Dashiell Hammett Wikipedia page is surprisingly good with a decent bibliography. There’s a decent PBS American Masters program on Hammett, but it appears to miss some of the harsher edges of his life and it gets some details wrong. I really like Claudia Roth Pierpont‘s profile of Hammett in the New Yorker (2022) which is ostensibly a review of the Library of America’s two-volume set of Hammet’s works. By the way, this set is fabulous (wish they’d publish a paperback version).
Richard Brewer
My co-host on this episode is a long-time mystery reader. We first met while working at the Mysterious Bookshops back in the 90’s. He is also an audiobook director having recently completed the novels of Raymond Chandler as audiobooks. Check out his Facebook page. The Chandler audiobooks (narrated by Scott Brick) can be found here.