Dashiell Hammett: Man of Mystery

By Sally Cline and Otto Penzler

Dashiell Hammett changed the face of crime fiction. In five novels published over five years as well as a string of stories, he transformed the mystery genre into literature and left us with the figure of the hard-boiled detective, from the Continental Op to Sam Spade—immortalized on film by Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon—and the more glamorous Thin Man, also made iconic with the aid of Hollywood. A brilliant writer, Hammett was a complex and enigmatic man. After 1934 until his death in 1961, he published no more novels and suffered from a writer’s block that both shamed and maimed him. He is identified with his tough protagonists, but his tuberculosis compromised his masculine identity and alcoholism may have been his answer. A former Pinkerton detective who valued honesty, he was attracted to women who lied outrageously, most notably Lillian Hellman, with whom he conducted a thirty-year affair. A controversial political activist who stood up for civil liberty, he was also a very private man. In this compact new biography, Sally Cline uses fresh research, including interviews with Hammett’s family and Hellman’s heir, to reexamine the life and works of the writer whom Raymond Chandler called “the ace performer.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcade Publishing
• Release date: Jun 7, 2016
• ISBN: 9781628723786

Sally Cline

Sally Cline was an award-winning biographer and fiction writer, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Research Fellow at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, and former Advisory Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund as well as a Hawthornden Fellow. After Agatha: The Explosion in Women's Crime Writing was her fourteenth book. She wrote ten non-fiction titles, one biographical novel Lily and Max (Golden Books) and one book of short stories, One of Us is Lying (Golden Books). Her biography Radclyffe Hall: A Woman Called John (John Murray, UK) is now a classic, and was shortlisted for the LAMBDA Prize. Her study Lifting the Taboo: Women, Death and Dying (Little, Brown, UK) won the Arts Council Prize for Non-Fiction. Her ground-breaking biography Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (John Murray, UK) and Zelda Fitzgerald: The Tragic Meticulously Researched Biography of the Jazz Age's High Priestess (Arcade, NY, US) was a bestseller in both the UK and the US and preceded her landmark biography Dashiell Hammett: Man of Mystery (Arcade NY, US) She was the co-series Editor for Bloomsbury's nine-volume Writers' and Artists' Companions in Writing, for which she co-authored two titles: Literary Non-Fiction (with Midge Gillies) and Life Writing: Writing Biography, Autobiography and Memoir (with Carole Angier). She was 2013 Judge for the HW Fisher Prize for First Published Biographies, a Consulting Editor for the International Literary Quarterly and wrote and recorded podcasts for the Royal Literary Fund. Her short stories for print and radio have won prizes from the BBC and Raconteur. She also won a Hosking Houses Trust Fellowship for Women Writers over forty. Formerly Director of the Royal Literary Fund Mentoring Scheme, mentor for the Arts Council Escalator programme, judge and mentor for the prestigious Gold Dust Mentoring Scheme, she taught social science and politics at Cambridge University. She was on City University London's Creative Writing Programme, was Writer in Residence and mentor for the MA in Creative Writing at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge and ran Creative Writing Workshops for the Guardian Masterclasses at Stratford on Avon. She held degrees and masters from Durham University (English and Philosophy) and Lancaster University (Sociology and Politics) and was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters in International Writing. She lived in Cornwall and Cambridge but sadly passed away in 2022.