Crime fiction's 'hard-boiled' revolutionary

"That strange Marylander" is what Henry Louis Mencken ("the sage of Baltimore") called Samuel Dashiell Hammett, who was born in the Old Line State in 1894, 45 years after Edgar Allan Poe died there. Like Poe, Hammett grew up in an America still fashioning its social and cultural identity from raw materials. And like Poe, inventor of the detective story, Hammett would write tales that held not only the shocks and thrills of entertainment but also the lights and shadows of art.

"I'm one of the few ... people moderately literate who take the detective story seriously," a 33-year-old Dashiell Hammett wrote New York publisher Blanche Knopf from San Francisco in 1928, two years before the death of Sherlock Holmes' creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. "Some day somebody is going to make 'literature' of it ... and I'm selfish enough to have my hopes...."

At the time, the former detective for the Pinkerton agency had been learning his craft and earning his living for six years writing tales for pulp magazines such as Black Mask. Even in these early short stories, Hammett was combining the rudiments of the mystery puzzle with the urban realities he'd witnessed as a Pinkerton man to fashion a "hard-boiled," thoroughly American type of crime fiction. A few of these tales are included in "Vintage Hammett," a new anthology marking the 75th anniversary of Hammett's revolutionary novel, "The Maltese Falcon," which also is being reissued along with his first novel, "Red Harvest," and his last, "The Thin Man."

Hammett's hard-boiled revolution moved from the pulps to the mainstream in 1929 with publication of "Red Harvest," which seems nearly as fresh, alive and surprising today as when it was written. It is narrated by a recurring Hammett protagonist: the nameless Continental Op (or Operative) working for the large Pinkerton-like Continental Detective Agency. Forty years old, 5 feet 6 and 190 pounds, the Op may not be much to look at -- one woman calls him "a fat, middle-aged, hard-boiled, pig-headed guy" -- but he's effective in ways unknown to the likes of Sherlock Holmes or even his own employers. "It's right enough for the Agency to have rules and regulations," the Op notes, "but when you're out on a job you've got to do it the best way you can."