The Adventures of Sam Spade and Other Stories / A Man Called Spade
1944
The Continental Op
1945
The Return of the Continental Op
1945
Hammett Homicides
1946
Dead Yellow Women
1947
Nightmare Town
1948
The Creeping Siamese
1950
A Man Named Thin
1962
The Big Knockover
1966
The Continental Op (Edited by Steven Marcus)
1974
Nightmare Town (Knopf Edition)
1999
Crime Stories and Other Writings
2001
Lost Stories
2005
Return of the Thin Man
2012
The Hunter and Other Stories
2013
The Big Book of the Continental Op
2017
Publication Order of Graphic Novels
Secret Agent X-9: Book 1 (With: Alex Raymond)
1934
Secret Agent X-9: Book 2 (With: Alex Raymond)
1934
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
The Battle of the Aleutians (With: Robert Colodny)
1944
Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett: 1921-1960
2001
About Dashiell Hammett
Dashiell Hammett (1894 to 1961) was an American writer of hard-boiled detective novels and short stories, and the creator of Sam Spade, Nick and Nora Charles and the Continental Op. He published five novels between 1929 and 1934, among them “The Maltese Falcon” and “The Thin Man”, and his work had a strong influence on film noir.
Samuel Dashiell Hammett was born on 27 May 1894 in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, and grew up in Philadelphia and Baltimore. He left school at thirteen to help support his family. From 1915 to 1922 he worked as an operative for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, with a break to serve in the Army during the First World War, when he contracted tuberculosis. He married Josephine Dolan, a nurse he met in hospital, in 1921, and they had two daughters.
His first story was published in The Smart Set in 1922. Most of his early work ran in the pulp magazine Black Mask and featured the Continental Op, a nameless private investigator based in San Francisco, who narrates 28 stories and the novels “Red Harvest” and “The Dain Curse” (both 1929). “The Maltese Falcon” (1930) introduced Sam Spade, “The Glass Key” followed in 1931, and “The Thin Man” (1934) brought in Nick and Nora Charles. The first four novels were serialised in Black Mask before Alfred A. Knopf published them. Hammett also wrote the first scripts for the comic strip Secret Agent X-9, drawn by Alex Raymond.
Film versions followed quickly. John Huston’s “The Maltese Falcon” (1941), with Humphrey Bogart as Spade, was the third screen adaptation of the novel, and “The Thin Man” led to a film series for which Hammett supplied the stories of the first two sequels. He wrote no novels after “The Thin Man”. From 1931 until his death he was the partner of the playwright Lillian Hellman.
Hammett joined the Communist Party in 1937 and enlisted again in 1942, serving in the Aleutian Islands, where he edited an Army newspaper. In 1951 he was jailed for contempt of court after refusing to name contributors to a Civil Rights Congress bail fund, and he was later blacklisted. He died of lung cancer in New York on 10 January 1961 and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Posthumous books include “The Big Knockover” (1966), which contains the unfinished novel “Tulip”, and “The Hunter and Other Stories” (2013).
