Samuel Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) was a writer of hardboiled mysteries and produced works such as The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, The Dain Curse, The Glass Key, The Continental Op, and Red Harvest.
Dash,
as he was known by his lover and friend Lillian Hellman, influenced writers
such as Raymond Chandler and Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of the Perry Mason
series. The modern detective genre wouldn’t exist without Dashiell Hammett.
He
had a short, clipped prose style that would influence the spare sentence
structure of Ernest Hemingway.
After
digging through archives, I discovered he was my second cousin. And that’s
pretty cool.
