In a few years of extraordinary creative energy, Dashiell Hammett invented the
modern American crime novel. In the words of Raymond Chandler, Hammett gave
murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to
provide a corpse. . . . He put these people down on paper as they were, and he
made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these
purposes. Beginning as a prolific contributor to the pulp magazines of the
1920s, he succeeded during his brief career in making his kind of crime fiction
a crucial part of the fabric of American writing: a