Dashiell Hammett

(1894 - 1961)

In 1915, at the age of twenty-one, Dashiell Hammett became an operative for the Pinkerton Detective Agency. After contracting tuberculosis and being discharged from army service during World War I, he returned to the agency and was eventually sent to San Francisco. His detective fiction, including The Maltese Falcon (the film version of which made a star of Humphrey Bogart) and The Thin Man, is among the genre’s most celebrated.

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