According to novelist Margaret Atwood, writing in the
New York Review of Books, The Maltese Falcon is "perhaps the best-known American crime novel of all time." Critic Richard Layman, a specialist on Hammett, elevated that novel and
The Glass Key out of mere bestseller lists. In an interview with Michael Rogers for
Library Journal, Layman declared that those two novels "meet the highest standards of American literature." Widely considered the father of hard-boiled detective fiction, Hammett is also more than a crime writer, according to many critics, including Layman. "Hammett transcended the boundaries of detective fiction in his best work and displayed a stunning talent," Layman further explained to Rogers.
Along with those of Caroll John Daley, Hammett's stories in Black Mask magazine helped to bring about a major movement in detective fiction away from the genteel detectives solving crimes perpetrated by masterminds, to rough, believable private eyes dealing with common crooks. In the words of mystery writer Raymond Chandler, "Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley. . . . [He] gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish." As Atwood went on to note, the world of Hammett's novels appealed to her as a young reader because it was "fast-paced, sharp-edged, and filled with zippy dialogue and words I'd never heard pronounced.
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