There was little place for character development, because it was only a distraction from the description of the crime and the clues. The crime, it was felt, had to be unusual to be interesting, and therefore fictional murderers bore little resemblance to actual criminals, and the methods of crime in fiction often tested the reader's credulity. The setting was typically in a middle- or upper-class society, because there the crime was more shocking and more worthy of the attention of a detective, most often a brilliant amateur who solved crimes as a hobby.
Hammett's mysteries were different. He was the most accomplished of a school of writers that emerged in the early 1920s who were called hardboiled. "Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley," Raymond Chandler explained. "Hammett wrote at first (and almost to the end) for people with a sharp, aggressive attitude to life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street. Hammett 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 hand wrought dueling pistols, curare, and tropical fish.
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