SOURCE: "Return of the Continental Op," in The Nation, New York, Vol. 203, No. 14, October 31, 1966, pp. 454-56.

In this excerpt from a review of The Big Knockover, Gardner comments on Hammett's literary style and imaginative use of the detective fiction genre.

Fitzgerald said he was haunted by the conviction that Ring Lardner "got less percentage of himself on paper than any other American author of the first flight." Hammett got even less on paper, so much less that his rank is uncertain. His use of language is, certainly, "first flight." He did for American slang—the argots of hobos, cowboys, seamen, boxers, longshoremen, miners, Wobblies, and, of course, cops and robbers—what Mark Twain had previously done for the American vernacular: used it on the level of art. Hammett never merely played lexicographer to the underworld. He selected the witty, colorful elements of the jargon and used them naturally...