The chief characteristic of Hammett's stories was the hero, the hard-boiled private eye. The kind of hero who, almost a commonplace until the 1930s, is almost an anachronism in the 1960s. He was not an existentialist, for he made choices and felt responsible for individuals. He was not a nihilist, for although he saw the bottom of life, he did not believe that life was entirely empty, that all men were absurd, that the universe was necessarily indifferent, that death had to be meaningless. He fought to live, and he challenged death to keep others alive. (p. xiii)
The hero about whom Hammett wrote was a part of a continuous tradition that began on the frontier in the early part of the nineteenth century. This American literary hero started with Brom Bones in the pages of Washington Irving, continued in the tales of Augustus Longstreet, Charles Webber, Joseph Baldwin, and Alfred Arrington, appeared constantly in the dime novels of the House of Beadle and Adams, and was ready-made for such "Western" writers of the twentieth century as Owen Wister and Zane Grey. By the time Hammett picked him up in the pages of Black Mask, in the early 1920s, his heroic characteristics were clearly established: courage, physical strength, indestructibility, indifference to danger and death, a knightly attitude, celibacy, a measure of violence, and a sense of justice. (pp. xiii-xiv)
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