SOURCE: Naremore, James. “Dashiell Hammett and the Poetics of Hard-Boiled Detection.” In Art in Crime Writing: Essays on Detective Fiction, edited by Bernard Benstock, pp. 49-72. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983.

In the following essay, Naremore discusses style, characterization, and themes in the novels of Dashiell Hammett, praising his handling of language and placing his works in historical context.

I

Dashiell Hammett is a profoundly romantic figure, and the most important writer of detective fiction in America after Edgar Allan Poe. During the years when he was doing his best work—chiefly the late 1920s—he managed to reconcile some of the deepest contradictions in his culture. He was a man of action and a man of sensibility, an ex-private-eye who looked like an aristocrat; he wrote five novels and a few dozen stories which provided material for scores of film, radio and television adaptations, but at the...