Dashiell Hammett was born in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, and grew up in Baltimore. Hammett left school at the age of fourteen and held a variety of jobs thereafter—messenger boy, newsboy, clerk, operator, and stevedore, finally becoming an operative for Pinkerton’s Detective Agency. He served as a sergeant in the Army in World War I and World War II. In the late 1920s Hammett became the unquestioned master of hard-boiled detective fiction in America. In The Maltese Falcon (1930) he first introduced his famous private eye, Sam Spade. The Thin Man (1934) offered another immortal sleuth, Nick Charles. Red Harvest (1929), The Dain Curse (1929), and The Glass Key (1931) are among his most celebrated novels.
