Dashiell Hammett Quotes

“I just tell you what happens. I don't explain it.”
― Dashiell Hammett

“And there are still a number of people around who say that Hammett didn't write detective stories at all-merely hard-boiled chronicles of mean streets with a perfunctory mystery element dropped in like the olive in a martini. (The Simple Art of Murder)”
― Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder

“Hammett used to be irritated by that and would answer that nobody ever deliberately wrote a potboiler, you just did the best you could and woke up to find it good or no good.”
― Lillian Hellman, An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir

“...I was so often silent angry with Hammett for making the situation hard on me, not knowing then that the dying do not, should not, be asked to think about anything but their own minute of running time.”
― Lillian Hellman, An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir

“When Hammett turns to the respectable world, the world of respectable society, of affluence and influence, of open personal and political power, he finds only more of the same. The respectability of respectable American society is as much a fiction and a fraud as the phony respectable society manufactured by the criminals. Indeed, he unwaveringly represents the world of crime as a reproduction in both structure and detail of the modern capitalist society it depends on, preys off, and is part of. He not only continually juxtaposes and connects the ambiguously fictional worlds of art and writing with the fraudulently fictional worlds of society; he connects them, juxtaposes them, and sees them in dizzying and baffling interaction... It is into this bottomlessly equivocal, endlessly fraudulent and brutally acquisitive world that Hammett precipitates the Op.”
― Steven Marcus, The Continental Op