Dashiell Hammett died fifty years ago, January 10, 1961, he was sixty-five. It was a great writer is he who is behind this character is found today in all sorts of movies and police series: the private detective "hard boiled" (tough).
He has written five novels, four of which are considered true masterpieces: Red Harvest (1929), Cursed Blood (1929, Maltese Falcon (1930) and The Glass Key (1931). Influenced by movies, writers this time, seek a writing objective reports that behavior (without interest or feelings or states of mind), sometimes referred to this literary trend, the current " behaviorist.
Hammett has profoundly changed the detective novel by elevating the status of literary work: its main character is usually a private detective who plies his trade without emotional. The novelist is the action of his plots in an urban, corrupt and violent. The story there is finally a secondary importance and it is this atmosphere of violence and corruption that usually keeps his work. Hammett probably drew inspiration from his own experience as he was himself a private detective agency for the famous Pinkerton of Philadelphia for nearly six years .
inspiration? Personal crisis? Our author publishes a new novel in 1934 (The Thin , originally a series of successful films in the thirties) and stop writing. His political views (he was a communist) earned him to be worried (and even imprisoned) during the sad period of the "witch hunt" McCarthyste . 
Red Harvest and The Glass Key are two novels that work a bit on the same theme: opposition to gangs and liquidations in a corrupt town. The second is a feat because wholly written in external focus it also reflects the interest of Hammett for this science, then new, psychoanalysis.
Blood Curse is a modern Gothic novel plunges the reader into the murky world of cults.
As for Maltese Falcon , it is a treasure hunt, it reuses Hammett (he wrote for the amount of new " pulps" - magazines good markets) the character Sat of Spade, private inflexible, played on screen by Humphrey Boggart.
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