A selective bibliography of open access articles on Dashiell Hammett, favoring signed articles by recognized scholars, articles published in reviewed sources, and web sites that adhere to the Modern Language Association Guidelines for Authors of Web Pages
main page | 20th century authors | 19th century authors | about LiteraryHistory
Freedman, Carl and Christopher Kendrick. "Forms of Labor in Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest." First page of article only. PMLA, Vol. 106, No. 2 (Mar., 1991), pp. 209-221
Harris, Martin. Hammett's Flitcraft Parable, The Stepfather, and the Significance of Falling Beams. Literature Film Quarterly, 2006
Horsley, Lee. A substantial introduction to Dashiell Hammett, from the Literary Encyclopedia, 10/20/01
Layman, Richard. A review of Shadow Man: The Life of Dashiell Hammett. (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1981) Reviewed in the NYTimes by John Leonard, 7/8/81
Layman, Richard. Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett, 1921-1960. Excerpt from Part One. Also, a review, in NYTimes, 5/6/01 (requires one-time registration)
Layman, Richard. "There's Only One Maltese Falcon," in January Magazine
Layman, Richard. "Hammett's Maltese Falcon, 75 Years Later." In an NPR interview, Layman notes that John Huston's version is one of the few times when a great American novel became a great movie, 4/3/07
Malmgren, Carl D. "The Crime of the Sign: Dashiell Hammett's Detective Fiction." Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1999
Marcus, Steven. "Hard-Boiled Writing from a Private Eye." In an interview, Dr. Marcus, editor of a new Library of America edition of Hammett's novels and stories, discusses Dashiell Hammet's development as a writer. Ideas, Vol. 5, No. 1, 1997
Porter, Joseph C. "The End of the Trail: The American West of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler," first page of article only. The Western Historical Quarterly, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Oct., 1975), pp. 411-424
Reid, Robin Anne. "The Centenary Caper: Casing Two Competing Schools of Detective Fiction." Contrasts "cozy" and "hard-boiled" detective fiction [Dorothy Sayers and Dashiell Hammett]. First page of article only. Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, Vol. 46, No. 1/2 (1992), pp. 55-62
Riley, James. 'As if there were anywhere to go': The Lack of Transcendence in the Noir Fiction of Dashiell Hammett and David Goodis. At crimeculture.com, Autumn 2004
Walker, John. "City jungles and expressionist reifications from Brecht to Hammett [Bertolt Brecht and Dashiell Hammett]." Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1998
Dictionary of Literary Biography entry on Dashiell Hammett [sample entry, interesting notes on DLB style]
"Dashiell Hammett: Let's Talk About the Black Bird." A feature on Dashiell Hammett in January Magazine includes comments from Richard Layman and many additional tributes
A biographical introduction to Dashiell Hammett from Books and Writers, Kuusankoski Public Library, Finland
Reading group guide for The Maltese Falcon, from Random House
Web site for Dashiell Hammett includes short plot summaries and a biography, from Random House
An introduction to Dashiell Hammett from the PBS "American Masters" series
"Before The Thin Man," summarizes Hammett's writing career, in Salon, 4/17/00. By Dick Lochte
Newspaper review of Hellman and Hammett: The Legendary Passion of Lily and Dash, Joan Mellen (Harper Collins) Metroactive, 7/18/96
"Dashiell Hammett's legacy lies not only in his writing, but in his living -- rough, wild and on the edge." Newspaper article in the San Francisco Chronicle, 2/7/05
On the influence of Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest on Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo, the influence of both films on Last Man Standing (1996), and legal wrangling. Newspaper article in Metroactive, 9/26/96
"Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon turns 75." Alexis Soloski, Village Voice, 1/27/05
"The king of pulp: Where would action cinema be without Dashiell Hammett?" Newspaper article, Seattle Weekly, 12/5/01
Pictures of 891 Post Street, San Francisco, where Dashiell Hammett lived when he wrote his first three novels
On the French writer Andre Gide, passing mention of his admiration for Hammett. Time magazine, 3/6/44
Metress, Christopher, ed. The Critical Response to Dashiell Hammett (Greenwood Press, 1994), publisher's web site with list of chapters
"Hardboiled Maryland." An electronic exhibit on the works of Dashiell Hammett and other hard-boiled fiction writers, at the Univ. of Maryland
Information on the Dashiell Hammett papers at the Univ. of Texas Austin
Berger, Roger A. '"The Black Dick': race, sexuality, and discourse in the L.A. novels of Walter Mosley" [African American detective novels] African American Review, Summer, 1997
Breu, Christopher. A review of Hard-Boiled Masculinities (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2005). Reviewed by Justin Cober-Lake in Pop Matters. Publisher's blub for Hard-Boiled Masculinities
Breen, Jon L. "The Ellery Queen mystery: why is the corpus no longer alive?" Weekly Standard, Oct 10, 2005
Catano, James V. "Detecting change: Gender and ethnicity in the detective novel." Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Summer 2000
Cawelti, John. Publisher's blurb for Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Univ. of Chicago, 1976)
Chandler, Raymond. "The Simple Act of Murder." The Atlantic Monthly, Nov. 1945
Demko, George. "Landscapes of Crime." An attractive web site on the geographical settings of mysteries, includes studies of international settings, from a Dartmouth professor
Entin, Joseph. "A new deal for thirties literature." A review of Michael Szalay, New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State (Duke Univ. Press, 2000); Sean Mccann, Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism (Duke Univ. Press, 2000); and EM Smith, Hard-Boiled: Working-Class Readers and Pulp Magazines (Temple Univ. Press, 2000), in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 2000
Fister, Barbara. "Copycat Crimes: Crime Fiction and the Marketplace of Anxieties." [draft of an article that appeared in Clues: A Journal of Detection 23.3 (Spring 2005): 43-56.]
Gray, Russel W. "Hard-boiled black easy: genre conventions in A Red Death." [on Walter Mosley] African American Review, Fall, 2004
Hopler, Jay. "Watching the detectives: reading dime novels and hard-boiled detective stories in context." Journal of Social History, Winter, 2002
Horsley, Lee. Extract from The Noir Thriller (Palgrave, 2001)
Lehman, David. "The Mysterious Romance of Murder: The enduring highbrow fascination with detective stories." In Boston Review, Feb/March 2000
Leitch, Thomas. "Twelve fallacies in contemporary adaptation theory." Criticism, Spring, 2003
Paradis, Kenneth. "Warshawski's Situation: Beauvoirean Feminism and the Hard-Boiled Detective." First page of essay only. In South Central Review, Vol. 18, No. 3/4
Porter, Dennis. Review of The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction. (Yale Univ. Press, 1981). Reviewed in Journal of European Studies, by H.M. Klein 12 (47): 224
Priestman, Martin, ed. blurb for The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction
Pronzini, Bill and Jack Adrian, eds. A short review of Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories (Oxford Univ. Press), in Studies in Short Fiction, Fall, 1997, reviewed by Douglas Levin
Silver, Alain. "Kiss Me Deadly: Evidence of a Style," [Mickey Spillane film adaptation] from Film Noir Reader (1996)
Smith, Johanna M. "Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction: Gendering the Canon," first page of essay only. Pacific Coast Philology, Vol. 26, No. 1/2 (Jul., 1991), pp. 78-84
Todorov, Tzvetan. Todorov's influential structuralist analysis of the whodunit and the thriller in The Poetics of Prose (Cornell Univ. Press, 1977) is briefly summarized. From the Victorian Web
Willett, Ralph. "Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction," covers major authors, women detectives, and settings including Harlem, Los Angeles, Miami, urban and desert landscapes. From the British Assoc. of American Studies, BAAS Pamphlet No. 23 (1992)
Introduction to Ross MacDonald from Books and Writers, Kuusankoski Public Library, Finland
Horsley, Lee and Katharine. "Crime Culture," an academic web site on crime fiction, crime film, and true crime. Includes original articles, syllabi, recommended secondary bibliography for teaching crime fiction, and more
Marling, William. "Hard-boiled detective fiction," contains essays by Dr. Marling on early writers of hard-boiled fiction, classic writers, and later writers in this style, an extensive secondary bibliography, and more
Black Mask Magazine "the classic hard-boiled pulp crime mag." Slickly produced and informative, includes pages on the history of the genre and some early tales from Black Mask
main page | 20th century authors | 19th century authors | about LiteraryHistory
1998-2008 by Donna Jan Pridmore