Nightmare Town

Samuel Dashiell Hammett was born in 1894 in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, and his family moved to Baltimore when he was five. He dropped out of high school after his freshman year and held a series of odd jobs—messenger boy, newsboy, clerk, and stevedore—before becoming an operative for Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency in 1915, at the age of twenty-one. In 1918, during World War I, he joined the U.S. Army Medical Corps, where he contracted the Spanish influenza and tuberculosis. Discharged with a medical disability and a sergeant’s rank, he resumed detective work as he was able. When his health worsened, he turned to writing to support himself and his family, publishing his first fiction in 1922.

By the late 1920s…