Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

1.1.1 Dashiell Hammett
In 1929, Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) broke onto the scene with his first novel
featuring the nameless detective employed by the “Continental Detective Agency”, in San
Francisco, and hence called “The Continental Op”. In this novel, the hero is a private eye
who goes to “Poisonville”, a mining town called Butte in Montana, which is distinctively
described as “an ugly city of forty thousand, set in an ugly notch between two ugly
mountains”. Newspaper editor Donald Willson has been killed, and the Op is hired by his
father, Old Elihu Willson, a mining and newspaper czar, to find the murderer and to clean
up the town. The Op begins to work on the murder case and in exchange he is promised ten
thousand dollars. He eventually solves Donald’s murder and then Old Elihu breaks his
promise on the deal. The Op though forces him not to do it.
Hammett is usually considered to be the creator of this hard-boiled tradition with
various novels and short stories. Although Red Harvest is not remarkable in terms of its
plot or plausibility, it represents a critical division between the older dime novelists and a
new description of American society that is fraudulent and alienated. The Continental Op
is normally described as an unscrupulous character, who acts in a cunning manner when
exercising his profession. Even morally speaking, he very often finds it difficult to decide
on whether he should denounce a co-worker detective for a crime he has committed (even
if that means putting the reputation of his agency at risk).
The first cheap magazine devoted to crime fiction was the Detective Story
Magazine established by 1915. Amongst the dozens of magazines of this kind, probably
the best known and the most influential was Black Mask (fig. 1), founded in 1920 by Henry
L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. The magazine existed for a long period of time
(1920-1951) and soon became associated with a style of writing that strongly changed the
image of detective fiction. Originally publishing any type of adventure story, Black Mask,
which was a purely commercial project, ended up concentrating solely on crime and
detective stories exclusively.
Two years before the magazine appeared, the founders of Black Mask had already
set up another leading literary magazine called The Smart Set, calling itself a “magazine of
cleverness”, and reputed to be the most sophisticated “little magazine” in America. It was
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