Hammett Quotes

“So that's the way you scientific detectives work. My god! for a fat, middle-aged, hard-boiled, pig-headed guy, you've got the vaguest way of doing things I ever heard of.”
― Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest

“He's the guy that the joke was wrote about: 'Is he a criminal lawyer?' 'Yes, very.”
― Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest

“Hammett wrote at first (and almost to the end) for people with a sharp, aggressive attitude to life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street. Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish. He put these people down on paper as they were, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes”
― Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder