On the whole writers are clever fellows, or if one must descend to current terminology, clever persons. At best they are intelligent, more often than not styled with wit and possessing understanding of the human scene, comic, tragic, and midway. Why then are biographies about writers such dull pieces?
Perhaps it is because there isn’t much to dramatize in someone’s clicking away his thoughts on a typewriter or clutching a ballpoint pen over a pad of paper. Pre-twentieth-century writers are excepted, for they are period characters and the period itself whets interest. The attempt to make picaresque the writers of modern times proves only that exploits with bed and bottle are instant tedium.
Dashiell Hammett was a good writer. He cared about the craft. He made this plain in his writings about writing, revealing it also in his letters to publishers and editors and in his critical pieces for the Saturday Review. As with most writers, he developed his craft through reading. From boyhood he was an insatiable book reader—a characteristic of born writers—and possessed an unquenchable intellectual curiosity, another characteristic. Although not instantly—apprenticeship must be served—success did come to Hammett quite soon. After he achieved some fame as a “cover writer” for Black Mask(possibly the most important pulp magazine of his day), both critical and financial success continued to spiral through the publication of his novels and from them to his position in the top echelon of screenwriters in Hollywood. The question that has