James Ellroy Reveals the Real Reason He Writes ‹ CrimeReads

Dashiell Hammett's first novel, Red Harvest, hit bookstores. Hammett's narrator, the Continental Op, goes in strong:

"I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte."

Hammett slammed the tonal chord for the entire hard-boiled canon. The vulgarization of American Literature tapped Art. Hammett was our first great hard-boiled artist. He vulgarized the American idiom and reinvented our native slang. It's the language of disparagement and one-upsmanship. Hammett revised the myth of the frontier male and recast it as urban estrangement.