Young Sam Hammett in his parents’ backyard on North Stricker Street in Baltimore, just before leaving the Pinkertons for the Army in 1918. (Julie M. Rivett)
“Dearest Woman,” Josephine Annis Dolan (called Jose), met Sam Hammett when he was brought to the Cushman Institute in the fall of 1920. (Julie M. Rivett)
Transferred for his health, the smitten young lung patient has a smoke outside San Diego, 1921. (Julie M. Rivett)
Advertisement for Pinkerton’s San Francisco office, 1920, with Hammett’s supervisor, Phil Geauque, the future Secret Service man, on the masthead. (Internet Archive)
San Francisco’s James Flood Building on Market Street near the cable-car turnaround on Powell. Pinkerton’s had room 314. (San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library)
The renowned Pinkerton detective James McParland probably inspired the Continental Agency’s Old Man (“A tall, plump man in his seventies ... with a white-mustached, baby-pink, grandfatherly face, mild blue eyes behind rimless spectacles”), as well as a character in a late Sherlock Holmes novel. (Library of Congress)
Tough guy in transition: the ex-detective and emerging artist lights a match on the rooftop of the Crawford Apartments on Eddy Street in San Francisco, August 10, 1925. (Julie M. Rivett)
The natty young father sitting with daughter Mary in approximately the same year, 1925, with San Francisco stretching wide-open behind them (Julie M. Rivett)
Hammett looking gaunt yet determined in a Morris chair at the Crawford Apartments, early 1920s (Julie M. Rivett)
Red Harvest featured a fictional rendering of Butte, Montana, “an ugly city ... set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining.” (Random House)
Jose, Mary, and Jo sent Hammett this haunting snapshot from Montana during their months-long separation around 1926. (Julie M. Rivett)
The cover for the Continental Op adventure that became Red Harvest: “The Cleansing of Poisonville,” in the September 1927 issue of Black Mask (Layman Hammett Collection, Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of South Carolina Libraries, Columbia, S.C.)
H. C. Murphy’s cool-under-fire cover image for the September 1929 issue of Black Mask was the definitive picture of Sam Spade until John Huston’s 1941 movie. (Layman Hammett Collection, Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of South Carolina Libraries, Columbia, S.C.)
When the novel was first published in February 1930, Gilbert Seldes wrote in the New York Graphic, “The detectives of fiction have been knocked into a cocked hat ... by the appearance of Sam Spade in a book called The Maltese Falcon.” (Random House)
The maestro at his keyboard: Hammett is pictured in his writing prime for a newspaper profile, 1934. (Harry Ransom Collection)