AS WRITERS TURNED from the orotund style of Henry James and his Victorian predecessors to lean and swift prose, scholars have pointed to the undeniably profound force of Ernest Hemingway, but the argument could be made that the most influential writer of the twentieth century was Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961), whose crisp and realistic (one might say Hemingwayesque) dialogue appears to have influenced the great Papa.
Publishing dates are hard facts, not esoteric theories. Hammett’s first Continental Op story appeared in Black Mask on October 1, 1923. The quintessential hard-boiled private eye appeared frequently in the ensuing years. Hemingway’s first book, In Our Time, was published in Paris in a limited edition in 1924, and published in a tiny edition of 1,335 copies in the United States in October 1925, by which time Hammett was already well established and a highly popular regular contributor to the most important pulp magazine of its time.
In addition to the nameless operative of the Continental Detective Agency, Hammett created Sam Spade, the hero of the most famous American detective novel ever written or filmed, The Maltese Falcon (1930), which had been serialized in Black Mask, as were all of his novels except the last, The Thin Man (1934).
“Mike, Alec, or Rufus” was published in the January 1925 issue of Black Mask; it was first published in book form under the title “Tom, Dick, or Harry” (as it had been retitled for its publication in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine) in Twentieth Century Detective Stories (Cleveland, World, 1948). It was first collected in the Hammett short-story collection The Creeping Siamese (New York, Jonathan Press, 1950).