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    J.M.R.

INTRODUCTION
    The Early Years: 1923–1924
    Dashiell Hammett may have been born with the urge to write, we can’t know, but it was happenstance that set the course for his literary fame. His first choice of careers was private investigation. When he turned twenty-one, he joined Pinkerton’s National Detective Service as an operative, a job he enjoyed for three years, from 1915 to 1918, before joining the army. He served in a medical unit at Fort Bragg, Maryland, an intake center for soldiers infected with Spanish Influenza returning from the war in Europe. Hammett contracted the flu himself, and that activated a latent strain of tuberculosis probably spread from his mother. He left the army after just less than a year with a sergeant’s rating, an honorable discharge, and a disability rating that fluctuated over the next ten years between 20% and 100%, usually hovering midway in between.
    After a period of convalescence, Hammett returned to detective work sporadically, until he was hospitalized with tuberculosis for some six months from November 1920 to the following May. Upon his release from the hospital, he moved to San Francisco and married his nurse, Josephine Dolan, in July 1921. Their daughter Mary was born in October. Hammett tried to support his new family as a detective, but he was unable. He retired permanently from the agency in either December 1921 or February 1922, depending on which evidence you choose to accept, due to disability. He was twenty-six, often a virtual invalid, and he needed money.
    In February 1922 he commenced a year and a half of study at Munson’s School for Private Secretaries, with a “newspaper reporting objective,” as he wrote in his disability log for the Veterans Bureau. The training shows. His early fiction has a journalistic quality about it—in the best sense. It is clearly written, detail oriented, and plainly narrated, without the strained and sensationalistic flourishes that mark the fiction of other early pulp writers. In October 1922 he began submitting humorous and ironic sketches to The Smart Set, the high-brow magazine edited and partially owned by H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. At their suggestion, after publishing three of his sketches, he lowered his sights to pulp magazines, which offered him steady, if not hefty, paychecks but required that he alter his subject matter. He made his living during most of the twenties on the back of what soon became his series character, the Continental Op, a professional detective.
    Hammett’s Continental Op is inseparable from the pulp magazine Black Mask, which was barely three years old and under new ownership when the Continental Op was introduced. Twenty-six of the twenty-eight published Op stories first appeared there between October 1923 and November 1930, as well as two four-part serial novels featuring the Op. Founded in 1920 by Mencken and Nathan to publish what Mencken called in My Life as Author and Editor “hacks of experience,” writing for “murder fans.” Black Mask had no literary pretensions in the beginning. Its sole purpose was to make money. Mencken claimed in a 1933 letter to his friend Philip Goodman that he and Nathan could “get out a 128-page magazine at a cash outlay of no more than $500” and did so in the case of Black Mask . With “no desire to go on with the Black Mask .” Mencken and Nathan sold it in summer 1921 to Eugene Crowe and Eltinge Warner (just before Crowe’s death), having earned about $25,000 each for their efforts. From the beginning the magazine was aimed at a blue-collar audience who wanted entertaining stories. Though it is known now as the publication that pioneered hard-boiled detective fiction, in the 10 October 1923 issue, the editor bragged that Black Mask published “Rugged adventure and real man and woman romance; rare