Dashiell Hammett

Samuel Dashiell Hammett was an American writer of hard-boiled detective novels and short stories, and also a screenwriter and political activist. Among the characters he created are Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man, and the unnamed Continental Op. He also wrote Red Harvest and The Dain Curse and the comic strip character Secret Agent X-9. In its obituary The New York Times called him the dean of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction, and Time included Red Harvest on its list of the hundred best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005.