Julie M. Rivett

Dashiell Hammett: A Daughter Remembers

Josephine Hammett, Richard Laymon, Julie M. Rivett

• 2002 Anthony-Critical nominee
• 2002 Edgar-Critical/Biography nominee
• Score: 12.52

For more than forty years, since the day her illustrious father died, Jo Hammett has kept her silence. Now, for the first time, with uncompromising candor and profound admiration, she tells the story of Dashiell Hammett—Hollywood screenwriter and high-flying author of The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man—as she knew him. In Jo Hammett’s earliest recollections, although her already famous father exists outside the sphere of the daily life she shares with her mother and sister, he writes to Jo frequently and visits when he can. Jo’s memories of him are golden: She…

Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett: 1921-1960

Julie M. Rivett, Richard Laymon, Josephine Hammett Marshall, Dashiell Hammett

• 2002 Edgar-Critical/Biography nominee
• Score: 6.52

A literary event: The first-ever selection from the letters of Dashiell Hammett, the genius of American crime fiction.

More than any book before it, this one gives us the complete Hammett, in his own words. Here is Hammett the family man, distant but devoted, sometimes late with the check but never too late; Hammett the student of politics, scanning the headlines from a Marxist perspective; Hammett the lover of Lillian Hellman, delighting in her style, humor, accomplishments but maintaining his independence. Celebrity, soldier, activist, survivor—Hammett was…