The Mystery of Mystery: The Novels of Dashiell Hammett

Samuel Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) has long been recognized as America's finest hard-boiled detective writer. Yet Hammett was more than a successful popular writer: he was a creator of a distinct body of fiction that is unique in its vitality, its language, and its vivid and singular vision. Hammett's five novels, all produced within a five-year period, are remarkable in their ability to infuse the action on the page with such intensity that the fiction is complete in itself and points not only to the outer world, but inwards to the world of fiction and to the consciousness that created it. He worked the prescribed boundaries of a highly stylized form of popular fiction and devised original, entertaining stories that helped establish the pattern for the quintessential private; but he was also constructing serious fictions that manipulated that pattern, sometimes undercutting its formulas, and sometimes deepening it with a complex irony that called into question the basic tenets of the genre.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2014

Author dc:creator

• Gregory, Sinda J.

• Literature, American

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

(UMI)AAI8108523

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/66339