“... choice of becoming a novelist, Ellroy’s dramatic arc flings him back into an earlier era. Like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler – to whom he is an obvious heir – Ellroy comes to the hardboiled school out of the raw life he seeks to fictionalise. But unlike theirs, Ellroy’s life – considered as the test-bed of his work – is absurdly ...”

“... but has been in continuous evolution, both in fiction and in the cinema, since it was invented by Dashiell Hammett in the Twenties. And the dominant aesthetic in American art, from Walt Whitman to Lou Reed, has always been most powerful when adopting the perspective of outsider, underclass and little people: precisely the perspective needed for socially ...”

“... his first directing job, The Maltese Falcon (1941). At last Bogart was a hero, yet just as hard as Dashiell Hammett had written him, smart, adept, a tough guy with women, sexy and in the right – a hardboiled heroism that became the stuff of wartime pipe dreams. After that, it was straight on till morning and a utopia called Casablanca (1942), the first ...”

“... him animates the books: Marlowe’s voice, built on Hemingway and New Yorker-style wit as much as Dashiell Hammett, sees to that. But Chandler’s ambivalence about sex, California and industrial civilisation in general is a big part of his para-modernist appeal. You don’t have to squint too hard to see a resemblance to The Waste Land in The Big ...”

“... the English suburbs and towards the grittier (and far more romantic) novels written by himself and Dashiell Hammett. An explanation of sorts had already been offered by George Orwell. In ‘Decline of the English Murder’ (1946), he meditated on the apparent passing of the homely crime of murder as it was commonly reported in the British popular ...”

“... than Laura, whose affairs were infrequent, but included a glamorous though brief elopement with Dashiell Hammett to San Francisco. Perelman asked Laura for a divorce at one point during the winter of 1969, but soon after she was found to be suffering from terminal breast cancer, which resulted in her death only a few months later. Both were devastated ...”

“... along with a catalogue of deceased luminaries: Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Isadora Duncan, Dashiell Hammett, Kenneth Rexroth and Jack Kerouac. Via Ferlinghetti, formerly known as Price Row, is a dead-end off Union Street in San Francisco. It was dedicated on 24 April 1994 in a ceremony attended by Michael McClure and Philip Whalen. Ginsberg, in ...”

“... rooms in which the lovers’ meetings take place rival in squalor those depicted by Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett and other male specialists of the ‘hard-boiled’ school. (We first meet the lover and his lady at a picnic, as he eats a hard-boiled egg, peeling it with his teeth, in an early chapter entitled ‘The Hard-Boiled Egg’.) The hero of ...”

“... so that he was able to become something like a Conrad who had soaked himself in Beckett, or a Dashiell Hammett who had been reading Camus and Ionesco. These are wild approximations, of course. Onetti’s voice and subject-matter are his own, and their very elusiveness has played a part in his neglect. The other part was played by accident. Onetti was ...”

“... was a piece of old San Francisco, a place that no longer existed except in films, photographs and Dashiell Hammett novels. ‘There were only two great cities in the world,’ Bruno liked to say, ‘and both of them are gone: San Francisco and Shanghai. They had intrigue and class. They were international and everyone dressed right.’ Dressing right was ...”

“... used in the Fifties to harass people like her and eventually to imprison and impoverish her lover, Dashiell Hammett. Podhoretz’s anti-anti-American attacks were therefore inferentially an attack on her, or so she decided. Accordingly, she summoned him ‘for a talk’ – a phrase he took as a warning of trouble ahead. There were to be just the two of ...”