Shadow man

The legend of Dashiell Hammett, the former Pinkerton detective who reinvented the mystery story in five books written between 1929 and 1934, is carefully examined here by Richard Layman in a meticulously factual account of all that is likely to be known about the real "Continental Op." This unsentimental account of Hammett from his rural Maryland youth through the Pinkerton years in San Francisco, fame as a novelist, notoriety as a Hollywood screen writer, imprisonment as an uncooperative McCarthy committee witness, and an obscure death in 1961 highlights the facts while accenting the shadow on which the legend would be built. Book jacket.