Dictionary.com

Popular Searches

 Thesaurus.com

Hammett, Dashiell

Cultural  

  1. A twentieth-century American writer of finely crafted detective fiction. His novel The Maltese Falcon introduced Sam Spade, a tough, cynical, “hard-boiled” type of private eye. Hammett was jailed briefly and blacklisted after the infamous “red-baiting” hearings of the early 1950s.

Discover More

The popular 1941 film version of The Maltese Falcon starred Humphrey Bogart with Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre, who reunited for the classic film Casablanca.

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.