Dashiell Hammett

About this book

"Dashiell Hammett - Hollywood screenwriter and high-flying author of The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man - died in 1961. For the more than forty years since, his daughter, Jo Hammett, has kept her silence. Now, for the first time, she tells her side of the Dashiell Hammett story.". "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 the family when he can. Jo's memories of him are golden: like the trip she recalls to the Santa Anita racetrack in a chauffeur-driven limousine, where Hammett plays more on the horses than he can afford; or like a Depression-era excursion to Beverly Hills and a splurge that would have supported an entire family for a month - to buy Jo a new riding outfit. She recalls, too, dinner at New York's Plaza Hotel with her father and a surprisingly melancholy, teary, "small and rather rumpled-looking" Dorothy Parker. With more ambivalence, she remembers the 1950s, when she assumes her responsibility as the sole designated correspondent with her black-listed, imprisoned father and her role as go-between for him and Lillian Hellman.". "The notorious Hammett-Hellman romance, Dash's rude flirtations, his heavy drinking, his attraction to Communism, his quirks and betrayals and paternal love - Jo Hammett neither blinks at her father's faults nor diminishes his humanity. Illustrated with never-before published photos from family albums."--BOOK JACKET.