Knock back a stiff drink today, or better yet belly up to the fine fiction of Samuel Dashiell Hammett, born on a Maryland farm on this day in 1894.  Hammett left school at 13, became a Pinkerton at 19.  (He said later he quit them because of their strike-breaking.)  Although he joined the Army in WWI, he spent most of his time in the hospital with Spanish flu and later tuberculosis.  He started writing in San Francisco in the twenties when he was in his thirties, and he wrote his five great novels over a five-year period. 

A disabled vet with TB, he still pulled strings to join up in WWII.  After the war, he refused to reveal the names of the bail funders for the Civil Rights Congress and went to jail for six months, then refused to name names to HUAC and was blacklisted.  He died in 1961 and was buried in Arlington.

In his Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler said of him:

He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.