Samuel Dashiell Hammett was an American writer of hard-boiled detective novels and short stories, a screenwriter, and political activist. He created some of the most enduring characters in detective fiction, including Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon), Nick and Nora Charles (The Thin Man), The Continental Op (Red Harvest and The Dain Curse), and the comic strip character Secret Agent X-9.

Hammett is regarded as one of the very best mystery writers. His obituary in The New York Times described him as "the dean of the... 'hard-boiled' school of detective fiction." His 1929 novel Red Harvest was included on Time's list of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005. In 1990, the Crime Writers' Association picked three of his five novels for their list of The Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time. Five years later, The Maltese Falcon placed second on the The Top 100 Mystery Novels of All Time as selected by the Mystery Writers of America; Red Harvest, The Glass Key, and The Thin Man were also on the list. His work significantly influenced films, including genres of private eye/detective fiction, mystery thrillers, and film noir.

Raymond Chandler, often considered Hammett's successor, in his essay "The Simple Art of Murder," praised Hammett for giving "murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare, and tropical fish..." He appreciated that Hammett was "spare, frugal, hard-boiled," and capable of writing scenes "that seemed never to have been written before."