Portrait of Dashiell Hammett by Edward Biberman

Every Thursday evening, the National Portrait Gallery presents Face-to-Face, a talk about a selected portrait on view in the gallery. As part of this series, NPG historian David Ward discussed Edward Biberman’s 1937 portrait of writer Dashiell Hammett. This painting is on view in the exhibition “20th-Century Americans,” on the museum’s third floor.

Inspired to try his hand at writing mysteries after his years with the Pinkerton Detective Agency, Dashiell Hammett met a warm reception when he published his first two detective novels in 1929. But it was the appearance of The Maltese Falcon a year later that secured him his reputation as one of America's most original mystery writers. The hard-bitten realism and crisp dialogue of that work led critics to compare its author's style to that of Ernest Hemingway.

Hammett's later books, The Thin Man and The Glass Key, drew similar accolades. In defining the main difference between Hammett's works and the far more common drawing-room detective stories of the period, one admirer observed that Hammett had taken murder "out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley," where, after all, it more generally occurred in real life.

Listen to David Ward's Face-to-Face talk on Dashiell Hammett (20:49)

David Ward will speak again at the next Face-to-Face, when he discusses the portrait of Joseph McCarthy by George Tames.  The talk is this Thursday, October 30, and runs from 6:00 to 6:30 p.m. Visitors meet the presenter in the museum’s F Street lobby and then walk to the appropriate gallery.