Biography
Samuel Dashiell Hammett was the most influential American detective novelist of the twentieth century — the creator of the Continental Op, Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1930), and Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man (1934). He was also a longtime member of the Communist Party USA, a U.S. Army veteran of two world wars (he enlisted at 48 in 1942 and served in the Aleutian Islands), and the longtime companion of playwright Lillian Hellman.
In 1946 Hammett accepted the role of trustee of the bail fund of the Civil Rights Congress, the CPUSA-aligned legal defense organization that posted bond for Smith Act defendants. When four of the original Dennis 11 defendants jumped bail in July 1951, Hammett was subpoenaed before the U.S. District Court in New York and ordered to identify the contributors to the bail fund. He refused, asserting that he did not know the contributors names and that even if he did he would not provide them. He was held in civil contempt and sentenced to six months in federal prison.
Hammett served his sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution camp at Ashland, Kentucky in 1951, where his health collapsed. After his release the IRS pursued him for back taxes for the rest of his life. He was blacklisted from publishing, magazine, and screenwriting work and never wrote another novel. He died of lung cancer in 1961, age 66, and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery as a U.S. Army veteran over the objection of J. Edgar Hoover.
John Q. Barrett’s 2017 legal history places Hammett’s criminal-contempt conviction and immediate custody on July 9, 1951 before Judge Sylvester J. Ryan, and reports release on December 9, 1951. It traces confinement through New York City, Lewisburg, Chillicothe and Ashland without giving individual transfer dates. These dates differ by one day from July 8 and December 8 dates reported elsewhere; this remains a qualified source chronology. The six-month sentence is an imposed term, not proof of six full months actually served.
Jackson, Vinson, Reed, and “Reds,” Journal of Law 7 (2017), pages 19–32.
The Guardian reports: Hammett remained jailed after his secretary withdrew offered cash bail when prosecutors demanded its source. Setting bail had not physically freed him. Contemporary account, page 6.
An Associated Press report from New York published July 18, 1951 states that federal appeals judges cancelled the temporary appeal bail of Frederick Vanderbilt Field, Dashiell Hammett and W. Alpheus Hunton the previous day. It reports all three in jail on July 18. The account distinguishes these trustees’ contempt proceedings from the eleven Communist Party defendants whose Civil Rights Congress bonds had been revoked on July 16 and who could seek release on acceptable replacement bail. Cancellation of appeal bail does not by itself establish that each trustee had previously been physically released. Source: Midland Reporter-Telegram, July 18, 1951, page 9, “Red ‘Bail Angels’ Returned To Jail For Indefinite Stay,” Associated Press.
