THE BATTLE OF THE ALEUTIANS Dashiell Hammett 1944 1st!! Start Price GBP 399.95 Current Price GBP 399.95 Time Left - Bid Count 0 Buy It Now Price - Reserve Price - Start Time Sunday, September 07, 2008 End Time Wednesday, September 17, 2008 Location New Romney See more about 'THE BATTLE OF THE ALEUTIANS Dashiell Hammett 1944 1st!!' Description   Item: THE BATTLE OF THE ALEUTIANS by Cpl DASHIELL HAMMETT & Cpl Robert Colodny.    1st Edition!!!   Landscape (20cm x 13.5cm) softback book produced by the Intelligence Section of Field Force Headquarters, Adak, Alaska October 1943 (1944).   Content: This is a rare 1944 1st edition of The Battle of the Aleutians by Cpl. Dashiell Hammett & Cpl. Robert Colodny.    With illustrations, maps & layout by Sgt. Harry Fletcher.   Samuel Dashiell Hammett (May 27, 1894 – January 10, 1961) was an American author of hardboiled detective novels and short stories. Among the enduring characters he created are Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon), Nick and Nora Charles (The Thin Man), and the Continental Op (Red Harvest and The Dain Curse). In addition to the significant influence his novels and stories had on film, Hammett "is now widely regarded as one of the finest mystery writers of all time" and was called, in his obituary in the New York Times, "the dean of the... 'hard-boiled' school of detective fiction".   Hammett was born on a farm called "Hopewell and Aim" off Great Mills Road, St. Mary's County, in southern Maryland. His parents were Richard Thomas Hammett and Annie Bond Dashiell. (The Dashiells are an old Maryland family, the name being an Americanisation of the French De Chiel; it is pronounced "da-SHEEL", not "DASH-el".) He grew up in Philadelphia and Baltimore. "Sam", as he was known before he began writing, left school when he was 13 years old and held several jobs before working for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. He served as an operative for the Pinkerton Agency from 1915 to 1921, with time off to serve in World War I. However, the agency's role in union strike-breaking eventually disillusioned him. During World War I, Hammett enlisted in the U.S. Army and served in the Motor Ambulance Corps. However, he became ill with the Spanish flu and later contracted tuberculosis. He spent the war as a patient in a hospital in America. He married a nurse, Josephine Dolan, in 1921 and had two daughters with her: Mary Jane, born in 1921 and Josephine, born in 1926. Shortly after the birth of their second child, Health Services nurses informed Josephine that due to Hammett's tuberculosis, she and the children should not live with him. So they rented a place in San Francisco. Hammett would visit on weekends, but the marriage soon fell apart. Hammett still supported his wife and daughters financially with the income he made from his writing. Hammett turned to drinking, advertising, and eventually, writing. His work at the detective agency provided him the inspiration for his writings. Hammett's short story output, as opposed to his later novels, is very uneven. In his short stories he dwells heavily on the clichés of 1920's pulp fiction, especially on the theme of the Super-Crook or Master Criminal. (See Archvillain.) Hammett has super-criminals both male ("$106,000 Blood Money", "The Big Knockover") and female ("The Girl with the Silver Eyes", "The House on Turk Street"). He amusingly depicts the Fu Manchu – like crime boss of Chinatown in "Dead Yellow Women". In "Nightmare Town" he has a criminal gang which plots to burn down an entire city for insurance reasons. In "The Gutting of Coufignal" he has a White Russian general who leads a military-style operation to rob the cream of California society, gathered together on an isolated island for a wedding. In "The Big Knockover", he has a super-crook who attacks not just a single bank but the entire financial district of San Francisco, with the help of hundreds of other criminals gathered together from all over the U.S. Then the super-crook turns around and wipes out most of his helpers in order to keep the loot for himself. In The Dain Curse, a madman's quest for revenge on a woman who has scorned him leads directly or indirectly to the deaths or maiming's of more than a dozen people. Another character in The Dain Curse, a cult leader, has convinced himself that he is the Lord Jehovah incarnate, and when the Op barely manages to kill him after shooting him seven times and stabbing him in the throat, he thinks to himself "Thank God he wasn't really God". As Hammett's literary style matured, he relied less and less on the super-criminal and turned more to the kind of realistic, hardboiled fiction seen in The Maltese Falcon or The Thin Man. In The Simple Art of Murder, Hammett's successor in the field, Raymond Chandler, summarised Hammett's accomplishments as follows: Hammett was the ace performer... He is said to have lacked heart; yet the story he himself thought the most of [The Glass Key] is the record of a man's devotion to a friend. 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. From 1929 to 1930 Dashiell was romantically involved with Nell Martin, an author of short stories and several novels. He dedicated The Glass Key to her, and in turn, she dedicated her novel Lovers Should Marry to Hammett. In 1931, Hammett embarked on a thirty-year affair with playwright Lillian Hellman. He wrote his final novel in 1934, and devoted much of the rest of his life to left-wing activism. He was a strong anti-fascist throughout the 1930's and in 1937 he joined the American Communist Party. As a member of the League of American Writers, he served on its Keep America Out of War Committee in January 1940 during the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact. In 1942, after Pearl Harbor, Hammett enlisted in the United States Army. Though he was a disabled veteran of WWI, and a victim of tuberculosis, he pulled strings in order to be admitted to the service. He spent most of World War Two as an Army sergeant in the Aleutian Islands, where he edited an Army newspaper. He came out of the war suffering from emphysema. After the war, Hammett returned to political activism, "but he played that role with less fervour than before." He was elected President of the Civil Rights Congress of New York on 5 June 1946 at a meeting held at the Hotel Diplomat in New York City, and "devoted the largest portion of his working time to CRC activities." In 1946, a bail fund was created by the CRC "to be used at the discretion of three trustees to gain the release of defendants arrested for political reasons." Those three trustees were Hammett, who was chairman, Robert W. Dunn, and Frederick Vanderbilt Field, "millionaire Communist supporter."[8] On 3 April 1947, the CRC was designated a Communist front group on the Attorney General's List of Subversive Organisations, as directed by U.S. President Harry S. Truman’s Executive Order 9835.[ The CRC's bail fund gained national attention on 4 November 1949, when bail in the amount of "$260,000 in negotiable government bonds" was posted "to free eleven men appealing their convictions under the Smith Act for criminal conspiracy to teach and advocate the overthrow of the United States government by force and violence." On 2 July 1951, their appeals exhausted, four of the convicted men fled rather than surrender themselves to Federal agents and begin serving their sentences. "At that time the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, issued subpoenas for the trustees of the CRC bail fund in an attempt to learn the whereabouts of the fugitives...". Hammett testified on 9 July 1951 in front of United States District Court Judge Sylvester Ryan, facing questioning by U.S. District Attorney Irving Saypol, described by Time as "the nation's number one legal hunter of top Communists". During the hearing Hammett refused to provide the information the government wanted, specifically, the list of contributors to the bail fund, "people who might be sympathetic enough to harbor the fugitives." Instead, on every question regarding the CRC or the bail fund, Hammett took the Fifth Amendment, refusing to even identify his signature or initials on CRC documents the government had subpoenaed. As soon as his testimony concluded, Hammett was immediately found guilty of contempt of court. During the 1950's he was investigated by Congress (see McCarthyism), and testified on March 26, 1953 before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Although he testified to his own activities, he refused to cooperate with the committee, and was blacklisted. Hammett died in New York City's Lenox Hill Hospital, of lung cancer, diagnosed just two months before his death. As a veteran of two World Wars, he was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Condition: Softback good/excellent condition; minor rusting to staples (pages unaffected), minor wear to corners/edges, dulling/marks. Pages excellent + condition; page face very clean & bright.   Additional photographs available upon request.   Rare & Collectable 1st Edition!!!      SHIPPING INSURANCE This book is insured during shipping for its purchase value only. This insurance excludes postage & packaging costs. 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