During the auspicious beginning to Hammett's writing career, conditions at home were difficult: in late 1924 or early 1925, his tuberculosis flared up and he began living apart from his wife and daughter. That arrangement that would continue in various forms for many years. In the autumn of 1925, Jose became pregnant with their second daughter. When his editor refused to raise his rate, Hammett placed a classified ad ("and I can write," it concluded) and was hired as the advertising manager for Albert Samuels Jewellers, which quadrupled the family's income. Hammett embraced his new occupation (and a fetching red-haired colleague named Peggy O'Toole, the inspiration for Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon), but after just five months on the job, he collapsed at the office in a pool of blood: he had hepatitis on top of TB, and the Veterans' Bureau deemed him 100 percent disabled. Even so, Hammett was intent on building his reputation as an ad man, if also a bit defensive about it--in an essay called "Advertising is Literature" which he wrote for Western Advertising, he argued that "every man who works with words for effects is a literary worker."

After poor health made it impossible for Hammett to report to the jeweller's office, Joseph Shaw, the latest editor of Black Mask (he would drop "The" from the title), lured him back with an offer of a raise and the opportunity to write longer stories. An eight-year period of astonishing productivity began. Hammett dashed off a novella called The Big Knockover, which Shaw serialised, and started reviewing mysteries for the Saturday Review of Literature. The first chapters of "The Cleansing of Poisonville" appeared in Black Mask, and Hammett sent the full manuscript to East Coast publishing houses. Blanche Knopf replied that they were "keen," though they felt he should remove some of the violence and change the "hopeless" title. The book came out as Red Harvest in 1929, followed by The Dain Curse (1929), The Maltese Falcon (1930), The Glass Key (1931), and The Thin Man (1934), along with movie adaptations of Red Harvest, The Maltese Falcon, and The Thin Man.

Hammett's aspirations were growing. As early as 1925, he had half-joked to Phil Cody at The Black Mask that straightening out some confusion over rights would "save my literary executors trouble." In 1928, he told Blanche that he was "one of the few--if there are any more--moderately literate people who take the detective story seriously," predicting that "some day somebody's going to make 'literature' out of it." He shared his plans for a stream-of-consciousness detective novel that would "carry the reader along with the detective, showing him everything as it is found." By 1930, Hammett had become high-handed. When he received an invoice from Knopf for excess corrections on The Glass Key, he replied that someone in their editorial department "simply edited the Jesus out of my MS" and they were "lucky I haven't billed you for the trouble I was put to unediting it." His arrogance was warranted: his influence on crime fiction was immediate, profound, and far-reaching. In 1935, Hammett was invited to a Los Angeles party honoring Gertrude Stein, who wanted to meet the master of the modern detective story. He wasn't a mere genre writer; he was a modernist innovator. The Maltese Falcon, which opens with a beautiful woman walking into a PI's office with a fat bankroll and a sketchy story, reads as the ur-text of modern American crime fiction. It is what Chandler would describe, in a tribute to his master, as a scene "that seemed never to have been written before."

Hammett would soon stop writing--or, as his daughter Jo more accurately put it, stop publishing. Newly rich, he partied hard and spent profligately. And he would just as soon be overshadowed by Chandler, who had more discernibly lofty concerns. Chandler doubted Hammett "had any deliberate artistic aims whatever; he was trying to make a living by writing something he had firsthand information about. This wasn't exactly the case, but it affirmed Hammett's image as no-nonsense ex-dick. Writing was the closest thing Hammett had to a calling, but no calling comes without professional demands and anxieties, and Hammett wasn't sufficiently interested in the rewards to keep up the travails. "I am long and lean and greyheaded, and very lazy," he wrote to The Black Mask in 1924, at 30. "I have no ambition at all in the usual sense of the word."

People ask two questions about Hammett: why did he start writing, and why did he stop? Ward answers the first question to the extent that it can be answered, and he wisely avoids the second, to which Hammett already provided an answer, however inadequate: "I stopped writing because I found I was repeating myself. It's the beginning of the end when you discover you have style." Hammett didn't publish anything in the 26 years between The Thin Man and his death, but he wasn't idle: he drank prodigiously; he edited his lover Lillian Hellman's plays; he joined the Communist Party; he taught a mystery writing class; he joined the army (again); he stopped drinking; he was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, found guilty of contempt of court, and sent to prison; he maintained relationships with Jose and his daughters, and with Lillian, who became more of a friend than a lover; he had other lovers; he adored his grandchildren; he fished, and made his own fishing lures; he took up sketching and photography; he read. There is tragedy in his not-writing only in that he tried. He struggled for decades to finish a novel, Tulip, and never did.