Hammett's contemporary, Raymond Chandler, comments on Hammett's contribution to the genre by saying: Hammett was one of a group () who wrote or tried to write realistic mystery fiction () took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley . . . gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons () He put these people down on paper as they were, and he made them talk in the language they customarily used for these purposes (Angel 66). Hammett did not place his characters' crime stories within a rural setting, as was typical of earlier crime fict...

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