Unbecoming Dashiell Hammett by Nathan Ward

“What the book shows is a marginally competent Pinkerton operative, a consistent and unrepentant liar, a betrayer, a humiliator of women, a strikebreaker, a batterer, a tormentor of the helpless, an attempted rapist, a fraudster, and a tax evader who wrote a series of crime stories that were little informed by actual detective experience, one of which became the most influential novel in hard-boiled fiction.”