In his famous 1944 essay, “The Simple Art of Murder,” Raymond Chandler openly acknowledged Hammett’s genius. He properly credited him as “the ace performer,” the one writer responsible for the creation and development of the hard-boiled school of literature, the genre’s revolutionary realist. “He took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley,” Chandler declared. “Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse.” And crime novelist Ross Macdonald also granted Hammett the number one position in crime literature: “We all came out from under Hammett’s black mask.”

(cf.: Hammett, Dashiell. Nightmare Town (p. 1). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.)