Politics & Power Quote by Dashiell Hammett

Hammett’s brag lands like a cigarette flicked into polite American letters: casual, deliberate, and meant to scorch. Calling himself a “bad influence” isn’t a confession so much as a sly victory lap. He’s naming the crime and daring you to object. The joke works because “bad” is only bad if you’re invested in the literary establishment he helped embarrass - the genteel, high-minded tradition that treated violence, money, and corruption as vulgar subjects best left off the page.

The intent is double-edged. On one side, it’s self-mythmaking: Hammett positioning his hard-boiled style as a contaminant that spread. On the other, it’s a critique of how culture polices taste. If your work makes the gatekeepers clutch their pearls, maybe you’re doing something right. The subtext: I dragged American prose out of the drawing room and into the street, where power actually operates.

Context matters. Hammett didn’t invent toughness; he professionalized it. A former Pinkerton, he wrote with an evidentiary cool that made moralizing feel naive. In the interwar years, with Prohibition, graft, and class tension as background noise, his flat, unsentimental sentences read like a new kind of honesty. That “influence” wasn’t just stylistic; it rewired what counted as serious. Crime fiction stopped being disposable puzzle-box entertainment and became a lens on institutions, masculinity, and the economics of survival.

So the line isn’t humblebragging. It’s a diagnosis: American literature got “worse” by getting sharper, faster, less impressed with virtue - and Hammett is pleased to be guilty.