Hammett Caught on Celluloid

We all know that Raymond Chandler made a cameo appearance in 1944’s Double Indemnity, a film for which he and Billy Wilder wrote the screenplay. But were you aware that another father of American crime fiction, Dashiell Hammett, clocked his own bit of screen time?

San Francisco literary tour guide Don Herron tells the story in his blog, Up and Down These Mean Streets. It seems Hammett had a brief, uncredited role as “Slim,” a railroad ticket agent in Two Sharp Knives, the November 14, 1949, episode of Studio One, a CBS-TV anthology series. The teleplay was adapted from a Hammett short story of that same name, first published in Colliers magazine on January 13, 1934. The yarn had previously been turned into an episode of the radio drama Suspense, scripted by another crime writer, John Dickson Carr, and broadcast on December 22, 1942.

You can catch Hammett’s Studio One performance here.