Dashiell Hammett

Story of disappearance, murder, and robbery as told by "Nick" Charles, the detective who solves the case.

Dashiell Hammett was a crime writer who elevated the genre to true literature, and The Thin Man was Hammett's last-and most successful-novel. Following the enormous success of The Thin Man movie in 1934, Hammett was commissioned to write stories for additional films. He wrote two full-length novellas, for the films that became After the Thin Man and Another Thin Man. Bringing back his classic characters, retired private investigator Nick Charles and...

When the last honest citizen of Poisonville was murdered, the Continental Op stayed on to punish the guilty-even if that meant taking on an entire town. Red Harvest is more than a superb crime novel: it is a classic exploration of corruption and violence in the American grain.

Dashiell Hammett is universally regarded as one of the finest American writers of "hard boiled" detective fiction and his short stories and novels have been hailed as some of the best mystery stories ever written. Hammett would doubtless have gone down in literary history simply for his creation of the detective Sam Spade ("The Maltese Falcon") as well as Nick and Nora Charles ("The Thin Man" series), but he is also the creator of another of the most...

This collection consists of nine crime novellas which were originally published in magazine form in 1924. The plots of Hammett's stories were drawn from his actual experience as a Pinkerton detective. Hammett viewed the process of detective work not as the pursuit of a few elusive clues, but rather the tedious business of extracting relevant evidence from an overabundance of information. "The Tenth Clew" "Night Shots" "Zigzags of Treachery" "One Hour" "The...

"Half the jobs that come to a private detective are like this one: three or four days-and often as many weeks-have passed since the crime was committed. The police work on the job until they are stumped; then the injured party calls in a private sleuth, dumps him down on a trail that is old and cold and badly trampled, and expects-Oh, well! I picked out this way of making a living so …" As a detective with the San Francisco branch of the Continental...

Collects the two novellas that were the basis of the 1930s movies After the Thin Man and Another Thin Man, but were never published themselves, until now.

In the stories and novellas he wrote for Black Mask and other pulp magazines in the 1920s and 1930s, Dashiell Hammett took the detective story and turned it into a medium for capturing the jarring textures and revved-up cadences of modern American life. In this volume, The Library of America collects the finest of these stories: 24 in all, along with some revealing essays and an earlier version of his novel The Thin Man. Mixing melodramatic panache...

Contents: Red Harvest--The Dain curse --The Maltese falcon--The glass key--The thin man.