Dashiell Hammett

DASHIELL HAMMETT

Samuel (Dashiell) Hammet is probably the first hard-boiled writer and as such must be placed on a par with the most important fathers of the mystery/detective fiction genre. Born in St. Mary's County, Maryland, in 1894, his family soon moved to Philadelphia and later Baltimore. Here he studied at Baltimore Polytechnic but left school at 14. After having worked as paper boy, clerk, messenger and advertising manager, Hammett joined the local Pinkerton Detective Agency. During the First World War he was a sergeant in the ambulance corps but spent most of the war in hospital following tuberculosis. He rejoined the agency working occasionally to add to his pension money. He married Josephine Dolan in 1921 and had two children (they divorced in 1927 mainly due to Hammett's health). In 1923 the first short story by Hammett (under the pseudonym Peter Collinson) appeared in Black Mask and thanks to the adventures of the Continental Op Hammett became one of its most popular writers. His first book, Red Harvest, was published in 1929 followed shortly after by The Dain Curse both featuring The Continental Op. In September 1929, Hammett portrayed another character in a different narrative form (the first person narration was dropped), Sam Spade, the protagonist of one of the most famous detective stories ever written: The Maltese Falcon. In the 1930s he moved to Hollywood and Lillian Hellman became Hammett's companion. He wrote two more books: The Glass Key and The Thin Man. In 1934 he started writing for the comic strip Secret Agent X-9. During the Second World War he edited a newspaper for troops in the Aleutian Islands. The end of World War II saw the anti-Communist breakdown pinpoint him for his Communist beliefs. He went to prison in 1951 for five months after refusing to testify at a trial against four communists accused of conspiracy. From 1946 to 1956 he taught creative writing in Jefferson School of Social Science while the State Department kept his books away from the shelves of overseas US libraries, inland revenue claimed he owed huge amounts of tax and the federal government attached his income. Hammett died of lung cancer, penniless, in New York in 1961.

NIGHTMARE TOWN

In the title story, a man on a bender enters a small town and ends up unraveling the dark mystery at its heart. A woman confronts the brutal truth about her husband in the chilling story "Ruffian's Wife." "His Brother's Keeper" is a half-wit boxer's eulogy to the brother who betrayed him. "The Second-Story Angel" recounts one of the most novel cons ever devised. In seven stories, the tough and taciturn Continental Op takes on a motley collection of the deceitful, the duped, and the dead, and once again shows his uncanny ability to get at the truth. In three stories, Sam Spade confronts the darkness in the human soul while rolling his own cigarettes. And the first study for The Thin Man sends John Guild on a murder investigation in which almost every witness may be lying.

WOMAN IN THE DARK

A young, frightened, foreign woman appears at the door of an isolated house. The man and woman inside take her in. Other strangers appear in pursuit of the girl. Menace is in the air. Originally published in 1933, Hammett's Woman in the Dark shows the author at the peak of his narrative powers. With an introduction by Robert B. Parker, the author of the celebrated Spenser novels.

THE BIG KNOCKOVER

Short, thick-bodied, mulishly stubborn, and indifferent to physical pain, Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op was the prototype for generations of tough-guy detectives. He is also the hero of most of the nine stories in this volume. The Op's one enthusiasm is doing his job, and in The Big Knockover the jobs entail taking on a gang of modern-day freebooters, a vice-ridden hell's acre in the Arizona desert, and the bank job to end all bank jobs, along with such assorted grifters as Babe McCloor, Bluepoint Vance, Alphabet Shorty McCoy, and the Dis-and-Dat Kid.

THE CONTINENTAL OP

Short, thick-bodied, mulishly stubborn, and indifferent to pain, Dashiell Hammett's Continetal Op was the prototype for generations of tough-guy detectives. In these stories the Op unravels a murder with too many clues, looks for a girl with eyes the color of shadows on polished silver, and tangles with a crooked-eared gunman called the Whosis Kid.