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Dashiell Samuel Hammett was born in St. Mary’s County. He grew up in Philadelphia and Baltimore. Hammett left school at the age of fourteen and held several kinds of jobs thereafter—messenger boy, newsboy, clerk, operator, and stevedore, finally becoming an operative for Pinkerton’s Detective Agency. Sleuthing suited young Hammett, but World War I intervened, interrupting his work and injuring his health. When Sergeant Hammett was discharged from the last of several hospitals, he resumed detective work. He soon turned to writing, and in the late 1920s Hammett became the unquestioned master of detective-story fiction in America. In The Maltese Falcon (1930) he first introduced his famous private eye, Sam Spade. The Thin Man (1932) offered another immortal sleuth, Nick Charles. Red Harvest (1929), The Dain Curse (1929), and The Glass Key (1931) are among his most successful novels. During World War II, Hammett again served as sergeant in the Army, this time for more than two years, most of which he spent in the Aleutians. Hammett’s later life was marked in part by ill health, alcoholism, a period of imprisonment related to his alleged membership in the Communist Party, and by his long-time companion, the author Lillian Hellman, with whom he had a very volatile relationship. His attempt at autobiographical fiction survives in the story “Tulip,” which is contained in the posthumous collection The Big Knockover (1966, edited by Lillian Hellman). Another volume of his stories, The Continental Op (1974, edited by Stephen Marcus), introduced the final Hammett character: the “Op,” a nameless detective (or “operative”) who displays little of his personality, making him a classic tough guy in the hard-boiled mold—a bit like Hammett himself. |
Trade Paperback | Vintage | Fiction - Mystery & Detective - Hard-Boiled | 978-1-4000-7962-9 (1-4000-7962-4) | January 2005 | $ 9.95
Sam Spade, Nick and Nora Charles, The Continental Op. In his novels and stories, Dashiell Hammett created some of the most memorable characters--detectives, dames, and assorted miscreants--in twentieth-century fiction. It is nearly impossible to imagine modern American literature without Hammett.
Vintage Hammett features episodes from Red Harvest, The Maltese Falcon, The Dain... Read More
Trade Paperback | Vintage | Fiction - Short Stories (single author) | 978-0-375-70102-3 (0-375-70102-8) | September 2000 | $ 14.95
"Hammett's pioneering hard-boiled style has been much imitated, but the original--packs a wallop."--The New Yorker
Here are twenty long-unavailable stories by the master who brought us The Maltese Falcon. Laconic coppers, lowlifes, and mysterious women double- and triple-cross their colleagues with practiced nonchalance. A man on a bender awakens in a small... Read More
Trade Paperback | Vintage | Fiction - Mystery & Detective | 978-0-679-72259-5 (0-679-72259-9) | July 1989 | $ 14.95
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... Read More
Trade Paperback | Vintage | Fiction - Mystery & Detective - Hard-Boiled | 978-0-679-72258-8 (0-679-72258-0) | July 1989 | $ 15.00
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... Read More
Trade Paperback | Vintage | Fiction - Mystery & Detective | 978-0-679-72260-1 (0-679-72260-2) | July 1989 | $ 13.00
The Continental Op is a short, squat, and utterly unsentimental tank of a private detective. Miss Gabrielle Dain Leggett is young, wealthy, and a devotee of morphine and religious cults. She has an unfortunate effect on the people around her: they have a habit of dying violently. Is Gabrielle the victim... Read More
Trade Paperback | Vintage | Fiction - Mystery & Detective | 978-0-679-72262-5 (0-679-72262-9) | July 1989 | $ 14.00
Paul Madvig was a cheerfully corrupt ward-heeler who aspired to something better: the daughter of Senator Ralph Bancroft Henry, the heiress to a dynasty of political purebreds. Did he want her badly enough to commit murder? And if Madvig was innocent, which of his dozens of enemies was doing an awfully... Read More
Trade Paperback | Vintage | Fiction - Mystery & Detective - Hard-Boiled | 978-0-679-72264-9 (0-679-72264-5) | July 1989 | $ 12.95
A treasure worth killing for. Sam Spade, a slightly shopworn private eye with his own solitary code of ethics. A perfumed grafter named Joel Cairo, a fat man name Gutman, and Brigid O’Shaughnessy, a beautiful and treacherous woman whose loyalties shift at the drop of a dime. These are the ingredients... Read More
Trade Paperback | Vintage | Fiction - Mystery & Detective | 978-0-679-72261-8 (0-679-72261-0) | July 1989 | $ 13.00
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. Read More
Trade Paperback | Vintage | Fiction - Mystery & Detective | 978-0-679-72263-2 (0-679-72263-7) | July 1989 | $ 13.00
Nick and Nora Charles are Hammett's most enchanting creations, a rich, glamorous couple who solve homicides in between wisecracks and martinis. At once knowing and unabashedly romantic, The Thin Man is a murder mystery that doubles as a sophisticated comedy of manners. Read More
Trade Paperback | Vintage | Fiction - Mystery & Detective | 978-0-679-72265-6 (0-679-72265-3) | July 1989 | $ 10.00
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... Read More