Dashiell Hammett

Nick Charles searches for a wealthy inventor who is the prime suspect in a New York City murder case.

The steadfast and sturdy Continental Op has been summoned to the town of Personville—known as Poisonville—a dusty mining community splintered by competing factions of gangsters and petty criminals. The Op has been hired by Donald Willsson, publisher of the local newspaper, who gave little indication about the reason for the visit. No sooner does the Op arrive, than the body count begins to climb . . . starting with his client. With...

Crime writer Dashiell Hammett elevated the genre to true literature and The Thin Man was his last - and most successful - novel. Following the enormous success of the 1934 movie version, Hammett was commissioned to write stories for additional films. He wrote two full length novellas, pulling his classic characters retired PI Nick Charles and his former debutante wife Nora back into a deadly - and fully satisfying - game of cat and mouse.

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 all twenty-eight stories and two serialized novels starring Continental Op, the hardworking private eye with an unyielding personal code.

Twenty stories by a crime writer. They range from The Assistant Murderer, on a detective famous for his ugliness, to Ruffian's Wife, in which a wife discovers her husband's true nature. By the author of The Maltese Falcon.