Short Story Collections
SCUFFING, EDGEWEAR, CHAFING & DINGS ON COVERS AND PAGES. FADED BROWN & IT IS THE ADVENTURES OF SAM SPADE AND OTHER STORIES BY DASHIELL HAMMELL. INTRODUCTION BY ELLERY QUEEN. THIS COPY HAS BEEN WELL USED & WELL READ!
A collection of Hammett short stories, compiled by Ellery Queen, includes: The House in Turk Street (Continental Op) The Girl with the Silver Eyes (Continental Op) Night Shots (Continental Op) The Main Death (Continental Op) Two Sharp Knives (Chief of Police Anderson) Ruffian's Wife (Guy Tharp) Dell Mapback format, paperback with a map on the back showing "Map of San Francisco, including hot spots of crime in 'Hammett Homicides'".
'- Père du roman noir, Dashiell Hammett reste, pour le grand public, le créateur du détective privé Sam Spade dans le Faucon Maltais. En cins romans, et plus d'une soixantaine de nouvelles, il s'imposa comme une des grandes figures de la fiction américaine grâce à un univers réaliste et un style novateur. - Cette nouvelle au rythme trépidant est une peinture inégalée du Chinatown de San Francisco dans les années 1920, sur fond de conflit sino japonais et de trafics liés à la prohibition. Le détective qui travaille pour l'Agence Continentale pourrait bien se perdre dans ce dédale de ruelles étroites où passages dérobés et fumeries d'opium par Lilian Shan, une Chinoise éduquée dans les meilleures universités américaines, l'agent de la Continentale doit élucider les meurtres des deux domestiques de la jeune femme. Pour cela, il lui faudra affronter l'énigmatique Chang Li Ching, voler au secours d'une petite esclave chinoise et ne pas hésiter à jouer du coup de poing pour se titrer d'affaire. La série BILINGUE propose : - une traduction fidèle et intégrale, accompagnée de nombreuses notes ; - une méthode originale de perfectionnement par un contact direct avec les oeurvres d'auteurs étrangers.
A collection of some of the finest stories from Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon. This publication from Boomer Books is specially designed and typeset for comfortable reading.
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.
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.
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: twenty-four in all, along with some revealing essays and an earlier version of his novel The Thin Man . Mixing melodramatic panache and poker-faced comedy, a sensitivity to place and a perceptive grasp of social conflict, Hammett’s stories are hard-edged entertainments for an era of headlong change and extravagant violence. For the heroic sagas of earlier eras Hammett substituted the up-tempo, devious, sometimes nearly nihilistic exploits of con men and blackmailers, fake spiritualists and thieving politicians, slumming socialites and deadpan assassins. As a guide through this underworld he created the Continental Op, the nameless, laconic detective, world-weary and unblinking, who serves as protagonist of most of these stories. The deliberately unheroic Op is separated only by his code of professionalism from the brutality and corruption that run rampant in stories such as “Zigzags of Treachery,” “Dead Yellow Women,” “Fly Paper,” and “$106,000 Blood Money.” Hammett’s years of experience as a Pinkerton detective give even his most outlandishly plotted mysteries a gritty credibility, and his intimate knowledge of San Francisco made him the perfect chronicler of that city’s waterfronts, back alleys, police stations, and luxury hotels. By connecting crime fiction to the realities of American streets and American speech, his Black Mask stories opened up new vistas for generations of writers and readers. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
Spanning the whole of Dashiell Hammett's brief writing career from 1922 to 1934, Dashiell Hammett: A Centenary Anthology is the largest Hammett collection ever published. While his novels The Maltese Falcon , The Glass Key , and The Thin Man are world-famous from the enduring success of their big screen movie adaptations, Hammett's shorter fiction is much less well known. This anthology fills that gap, offering 35 stories that are as fresh and compelling today as when they were first published. It was Hammett who brought realism to the detective story genre, transforming what many viewed as pulp fiction into literature, and the stories here emerge as distinctly and authentically American. Characterized by fast-paced realism and Hammett's half-amused yet entirely hard-edged prose, they provide a rich mix of crime, humor, irony, despair, and blazing action. Hammett wrote of murder, theft, and corruption as one who had experienced the dark underbelly of life firsthand, as indeed he had during more than ten years as an agent with the legendary Pinkerton Detective Agency. From "Another Perfect Crime," a laudably succinct lampoon of precisely the kinds of crime story from which Hammett was struggling to free himself early in his career, to stories featuring Hammett's never-named detective, the Continental Op, and even a tale featuring the most renowned hardboiled private detective of them all, Sam Spade, these tales of murder and mayhem, defeat and loss, hoodlums and thrown fights are compulsively good reads. As introduced by Jack Adrian in this unique collection, they represent the incomparable legacy of a great American writer whose short stories and novels had a profound influence on 20th century culture and film.
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 Curse , and The Thin Man ; and stories featuring the Continental Op, including “The House in Turk Street,” “The Girl with the Silver Eyes," and "Flypaper.” It also includes the story "Nightshade" which has not been available in over fifty years. Vintage Readers are a perfect introduction to some of the great modern writers, presented in attractive, affordable paperback editions.
Dashiell Hammett, the creator of Sam Spade, The Maltese Falcon , and The Thin Man , was one of the 20th century’s most influential and entertaining authors. Even so, many of Hammett’s stories—including some of his best—have been out of the reach of anyone but a handful of scholars and collectors, until now. This essential compendium rescues 21 long-lost Hammett stories, all either never collected in an anthology or unavailable for decades. These stories appear nowhere else, and represent a variety of styles from the famous mysterysmith: his first detective fiction, humorous satires, adventure yarns, a sensitive autobiographical piece, and a Thin Man story told with photos. In addition, all stories have been restored to their original versions, replacing often wholesale cuttings with the original text for the first time. To round out this celebration of Hammett, three-time Edgar Award–winner Joe Gores has written an introduction describing how Hammett influenced literature, movies, television, and Gores’ own life.
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 his former debutante wife Nora, who return home to find Nora’s family gardener murdered, pulling the couple back into another deadly game of cat and mouse. Hammett has written two fully satisfying "Thin Man" stories, with classic, barbed Hammett dialogue and fully developed characters. Neither of these stories has been previously published (except for a partial in a small magazine 25 years ago). The Return of the Thin Man is a hugely entertaining read that brings back two classic characters from one of the greatest of mystery writers who ever lived. This book is destined to become essential reading for Hammett's millions of fans and a new generation of mystery readers the world over.
THE HUNTER AND OTHER STORIES is a unique literary publication from one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, Dashiell Hammett. This volume includes both new Hammett stories gleaned from his personal archives along with screen treatments long buried in film-industry files. The best of Dashiell Hammett's unfamiliar treasures have been rescued from deep in these archives: screen stories, unpublished and rarely published fiction, and intriguing unfinished narratives. Hammett is regarded as both a pioneer and master of hard-boiled detective fiction, but these dozen and half stories that explore failed romance, courage in the face of conflict, hypocrisy, and crass opportunism, show him in a different light. The collection also includes two full-length screen treatments. "On the Make" is the basis for the rarely seen 1935 film Mr. Dynamite, starring a corrupt detective who never misses an opportunity to take advantage of his clients rather than help them. "The Kiss-Off" is the basis for City Streets (1931), with Sylvia Sydney and Gary Cooper caught in a romance complicated by racketeering's obligations and temptations. Like the screen stories from RETURN OF THE THIN MAN , they read as novellas-rich in both story and character. Publication of these new volumes is due to the passion of Julie M. Rivett, Hammett's granddaughter and a well-regarded Hammett scholar, as well as Richard Layman, the author of the first full-length biography of Hammett, Shadow Man, the definitive bibliography, and other works. Rivett and Layman are trustees for Hammett's literary estate and have co-edited two previous Hammett volumes-Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett and Dashiell Hammett: A Daughter Remembers. THE HUNTER AND OTHER STORIES will appeal to longtime Hammett fans, and introduce a new generation to one of the most influential voices in American fiction.
This collection contains nine early stories featuring the Continental Op, an un-named middle-aged detective working for the San Francisco branch of the fictional Continental Detective Agency. The stories are narrated in the first person. The “hardboiled detective” voice was later used by author Dashiell Hammett in The Maltese Falcon (Sam Spade) and the Thin Man series of stories.