Vintage Hammett

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.“Hammett's prose was clean and entirely unique. His characters were as sharply and economically defined as any in American fiction." –The New York Times

Dashiell Hammett was born in St. Marys County, Maryland, in 1894.  HE grew up in Philadelphia and Baltimore.  He left school at the age of fourteen and held several kinds of jobs thereafter—messenger boy, newsboy, clerk, timekeeper, yardman, machine operator, and stevedore.  He finally became an operative for Pinkerton's Detective Agency.
   World War I, in which he served as a sergeant, interrupted his sleuthing and injured his health.  When he was finally discharged from the last of several hospitals, he resumed detective work.  Subsequently he turned to writing, and in the late 1920s he became the unquestioned master of detective-story fiction in America. During World War II, Mr. Hammett again served as a sergeant in the army, this time for more than two years, most of which he spent in the Aleutians.  He died in 1961.