Back Crime Stories and Other Writings

Dashiell Hammett: Crime Stories and Other Writings

Edited by Steven Marcus

“Steven Marcus has gone back to Hammett’s original magazine versions, so that even much-anthologized stories here take on an unfamiliar cast, like old friends newly paroled.” — San Francisco Chronicle

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents

Overview

Story of the Week “Suggestions to Detective Story Writers,” Dashiell Hammett
May 27, 2024

Story of the Week “The Main Death,” Dashiell Hammett
May 26, 2023

Story of the Week Dashiell Hammett, “The Gutting of Couffignal”
May 28, 2021

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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: 24 in all, along with 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.

Steven Marcus, volume editor, is George Delacorte Professor of the Humanities, Emeritus, at Columbia University. A distinguished cultural historian and literary critic, he is the author of many books, including The Other Victorians and Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class. He is also the editor of the historic collection of Hammett stories, The Continental Op.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Dashiell Hammett: Crime Stories & Other Writings is kept in print by a gift from The Tebil Foundation to the Guardians of American Letters Fund made in memory of William K. Jacobs Jr.
News & Views

Story of the Week “Suggestions to Detective Story Writers,” Dashiell Hammett
May 27, 2024

Story of the Week “The Main Death,” Dashiell Hammett
May 26, 2023

Story of the Week Dashiell Hammett, “The Gutting of Couffignal”
May 28, 2021

Story of the Week Dashiell Hammett, “Zigzags of Treachery”
May 28, 2020

Story of the Week Dashiell Hammett, “The Tenth Clew”
February 7, 2020
Table of Contents

Crime Stories
Arson Plus
Slippery Fingers
Crooked Souls
The Tenth Clew
Zigzags of Treachery
The House in Turk Street
The Girl with the Silver Eyes
Women, Politics and Murder
The Golden Horseshoe
Nightmare Town
The Whosis Kid
The Scorched Face
Dead Yellow Women
The Gutting of Couffignal
The Assistant Murderer
Creeping Siamese
The Big Knock-Over
$106,000 Blood Money
The Main Death
This King Business
Fly Paper
The Farewell Murder
Woman in the Dark
Two Sharp Knives

Other Writings
The Thin Man: An Early Typescript
From the Memoirs of a Private Detective
Suggestions to Detective Story Writers

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ISBN: 978-1-93108200-6 934 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 125 Library of America Series

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