Nightmare Town: Stories

Dashiell Hammett

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Sep 12, 2000 - Fiction - 432 pages

"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 town with a dark mystery at its heart. A woman confronts a brutal truth about her husband. Here is classic noir: hard-boiled descriptions to rival Hemingway, verbal exchanges punctuated with pistol shots and fisticuffs. Devilishly plotted, whip-smart, impassioned, Nightmare Town is a treasury of tales from America's poet laureate of the dispossessed.

Contents

• NIGHTMARE TOWN: 3
• HOUSE DICK: 42
• RUFFIANS WIFE: 55

About the author

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.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Nightmare Town: Stories; Novel Conversation; Vintage crime/Black lizard
• Author: Dashiell Hammett
• Editors: Kirby McCauley, Martin Harry Greenberg, Edward Gorman
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2000
• Original from: the University of Michigan
• Digitized: Aug 23, 2010
• ISBN: 0375701028, 9780375701023
• Length: 432 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Mystery & Detective / Collections & Anthologies; Fiction / Mystery & Detective / Hard-Boiled; Fiction / Noir; Fiction / Short Stories (single author)