Dashiell Hammett

Dive into the gritty, fast-paced world of classic noir with Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammetts groundbreaking tale of corruption, greed, and betrayal. This hardboiled detective novel is a thrilling ride that set the standard for crime fiction and introduced readers to Hammetts sharp prose and relentless storytelling. The story follows the nameless Continental Op, a seasoned private investigator sent to the industrial town of Personvillenicknamed Poisonvilleto...

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...

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...

Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett is a gritty, fast-paced detective novel that helped define the hard-boiled crime genre. The story follows the Continental Op, an unnamed, tough, and unflinching private investigator who is sent to the corrupt mining town of Personville - or "Poisonville," as the locals call it. Hired by a local newspaper editor to clean up the town, the Op quickly finds himself embroiled in a violent web of power struggles, corruption,...

The Continental Op is a short, squat, and utterly unsentimental tank of a private detective. Miss Gabrielle Dain Leggett is young, wealthy, and a devotee of morphine and religious cults. She has an unfortunate effect on the people around her: they have a habit of dying violently. Is Gabrielle the victim of a family curse? Or is the truth about her weirder and infinitely more dangerous? The Dain Curse is one of the Continental Op's most bizarre cases...

The Thin Man introduces Nick and Nora Charles, New York's coolest crime-solving couple. Nick retired from detecting after his wife inherited a tidy sum, but six years later a pretty blonde spies him at a speakeasy and asks for his help finding her father, an eccentric inventor who was once Nick's client. Nick can no more resist the case than a morning cocktail or a good fight, and soon he and Nora are caught in a complicated web of confused identities...

Paul Madvig was a cheerfully corrupt ward heeler who aspired to something better: the daughter of Senator Ralph Bancroft Henry, the heiress to a dynasty of political purebreds. Did he want her badly enough to commit murder? And if Madvig was innocent, which of his dozens of enemies was doing an awfully good job of framing him? Dashiell Hammett's tour de force of detective fiction combines an airtight plot, authentically venal characters, and writing...

Sam Spade is a partner in a private-eye firm who finds himself hounded by police when his partner is killed while tailing a man. The woman who asked his partner to follow the man turns out to be someone who is not what she says she is, and is really involved in something to do with the 'Maltese Falcon', a gold-encrusted life-sized statue of a falcon, the only one of its kind.