Nightmare Town Stories

"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 usThe 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 Townis a treasury of tales from America's poet laureate of the dispossessed.

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 <b>The Maltese Falcon</b> (1930) he first introduced his famous private eye, Sam Spade. <b>The Thin Man</b> (1932) offered another immortal sleuth, Nick Charles. <b>Re