Selected Letters Of Dashiell Hammett: 1921 - 1960

The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, The Thin Man -- the novels of Dashiell Hammett are world-famous, their hardboiled characters a part of the American psyche. But unlike most of our great writers, the man himself has remained private, elusive. Now his biographer, Richard Layman, and his granddaughter, Julie M. Rivett, have gathered a treasure trove of Hammett's letters, almost all of them from private collections, almost all of them previously unpublished. "Reading them," writes Diane Johnson, "is the closest we can come to knowing the enigmatic, mild author of those powerful, original novels."

Richard Layman is the author of Shadow Man, the first full biography of Dashiell Hammett, and the vice president of Bruccoli Clark Layman, a publisher of reference works in literature. He lives in Columbia, South Carolina.

Julie M. Rivett is a granddaughter of Dashiell Hammett, and Josephine Hammett Marshall is his daughter. They live in Southern California.