Dashiell Hammett

After the death of his partner, private eye Sam Spade is dragged into a quest for a priceless statuette.

An anthology of eighteen short stories containing a number of previously unpublished pieces -- including an unfinished Sam Spade adventure -- as well as early screen treatments for "On the Make" and "The Kiss-Off."

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...

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...

This collection consists of nine crime novellas which were originally published in magazine form in 1924. The plots of Hammett's stories were drawn from his actual experience as a Pinkerton detective. Hammett viewed the process of detective work not as the pursuit of a few elusive clues, but rather the tedious business of extracting relevant evidence from an overabundance of information. The Tenth Clew Night Shots Zigzags of Treachery One Hour The...

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...

After the Thin Man -- Nick and Nora investigate a love triangle gone wrong after a dead man is discovered at their door. Another Thin Man-- After a wealthy business partner of Nora's father's is murdered, Nick and Nora's investigation brings them into the killer's crosshairs