Dashiell Hammett Books In Order

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. Red Harvest (By:) (1929)
  2. The Dain Curse (1929)
  3. The Maltese Falcon (1930)
  4. The Glass Key (1931)
  5. Woman In The Dark (1933)
  6. The Thin Man (1934)
  7. They Can Only Hang You Once (1944)
  8. Creeping Siamese and Other Stories (By:Julie M. Rivett) (1950)

Short Story Collections In Publication Order

  1. The Adventures of Sam Spade and Other Stories (1944)
  2. A Man Called Spade (1944)
  3. Hammett Homicides (1946)
  4. Dead Yellow Woman (1947)
  5. Nightmare Town and Other Stories (1950)
  6. The Big Knockover (1966)
  7. The Continental Op (1974)
  8. Dashiell Hammett: Crime Stories and Other Writings (2001)
  9. Dashiell Hammett: A Retrospective Anthology (With: Jack Adrian) (2004)
  10. Vintage Hammett (2005)
  11. Lost Stories (With: Joe Gores) (2005)
  12. Return of the Thin Man (With: Julie M. Rivett) (2012)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett: 1921-1960 (2002)
  2. The Crime Wave (2007)

Anthologies In Publication Order

  1. Red Brain and Other Thrillers (1961)
  2. Breakdown and Other Thrillers (1968)
  3. Tales of Mystery (1986)
  4. City Sleuths and Tough Guys (1989)
  5. The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century (2000)
  6. Books to Die For (2012)
  7. Creeps by Night (2020)

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Dashiell Hammett Books Overview

Red Harvest (By:)

The Continental Op first heard Personville called Poisonville by Hickey Dewey. But since Dewey also called a shirt a shoit, he didn’t think anything of it. Until he went there and his client, the only honest man in Poisonville, was murdered. Then the Op decided to stay to punish the guilty. And that meant taking on the entire town…

The Dain Curse

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, and a tautly crafted masterpiece of suspense.

The Maltese Falcon

The Maltese Falcon is considered Dashiell Hammett’s finest novel. The story introduces detective Sam Spade, a man of few words who displays little emotion. Hired by a woman Miss Wonderly to locate her sister, Spade gives the assignment to his partner Miles Archer. Archer tails the missing sister’s companion, and within a single evening both Archer and the man have been shot dead. As Spade pursues the mystery of his partner’s death, he is drawn into a circle of colorful characters: Miss Wonderly, who lies prettily and pathologically about everything; a fat, well dressed man named Gutman; a jumpy man named Cairo; and an extremely stupid, impulsive gunman. All of them are in competition to find the legendary, jewel encrusted Maltese Falcon, hidden for many centuries. As they get closer and closer to the statue, Spade gets closer and closer to identifying the person who murdered his partner.

The Glass Key

Ned Beaumont is a tall, thin, moustache wearing, TB ridden, drinking, gambling, hanger on to the political boss of a corrupt Eastern city. Nevertheless, like every Hammett hero and like Hammett himself, he has an unbreakable, if idiosyncratic moral code. Ned’s boss wants to better himself with a thoroughbred senator’s daughter; but does he want it badly enough to commit murder? If he’s innocent, who wants him in the frame? Beaumont must find out.

Woman In The Dark

There is menace in the air some unspoken, unexplained aura of violence and misdeed associated with the strange girl who appeared on the doorstep one day. From the master of the hard boiled detective story comes a new story of mystery and intrigue.

The Thin Man

Nick Charles was a hard edged gumshoe for years until his wife Nora’s father died and left her an inheritance. After six years living away, he s back in his old haunt, New York, where it seems his very unwelcome past is ready to resurface. Enter Dorothy Wynant, daughter of weird and possibly insane inventor Clyde Wynant. Wynant’s secretary/mistress has just been murdered. Despite Nick s constant assertions that he s not in the business anymore and definitely not on the case, he gets drawn into a complicated web of family matters, confused identities, and surprising evidence. Wife Nora is a willing accomplice as they sift through the players in the mystery, all the while sipping cocktails and socializing in rarefied New York society. Despite his reluctance, he and Nora are drawn into a byzantine world of speakeasies, sociopaths, and shady ladies. Reader William Dufris renders Hammett s wit and world weariness with his usual panache. Dashiell Hammett is recognized as a master of hard boiled detective fiction. The Thin Man was made into a movie in 1934, directed by W. S. Van Dyke, and The Thin Man was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture and spawned an entire series of films.

Nightmare Town and Other Stories

A collection of some of the finest stories from Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon. This publication from Boomer Books is specially designed and typeset for comfortable reading.

The Big Knockover

Nine short stories, many featuring the Continental Op. Includes the unfinished novel, Tulip, and a memoir by Lillian Hellman.

The Continental Op

Dashiell Hammett is the true inventor of modern detective fiction and the creator of the private eye, the isolated hero in a world where treachery is the norm. The Continental Op was his great first contribution to the genre and these seven stories, which first appeared in the magazine Black Mask, are the best examples of Hammett’s early writing, in which his formidable literary and moral imagination is already operating at full strength. The Continental Op is the dispassionate fat man working for the Continental Detective Agency, modelled on the Pinkerton Agency, whose only interest is in doing his job in a world of violence, passion, desperate action and great excitement.

Dashiell Hammett: Crime Stories and Other Writings

‘If Dashiell Hammett ends up rubbing or bending elbows with Mark Twain, why, probably neither man will mind.’ Chicago Sun Times, on Hammett: Complete Novels In scores of stories written for Black Mask and other pulp magazines in the 1920s and 1930s, Dashiell Hammett used the vernacular adventure tale to register the jarring textures and revved up cadences of modern America. His stories opened up crime fiction to the realities of American streets and American speech. These texts, along with some revealing essays and an early version of his novel The Thin Man, are reprinted here for the first time without the cuts and revisions introduced by later editors. Hammett’s years of experience as a Pinkerton detective give even his most outlandishly plotted mysteries a gritty credibility. Mixing melodramatic panache and poker faced comedy, his stories are hard edged entertainment for an era of headlong change and extravagant violence, tracking the devious, nearly nihilistic exploits of con men and blackmailers, slumming socialites and deadpan assassins. As guide through this underworld he created the Continental Op, the nameless and deliberately unheroic detective separated from the brutality and corruption around him only by his professionalism. Steven Marcus is the editor.

Dashiell Hammett: A Retrospective Anthology (With: Jack Adrian)

Complete in one volume, the five books that created the modern American crime novelIn a few years of extraordinary creative energy, Dashiell Hammett invented the modern American crime novel. In the words of Raymond Chandler, ‘Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse…
. He put these people down on paper as they were, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes.’The five novels that Hammett published between 1929 and 1934, collected here in one volume, have become part of modern American culture, creating archetypal characters and establishing the ground rules and characteristic tone for a whole tradition of hardboiled writing. Drawing on his own experiences as a Pinkerton detective, Hammett gave a harshly realistic edge to novels that were at the same time infused with a spirit of romantic adventure. His lean and deliberately simplified prose won admiration from such contemporaries as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. Each novel is distinct in mood and structure. Red Harvest 1929 epitomizes the violence and momentum of his Black Mask stories about the anonymous detective the Continental Op, in a raucous and nightmarish evocation of political corruption and gang warfare in a western mining town. In The Dain Curse 1929 the Op returns in a more melodramatic tale involving jewel theft, drugs, and a religious cult. With The Maltese Falcon 1930 and its protagonist Sam Spade, Hammett achieved his most enduring popular success, a tightly constructed quest story shot through with a sense of disillusionment and the arbitrariness of personal destiny. The Glass Key 1931 is a further exploration of city politics at their most scurrilous. His last novel was The Thin Man 1934, a ruefully comic tale paying homage to the traditional mystery form and featuring Nick and Nora Charles, the sophisticated inebriates who would enjoy a long afterlife in the movies.

Vintage Hammett

Sam Spade, Nick and Nora Charles, The Continental Op. In his novels and stories, Dashiell Hammett created some of the most memorable characters detectives, dames, and assorted miscreants in twentieth century fiction. It is nearly impossible to imagine modern American literature without Hammett. Vintage Hammett features episodes from Red Harvest, The Maltese Falcon, The Dain Curse, and The Thin Man; and stories featuring the Continental Op, including The House in Turk Street, The Girl with the Silver Eyes,’ and ‘Flypaper. It also includes the story ‘Nightshade’ which has not been available in over fifty years. Vintage Readers are a perfect introduction to some of the great modern writers, presented in attractive, affordable paperback editions.

Lost Stories (With: Joe Gores)

Dashiell Hammett, the bestselling creator of Sam Spade, The Maltese Falcon, and The Thin Man, was one of the America’s most entertaining authors, and one of its most influential. Even so, many of Hammett s stories including some of his best have been out of the reach of anyone but a handful of scholars and collectors until now.

Lost Stories rescues 21 long lost Hammett stories, all either never published in an anthology or unavailable for decades. Stories range from the first fiction Hammett ever wrote to his last. All stories have been restored to their original versions, replacing often wholesale cuts with the original text for the first time.

Readers of Hammett’s famous mysteries will be surprised by the variety of stories here. They include Hammett’s first detective fiction, humorous satires, adventure yarns, a sensitive autobiographical piece, and a tale Ellery Queen promises ‘is one of the most startling stories you have ever read.’

For each story, Hammett researcher Vince Emery tells how Hammett s life shaped the story and how the story affected his life. Emery s comments reveal surprises about Hammett s life not covered in any other book.

To round out this celebration of Hammett, three time Edgar Award winner Joe Gores has written an introduction describing how Hammett influenced literature, movies, television, and Gores own life.

Lost Stories is the first title in The Ace Performer Collection, a new series of books by and about Dashiell Hammett, crowned ‘the ace performer’ by his disciple Raymond Chandler.

Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett: 1921-1960

A literary event: The first ever selection from the letters of Dashiell Hammett, the genius of American crime fiction . ‘This book is a thing of beauty, from concept to execution, taking us all the way down to the life marrow of hardboiled’s one true icon. Under Richard ‘Shadow Man’ Layman’s masterful guidance, we find what Hammett sought and fought for his entire life…
Truth.’Andrew VachssMore than any book before it, this one gives us the complete Hammett, in his own words. Here is Hammett the family man, distant but devoted, sometimes late with the check but never too late; Hammett the student of politics, scanning the headlines from a Marxist perspective; Hammett the lover of Lillian Hellman, delighting in her style, humor, accomplishments but maintaining his independence. Celebrity, soldier, activist, survivor Hammett was each in turn, but he was always, above all else, a writer. The artist is present in every line, and this book adds to his stature as a classic American writer.’That these letters read exceptionally well is no surprise…
Hammett comes across here as authentically, contradictorily human.’ Book magazine’An illuminating collection of the famed writer’s letters…
A fine rendering of Hammett’s life in his own words and a remarkable slice of Americana.’Kirkus Reviews’A dry fatalism in the letters sent me back to the novels and their absence of mercy. No book on Hammett has made that tone clear in terms of his life. But these letters show the old fashioned literary gent vaguely tickled by praise from Gide and Malraux who still kept a thug in tow, a kind of inner Ned Beaumont, to make sure that pride or pleasure never got out of hand.’ David Thomson, New York Times Book Review ‘The key revelations are personal: self portraits of the author as doting father, unremitting drunk, self educated intellectual, committed Marxist, patriot, soft touch, seducer, and romantic…
Compelling and informative.’Dick Lochte, Los Angeles Times Book Review’They do not disappoint. They sound gloriously like Hammett, full of wry observation, whether he is describing his evening at the Brown Derby or finally reading Wuthering Heights.’ Lisa Levy, Entertainment Weekly A

The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century

In The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century, best selling author Tony Hillerman and mystery expert Otto Penzler present an unparalleled treasury of American suspense fiction that every fan will cherish. Offering the finest examples from all reaches of the genre, this collection charts the mystery’s eminent history from the turn of the century puzzles of Futrelle, to the seminal pulp fiction of Hammett and Chandler, to the mystery story’s rise to legitimacy in the popular mind, a trend that has benefited masterly writers like Westlake, Hunter, and Grafton. Nowhere else can readers find a more thorough, more engaging, more essential distillation of American crime fiction. Penzler, BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES series editor, and Hillerman, whose Leaphorn/Chee novels have won him multiple Edgar Awards and millions of devotees, winnowed this select group out of a thousand stories, drawing on sources as diverse as ELLERY QUEEN’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE and ESQUIRE, COLLIER’S and THE NEW YORKER. Giants of the genre abound Raymond Chandler, Stephen King, Dashiell Hammett, Lawrence Block, Ellery Queen, Sara Paretsky, and others but the editors also unearthed gems by luminaries rarely found in suspense anthologies: William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Damon Runyon, Harlan Ellison, James Thurber, and Joyce Carol Oates. Mystery buffs and newcomers alike will delight in the thrilling stories and top notch writing of a hundred years’ worth of the finest suspense, crime, and mystery writing.

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