Dashiell Hammett: Crime Stories & Other Writings (LOA #125)

In the stories and novellas he wrote for Black Mask and other pulp magazines in the 1920s and 1930s, Dashiell Hammett took the detective story and turned it into a medium for capturing the jarring textures and revved-up cadences of modern American life. In this volume, The Library of America collects the finest of these stories: twenty-four in all, along with some revealing essays and an earlier version of his novel The Thin Man.

Mixing melodramatic panache and poker-faced comedy, a sensitiv...