Review: 15 early, but good, Hammett stories
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 05 27, 2012
UPDATED 07-20-13: This is an enjoyable collection of pulp tales (with an active TOC) by a master of detective fiction. The "Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection" calls Hammett "the most important member of the hard-boiled school of fiction," and while these tales are neither his best nor most famous, they are still quite entertaining.  A similar, dollar set of 16 Hammett stories was once available in the kindle Store; it contained these same 15 stories plus one more ("The Road Home"). That's the set I bought, but I cannot recommend that one to you because it is no longer available.There is recently, however, another Hammett collection you may wish to compare to this one. "The Hammett Megapack" from Wildside lists 20 stories and also costs a buck (and the formatting is, quite frankly, more to my liking). But that set does NOT contain the substantial (70-ish page) story, "The Assistant Murderer" (which this one does), probably because that story is already included in Wildside's "Detective Megapack." ("The Assistant Murderer" is also available by itself for as much as $2.99 in the Kindle Store.) The additional stories in the Megapack ("The Road Home," "The New Racket," "The Wages of Crime," and "Night Shade") are very short, with two of them ("Parthian Shot" and "Immortality") each being merely a paragraph long. Nevertheless, because they're by Hammett, they are desirable.So, of the two competing collections, if I were only willing to spend ONE dollar, I'd get this one for "The Assistant Murderer" and the other 14 Hammett stories it contains. But if I were willing to spend TWO dollars, I'd purchase BOTH of the aforementioned Megapacks to get the greatest number of Hammett stories (plus a batch of tales by other authors). Either way, of course, you can't really go wrong because, for very little money, each provides a good many, hard-boiled detective stories.