num_pages: 396
description: "Hammett's pioneering hard-boiled style has been much imitated, but the original--packs a wallop."-- The New YorkerHere are twenty long-unavailable stories by the master who brought us The Maltese Falcon . Laconic coppers, lowlifes, and mysterious women double- and triple-cross their colleagues with practiced nonchalance. A man on a bender awakens in a small town with a dark mystery at its heart. A woman confronts a brutal truth about her husband. Here is classic hard-boiled descriptions to rival Hemingway, verbal exchanges punctuated with pistol shots and fisticuffs. Devilishly plotted, whip-smart, impassioned, Nightmare Town is a treasury of tales from America's poet laureate of the dispossessed.
language: English
title: Nightmare Town: Stories
titlecomplete: Nightmare Town: Stories
characters: Alexander Rush, Sam Spade, Steve Threefall, The Continental Op
genres: Fiction, Pulp, Short Stories, Mystery, Noir, Detective, Mystery Thriller, Classics, Hard Boiled, Crime
ratings_count: 2276
places: Izzard, Nevada, The United States of America
series: The Continental Op
publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard