num_pages: 934
description: 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. Now The Library of America collects the finest of them: 24 in all, along with some revealing essays and an early version of his novel The Thin Man. The texts, reprinted here for the first time, are those that appeared originally in the pulps, 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.
language: English
title: Crime Stories and Other Writings
titlecomplete: Crime Stories and Other Writings
characters: Dick Foley, Bob Teal, Benny Forman, George Dean, Denis Waldeman, Marty O'Hara, The Continental Op, Joseph Clane, Ned Root, Phels (Slippery Fingers), Frederick Grover, Barton (Slippery Fingers), George Farr, Henry Grover
genres: Short Stories, American, Thriller, Crime, Literature, Hard Boiled, Noir, Suspense, Mystery, Fiction
ratings_count: 528
places: San Francisco, California
series: The Continental Op
publisher: Library of America