The Dain Curse, The Glass Key, and Selected Stories (Everyman's Library)
“Dashiell Hammett is an original. He is a master of the detective novel, yes, but also one hell of a writer.”—BOSTON GLOBE“Hammett could no more vulgarize his imaginative methods than he could his spare and elegant style . . . Hammett’s art . . . transform[ed] the possibilities for art among his successors.”—NEW YORK TIMES“These [Continental Op] tales show Hammett writing with the precision of a diamond cutter.”—NEWSWEEK“Not just the first of the tough school of crime-writing but the best.”—THE TIMES (London)“Hammett had to fit social realism into a suffocatingly contrived form. He did it with language—densely spare exposition and multilayered dialogue. He gave us a spellbinding male discourse—The Maneuver as moral crusade, the job holder’s aria and torch song.”—from the Introduction by James Ellroy