Gain Access To Crime Stories And Other Writings Documented By Dashiell Hammett Disseminated As Pamphlet

good starting points for Hammett, Nightmare Town, The Tenth Clew, and The Tenth Clew are especially worth it, I've been meaning to read some Hammett forever and it was nice to finally get around to these short stories, It was good reading for the subway, but some of the prose in this was a little too mechanical for my taste, I expected more attitude and atmosphere, So aboutpages later I feel pretty confident I have a handle on Hammett, and for purposes of this blurb I'm going to compare him to the other titan of classic crime fiction, Raymond Chandler.
Hammett is a lot less flowery and a lot less romantic than Chandler, He certainly has a good smartassed tone and some great lines in that idiom, but Chandler beats him for sheer poetry and inspiration, However, Hammett excels in the nature of the mysteries themselves: the riddles to be solved and the way his wiseacre Continental Op goes about taking care of business.
There's little emotion involved, and no dames that our hero's gonna pine after, even once they've been hanged, just a lot of bullets leftover to bite down on.
A great collection of short stories, I am a fan of Hammett's novels and his short fiction is nearly as good, I liked most of the stories but anything featuring the Continental Op is going to be at the top of the list, Hammett's writings are classic for a reason, If you like crime and thriller, he's an author to read, Take into account when these stories and books were written because the slurs in here are, you know, woof, Such a great writer. What a wonderful set of stories! Hammett is without a doubt the master and the American private eye/noir genre in both short and long form.
He influenced Hemingway. Not the other way around, So said Gertrude Stein and I'm not inclined to argue with the lady, I've also read Richard Layman's Shadow Man and DH was both selfdestructive and idealistic, The Hellman introductory essay in The Big Knockover is also worth reading, I loved absolutely every single short story collected in this book, Most of themof thefeature Hammett's nameless Continental Op character, one of my favourite characters ever, The remainingstories are all oneoffs, with different characters in different locales, By far the most complete collection of Hammett short stories out there especially the Continental Op stories, The retail price may be a bit steep, so I highly recommend buying it online,

Also included I guess that's where the 'Other Writings' part of the Crime Stories and Other Writings's title comes in is 'an early typescript' version of sitelinkThe Thin Man.
This is not 'The Thin Man you know amp love, The version included here isvery different andunfinished, Not wanting to confuse the final and unfinished versions down the road, I mean memory can be a tricky thing, and also not wanting to tarnish the luster of The Thin Man as I know it, I decided not to read this version.
But that doesn't affect my rating of the book in the least I got it for the crime stories, anyway!

If you've only ever read a few of Hammett's short stories, this is a great book for you.
And if you haven't read any Hammett yet, well, . . what are you waiting for

Highly recommended for fans of crime fiction, mysteries, or's detective stories, Fell in love with the Continental Op, I'll just never find another Raymond Chandler, I couldn't finish this before I had to get it back to the library, but the stories I read were all topnotch detective crime fiction, as hardboiled as they get.
Hammett was one of the founders of the American detective story, and although the first tale or two is weak, he quickly found his bearings.
Entertaining tales of earlyth century city crimes with arson, murder, larceny, kidnapping and con games galore, Well worth a looksee, By far the best collection of short stories by Hammett, Even If there is overlap with some of the other collections, still worth it to grab this one, There's not a Mt. Rushmore of American private eyes but Hammett's Continental Op wouldn't be one of the faces on it if there was, That's because he's a modest, faceless everyman though he's hardly anonymous or devoid of personality, I prefer the Op over Hammett's more infamous creation Sam Spade, That probably puts me in the minority, but I don't mind, Spade is not a particularly nice guy, on the other hand the Op is a regular Jackthelad, his voice like that of an old friend's to the reader.
Even though he's a Roaring Twenties lawman who breaks heads and takes names he turns a blind eye to Prohibition, as eager to go into a speakeasy as the next man.
It's worth mentioning there's a lot more Continental Op material than there is about Spade too, about six times as much, Fully two thirds of Hammett's crime fiction starred our man from the Continental Detective Agency instead of falcon statuettes, glass keys and thin men,

DASHIELL HAMMETT: CRIME STORIES AND OTHER WRITINGS collects two dozen of thestories Hammett published about the Continental Op, most of them novelettes.
And distinguished, authoritative writing it is, The novels RED HARVEST and THE DAIN CURSE initially consisted of four Op novelettes apiece, I personally have never seen any of those eight segments published home or abroad in their original standalone form and I've looked, That leaves only four other stories to collect if you want them all on your shelf, Three are easy to source, That fourth and elusive final Op caper, available nowhere but THE RETURN OF THE CONTINENTAL OP, cost me as much as I paid for this volume! 'Death and Company' is, ultimately and unfortunately, for only the most diehard of collectors, a disappointing sevenpage vignette.
Beyond a shadow of a doubt the weakest entry in the Op's otherwise superlative casebook, it's unsurprising it's uncollected with the others, With the exception of 'This King Business' allstories first appeared in Black Mask, the most feted extinct pulp magazine this side of the equally defunct Weird Tales.
THE MALTESE FALCON also debuted in the Mask's pages before Knopf brought it out in hardcover they'd already published HARVEST and DAIN,

If you're reading this you probably appreciate the exploits of the Op, one of the pioneering first person hardboiled American private dicks, but not the first.
Carroll John Daly's 'Three Gun Terry' sneaked onto Black Mask's table of contents months ahead of the Op, Terry Mack is Daly's pilot fish for his enormously popular Race Williams character, a homicidal maniac who rationalizes his shooting sprees as private detecting, The name of one of the stories in DASHIELL HAMMETT: CRIME STORIES AND OTHER WRITINGS is Bodies Piled Up,' a title as gruesome as Daly's The False Burton Combs' is clever for its misdirection.
I shan't give away its secret to the few who've not read it, Cap Shaw didn't suffer journalistic fools lightly and even though he hated Daly's stuff he published it anyway because a Race Williams yarn touted on the Mask's cover boosted sales by,issues.
Daly's stories are ridiculous enough to be farces, glutted with a toughness as counterfeit as a schoolboy's playground bluster, In his lifetime Daly enjoyed more glory in Black Mask than Hammett, but in the long run the Hammett legacy enjoys more success and respect, not that that ever does deceased authors any good.
This is not to say Daly's writing sucks, it often makes for entertaining lightweight reading, but it's all hat and no cattle, The Op's romps in the Mask are steeped in a realism still resonant and relevant, If I may borrow a phrase from Hollywood Detective Dan Turner, the Op's adventures are as serious as a rodney probing one's sacroiliac, '

Hammett's strengths as a storyteller and prose stylist as well as his background with Pinkerton's enabled his work to endure, On a side note, Lillian Hellman claimed Hammett didn't work for the agency for as long as he often alluded to, His own publisher Knopf hailed him as better than Hemingway, a conceit, of course, but one I happen to agree with, I'll take Hammett's drunken private eyes and femme fatales over Hemingway's drunken sportsmen and forlorn expatriates anytime, Not to rip on Papa, but why read something to depress yourself Hemingway's characters don't liberate and lift the spirit the way Hammett's do, To this day Hammett's influence on mystery novelists remains immense, justifying the mythic proportions of his literary reputation,

Every Op story in DASHIELL HAMMETT: CRIME STORIES AND OTHER WRITINGS is good, if not great, In the product department the consumer gets his money's worth, excellent fiction on nice paper expensively bound, Library of America puts together handsome wellconstructed editions designed to be read often and resist as much manhandling as an old medical desk reference printed in the forties.
The quality of Library of America's books cannot be overemphasized I own other collections from this same house, their books are built to last and can handle wear and tear.
And they don't have those godawful Deckle edges, A great collection, but it would be better if it had the complete set of stories Hammett wrote, A complete list of those stories is a missing piece as wellwe don't know what we don't know :, Always loves Hammett's writing. Bare knuckle writing. Fantastic dialogue. Great pace, and fun to read, Loved his advise to crime writers, Going to find a good biography if possible, The chronology at end of book left me wanting to read more THE CONTINENTAL OP is so rad, Even maybe radder than Sam Spade, because the Continental Op is NAMELESS and short and stout and "unattractive", whereas Samuel Spade is all suave and a ladykiller.
Im not a detective story aficionado, Over the course of my life, Ive read most of Hammetts novels, and one or two Chandler novels, This is a pretty narrow set,

I havent yet read all the stories in this collection, They are good. Duly entertaining and gripping. Like any mystery series, there are the sudden revelations by the Continental Op out of nowhere The Golden Horseshoe and many fortuitous escapes The House on Turk Street.


I was worried when I started the stories, I figured out the first two mysteries myself: the girl's faked kidnapping Crooked Souls and the brother and sister were actually a couple The Tenth Clew.
But the stories got a little weirder with more unusual twists as I read,

There is some unfortunate Chinese stereotyping, and plenty of odd names: OGar, Gantvoort, Quarre, Pangburn, But the stories achieve their goal: some fun adventure writing,

Terrific.
Ok I read through all the Dashiell Hammett I own,
Will dip back in in future to remind myself of his writing style,
The last story in this volume which Ill call AN EARLY TYPESCRIPT has a doityourself ending which is wild to ponder upon after getting to know Hammetts oeuvre and bio in such detail.

Ok Im not an English professor specializing in Hammett but I got a good start in studying him,
There are other stories he wrote for other magazines so these two Library Of America Volumes are not his complete oeuvre,
He allowed his writing to be sorely manipulated by magazine editors, by Knopf and thus Library Of America and then by Hollywood moguls, He could only have felt sorely victimized due to his political incorrectness, Too bad he couldnt have kicked all those people in the arse because he could really write without any of their supervision,
Currently the story CORKSCREW sticks out in my mind as especially compelling,
Have a lovely day! After reading sitelinkThe Thin Man and sitelinkThe Maltese Falcon, I decided to check this out and I ended up devouring the whole thing in every spare moment I had between reading slush and the billion or so other things I was working on at the time.
Consider me a Hammett fan, I learned a lot about

writing in theseplus pages, The short seems to suit Dashiell more than the novel and it only caught myself feeling over saturated with these stories once or twice, I think I liked the stories where he steps away from San Francisco and the Continental Op more, if only for the novelty, This includes stories like nightmare town and women in the dark, However the house on Turk street, a Continental Op story is great good example of how to play with form even in a traditional framework.
All told, a great collection and as close as you can get to all Dashiell's published shorts,
On a more general note, I'm really appreciating the completist approach to fiction writers, It seems the only way to tease out the nuance of their style and major themes, Only reading a representative story or their canonical text seems to be a bad compromise, Unfortunately I don't know how this could play out in a school, I didn't finish this collection of short stories so I won't give it a rating, since it would be unfair to rate a book without knowing how good what I didn't read was.
I readout ofstories and they weren't bad but they were just okay, I didn't want to readmore stories if they were just going to be okay, And I'll admit I usually don't finish short story collections and I made it farther in this one than with most of the others I've tried to read.
For most of the short story collections I've tried to read, I only read the first two or three stories before I abandoned them,

Anyway, I gave ratings to thestories that I did read right after I finished each of them:

Arson Plus:/
Slippery Fingers:/
Crooked Souls:/
The Tenth Clew:/
Zigzags of Treachery:/
The House in Turk Street:/
The Girl with the Silver Eyes:/

Maybe I'll come back to this book someday, though.
Now I know where all the old gangster/crime/mystery movies of the's and's got there ideas, Sure, some of the dialogue is cliched to usbut it was how the people of the underworld of crime talked back in the late teens and through the's.
Classic pulp fiction with a bit more intellect behind it, An excellent short story collection! Revisiting the Continental Op stories, They all have at least one passage that is pure gold, Here's a paragraph from the story "Women, Politics and Murder":

"Alone in the library, I cocked an eye at the ceiling and considered the information that Lina Best had given me.
But I soon gave that up no use trying to guess at things that will work themselves out in a while, I found a book, and spent the next halfhour reading about a sweet young shechump and a big strong hechump and all their troubles, ".