The Hunter and Other Stories

Dashiell Hammett was one of the founders of the hard-boiled detective genre with novels such as The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man, but he also wrote several other novels and many short stories. This volume, edited with commentaries by Layman (Shadow Man: The Life of Dashiell Hammett) and Rivett, Hammett's granddaughter, includes his uncollected short fiction. Several of these are mysteries, but Hammett was a working writer who was always trying to broaden his appeal. Some of the stories (such as "Fragments of Justice" and "An Inch and a Half of Glory") would have been right at home in the pages of The New Yorker or the Saturday Evening Post. Hammett's tenure in Hollywood is represented by three treatments for the studios, two of which actually became films. Fans of Hammett's gift for swiftly paced plotting and his ear for the language of the day will be pleased to find much evidence of this in these stories.