Customer Reviews

Great collection - By: Jason Parkes, 10 Oct 2002
Hammett is the king of crime writers, that means above such greats as Raymond Chandler, James M Cain , James Ellroy, Ross McDonald, Horace McCoy & Jim Thompson. This collection has now been publishedin paperback & along with 'The Four Great Novels' (Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Glass Key & The Maltese Falcon) represents the major works of Dashiel Hammett...

The introductions by Colin Dexter & William F Nolan are very good & give you a taste for reading a decent biog of Hammett & wondering what Wim Wenders' Hammett could have been like without studio interference. All the stories are fantastic here, emanating from pulp sourcesin magazines such as Black Mask, City Magazine & Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. They represent the best crime short stories & advance the crime mode as perfected by prior writers such as Wilkie Collins & Edgar Allen Poe. There are characters that will be familiar to readers of other Hammett works- the Continental Op, Sam Spade & a precursor of the great final work, The Thin Man.

Hammett's influence stretches across the rest of the 20th century, as say the influence of Red Harvest proves (RH influenced Yojimbo, which influenced A Fistful of Dollars, which influenced Miller's Crossing, which influenced Last Man Standing...) Hammett locates the venal corruption at the heart of American life & this is as great as any portrait of this nature (see The Big Money or Last Exit to Brooklyn). This is a key book to those interestedin either the crime genre or American fiction & comes highly reccomended.