Dashiell Hammett is universally regarded as one of the finest American writers of "hard boiled" detective fiction and his short stories and novels have been hailed as some of the best mystery stories ever written. Hammett would doubtless have gone down in literary history simply for his creation of the detective Sam Spade ("The Maltese Falcon") as well as Nick and Nora Charles ("The Thin Man" series), but he is also the creator of another of the most popular detectives in fiction: the nameless private investigator known as the Continental Op, who appears in dozens of his stories. Collected here is the complete collection of Dashiell Hammett's short fiction (though, in fairness, it seems that a old, forgotten story is unearthed every few years and added to the canon). Volume I contains Hammett's earliest stories, written from 1922 through 1924 (mostly for Black Mask magazine), including the first few Continental Op stories. Thrilling, brutal, spine-tingling and just plain brilliant, no mystery collection would be complete without the complete works of the master of the genre: Dashiell Hammett.
