Short, thick-bodied, mulishly stubborn, and indifferent to pain, Dashiell Hammett's Continetal Op was the prototype for generations of tough-guy detectives. In these stories the Op unravels a murder with too many clues, looks for a gi...

Sam Spade, Nick and Nora Charles, The Continental Op. In his novels and stories, Dashiell Hammett created some of the most memorable characters--detectives, dames, and assorted miscreants--in twentieth-century fiction. It is nearly im...

A murder investigation requires private detective Sam Spade--a man of few words who displays little emotion--to become involved in a dangerous search for a valuable statue, in a seventy-fifth anniversary edition of the classic hard-bo...

When the last honest citizen of Poisonville was murdered, the Continental Op stayed on to punish the guilty--even if that meant taking on an entire town. Red Harvest is more than a superb crime novel: it is a classic exploration of co...

Nick and Nora Charles are Hammett's most enchanting creations, a rich, glamorous couple who solve crimes in between wisecracks and martinis.

Dashiell Hammett was a crime writer who elevated the genre to true literature, and The Thin Man was Hammett's last-and most successful-novel. Following the enormous success of "The Thin Man" movie in 1934, Hammett was commis...

A treasure worth killing for. Sam Spade, a slightly shop-worn private eye with his own solitary code of ethics. A perfumed grifter named Joel Cairo, a fat man named Gutman, and Brigid O'Shaughnessy, a beautiful and treacherous woman...

Dashiell Hammett is best known as both pioneer and master of American hard-boiled detective fiction, but these dozen and a half stories both affirm that reputation and present him in a different light. Along with the full-length scree...