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Crime Stories
Dashiell Hammett
(custom book cover)
Jerry eBooks
Title Page
About Dashiell Hammett
Pseudonyms
Short Fiction Bibliography
Epigraph
THE PARTHIAN SHOT
IMMORTALITY
THE BARBER AND HIS WIFE
THE GREAT LOVERS
THE ROAD HOME
THE MASTER MIND
THE SARDONIC STAR OF TOM DOODY
THE JOKE ON ELOISE MOREY
HOLIDAY
THE CRUSADER
THE GREEN ELEPHANT
ARSON PLUS
CROOKED SOULS
THE DIMPLE
LAUGHING MASKS
THE SECOND STORY ANGEL
THE HOUSE DICK
ITCHY
THE TENTH CLEW
THE MAN WHO KILLED DAN ODAMS
ESTHER ENTERTAINS
NIGHT SHOTS
THE NEW RACKET
AFRAID OF A GUN
ZIG-ZAGS OF TREACHERY
ONE HOUR
THE HOUSE IN TURK STREET
THE GIRL WITH THE SILVER EYES
DEATH ON PINE STREET
THE GOLDEN HORSESHOE
WHO KILLED BOB TEAL?
NIGHTMARE TOWN
TOM, DICK OR HARRY
ANOTHER PERFECT CRIME
BER-BULU
THE WHOSIS KID
RUFFIAN’S WIFE
THE ASSISTANT MURDERER
CREEPING SIAMESE
THE ADVERTISING MAN WRITES A LOVE LETTER
CURSE IN THE OLD MANNER
THE MAIN DEATH
FLY PAPER
THE DIAMOND WAGER
THE FAREWELL MURDER
ON THE WAY
A MAN CALLED SPADE
THEY CAN ONLY HANG YOU ONCE
WOMAN IN THE DARK
NIGHT SHADE
THE FIRST THIN MAN
TWO SHARP KNIVES
HIS BROTHER’S KEEPER
THIS LITTLE PIG
AFTER THE THIN MAN
ANOTHER THIN MAN
“SEQUEL TO THE THIN MAN”
THE THIN MAN AND THE FLACK
A MAN NAMED THIN
SEVEN PAGES
FAITH
THE CURE
AN INCH AND A HALF OF GLORY
A KNIFE WILL CUT FOR ANYBODY
A THRONE FOR THE WORM
ACTION AND THE QUIZ KID
DEVIL’S PLAYGROUND
FRAGMENTS OF JUSTICE
MAGIC
MONK AND JOHNNY FOX
NELSON REDLINE
ON THE MAKE
THE BREECH-BORN
THE HUNTER
THE KISS-OFF
THE LOVELY STRANGERS
THE SIGN OF THE POTENT PILLS
TOO MANY HAVE LIVED
WEEK-END
Born in St. Mary's County, Maryland in 1894, Dashiell Hammett published hard-boiled short stories and novelettes before writing his first novel, Red Harvest (1929), which Time magazine called one of the top 100 novels written from 1923 to 2005. The Maltese Falcon introduced the character Sam Spade, Hammett's fictional detective, and both the book and its film became classics of the genre. Hammett also wrote The Glass Key (1931) and The Thin Man (1934), and his life's work has led many readers to call him the world's finest detective-fiction writer.
Dashiell Hammett was born in St. Mary's County, Maryland, on May 27, 1894, and went on to drop out of school around age 13. Growing up in Baltimore and Philadelphia, he worked a string of odd jobs to help support his family before joining the renowned Pinkerton Detective Agency in 1915, when he was 20. Hammett continued his detective work when he moved to San Francisco, California, before enlisting in the U.S. Army during World War I.
When Hammett returned from his tour of duty, the tuberculosis he had contracted in the Army had caused his health to be affected to the point that returning to his detective work was impossible. Hammett's ill health would remain with him for the rest of his life, but two good subplots would come out of it: He married a nurse he met through his tuberculosis treatment and later had two daughters with her, changing the course of his life and, in turn, the entire face of crime fiction.
Dashiell Hammett was forced to quit the Pinkertons, and what he did next is the stuff of literary legend, so true to life that it seems fabricated. He turned his experience with the Pinkerton Agency into short detective stories, with his first being published in 1922 by the society magazine The Smart Set. His take on the detective story was new, though, and its gritty realism forced his writing to migrate to the pulp/crime publications of the time, including Black Mask, which published his story "Arson Plus" in 1923 (under the pseudonym Peter Collinson).
The stories (more than 80 in total over his life) featured detectives such as Sam Spade and the Continental Op, two characters that would go down as classics of the Hammett-created "hard-boiled" genre. His heroes are no-nonsense, hard-drinking men who move through life unencumbered by anything but their personal sense of morality and code of honor. Sam Spade was Hammett's central character after 1929, becoming the symbol of the American private eye, with special thanks to Humphrey Bogart and his portrayal of Spade in the 1941 filmed version of The Maltese Falcon (1941).
The Maltese Falcon was Hammett's second novel (and was hugely popular, going into seven printings its first year), and he only wrote four others: Red Harvest (1929), The Dain Curse (1929), The Glass Key (1931) and The Thin Man (1934; featuring the married, boozy sleuths Nick and Nora Charles).
By around 1930, Hammett's marriage had deteriorated, and he thusly moved to Hollywood to look for work writing for the movies, which never quite worked out. While there, he met Lillian Hellman, a married, 24-year-old aspiring playwright. The two became inseparable, and, though they never married, they remained close for the rest of his life, despite his habits of heavy drinking and womanizing.
After he wrote The Thin Man, Hammett never wrote another novel and dedicated himself to left-wing political causes, including civil rights. When Pearl Harbor was bombed during World War II, Hammett once again enlisted in the Army, after which he moved to New York, where his fortunes would take a turn for the worse.
Trouble with the law involving Hammett's communist associates led him to serve a six-month jail sentence, after which the IRS came after him for $100,000 in back taxes and garnered his future earnings.
In 1953, Hammett found himself testifying before Joseph McCarthy's Senate hearings that sought to root out Communists in the American entertainment industry, bringing added, unwanted media attention to the writer. He soon moved to a cottage in Katonah, New York, where he lived an isolated life.
After suffering a heart attack in 1955, Hammett died of lung cancer in New York City on January 10, 1961, at the age of 67.
Despite only having published five novels, Hammett remains one of the most influential writers of his time. He created an entire subgenre of fiction as well as some of the most compelling leading men in literature, and his "hard-boiled" world has had a lasting effect on television, film and a wide array of writers.
PSEUDONYMS
In addition to his real name, Dashiell Hammett also wrote under these pseudonyms:
Peter Collinson
Samuel Dashiell
Daghull Hammett
Mary Jane Hammett
SHORT FICTION BIBLIOGRAPHY
“The Parthian Shot” (Oct 1922, The Smart Set)
“Immortality” (Nov 1922, 10 Stor
y Book)
“The Barber and His Wife” (Dec 1922, Brief Stories)
“The Road Home” (Dec 1922, Black Mask)
“The Master Mind” (Jan 1923, The Smart Set)
“The Sardonic Star of Tom Doody” (Feb 1923, Brief Stories)
“The Joke on Eloise Morey” (Jun 1923, Brief Stories, No. 4)
“The Vicious Circle” (Jun 15, 1923, Black Mask)
“Holiday” (Jul 1923, The New Pearsons)
“The Crusader” (Aug 1923, The Smart Set)
“The Green Elephant” (Oct 1923, The Smart Set)
“Arson Plus” (Oct 1, 1923, Black Mask)
“Slippery Fingers” (Oct 15, 1923, Black Mask)
“Crooked Souls” (Oct 15, 1923, Black Mask)
“The Dimple” (Oct 15,1923, Saucy Stories)
“Laughing Masks” (Nov 1923, Action Stories)
“It” (Nov 1, 1923, Black Mask)
“The Second-Story Angel” (Nov 15, 1923)
“The House Dick” (Dec 1, 1923, Black Mask)
“Itchy” (Jan 1924, Brief Stories)
“The Tenth Clew” (Jan 1, 1924, Black Mask)
“The Man Who Killed Dan Odams” (Jan 15, Black Mask)
“Esther Entertains” (Feb 1924, Brief Stories)
“Night Shots” (Feb 1, 1924, Black Mask)
“The New Racket” (Feb 15, 1924, Black Mask)
“Afraid of a Gun” (Mar 1, 1924, Black Mask)
“Zigzags of Treachery” (Mar 1, 1924, Black Mask)
“One Hour” (Apr 1, 1924, Black Mask)
“The House on Turk Street” (Apr 15, 1924, Black Mask)
“The Girl With the Silver Eyes” (Jun 1924, Black Mask)
“Death on Pine Street” (Sep 1924, Black Mask)
“The Golden Horseshoe” (Nov 1924, Black Mask)
“Who Killed Bob Teal?” (Nov 1924, True Detective Stories)
“Nightmare Town” (Dec 27, 1924, Argosy All-Star Weekly)
“Tom, Dick or Harry” (Jan 1925, Black Mask)
“Another Perfect Crime” (Feb 1925, Experience)
“Ber-Bulu” (Mar 1925, Sunset Magazine)
“The Whosis Kid” (Mar 1925, Black Mask)
“The Scorched Face” (May 1925, Black Mask)
“Corkscrew” (Sep 1925, Black Mask)
“Ruffian’s Wife” (Oct 1925, Sunset Magazine)
“Dead Yellow Women” (Nov 1925, Black Mask)
“The Gutting of Couffignal” (Dec 1925, Black Mask)
“The Nails in Mr. Cayterer” (Jan 1926, Black Mask)
“The Assistant Murderer” (Feb 1926, Black Mask)
“Creeping Siamese” (Mar 1926, Black Mask)
“This King Business” (1927)
“The Big Knockover” (Feb 1927, Black Mask)
“The Advertising Man Writes a Love Letter” (Feb 26, 1927, Judge)
“$106,000 Blood Money” (May 1927, Black Mask)
"Curse in the Old Manner" (Sep 1927, The Bookman)
“The Main Death” (Jun 1927, Black Mask)
“The Cleansing of Poisonville” (Nov 1927, Black Mask)
“Crime Wanted—Male or Female” (Dec 1927, Black Mask)
“Dynamite” (Jan 1928, Black Mask)
“This King Business” (Jan 1928, Mystery Stories)
“The 19th Murder” (Feb 1928, Black Mask)
“Black Lives” (Nov 1928, Black Mask)
“The Hollow Temple” (Dec 1928, Black Mask)
“Black Honeymoon” (Jan 1929, Black Mask)
“Black Riddle” (Feb 1929, Black Mask)
“Fly Paper” (Aug 1929, Black Mask)
“The Maltese Falcon, Parts 1-5” (Sep 1929-Jan 1930, Black Mask)
“The Diamond Wager” (Oct 19, 1929, Detective Fiction Weekly)
“The Farewell Murder” (Feb 1930, Black Mask)
“The Glass Key” (Mar 1930, Black Mask)
“The Cyclone Shot” (Apr 1930, Black Mask)
“Dagger Point” (May 1930, Black Mask)
“The Shattered Key” (Jun 1930, Black Mask)
“Death and Company” (Nov 1930, Black Mask)
“On the Way” (Mar 1932, Harper’s Bazaar)
“A Man Called Spade” (Jul 1932, The American Magazine)
“Too Many Have Lived” (Oct 1932, The American Magazine)
“They Can Only Hang You Once” (Nov 1932, Collier’s)
“Woman in the Dark, Parts One-Three” (Apr 8-15, 1933, Liberty)
“Night Shade” (Oct 1, 1933, Mystery League Magazine)
“Albert Pastor at Home” (Autumn 1933, Esquire)
“The Thin Man” (Dec 1933, Redbook)
“Two Sharp Knives” (Jan 13, 1934, Collier’s)
“His Brother’s Keeper” (Feb 17, 1934, Collier’s)
“This Little Pig” (Mar 24, 1934, Collier’s)
“After The Thin Man” (Sep 17, 1935)
“Another Thin Man” (May 13, 1938)
“Sequel to The Thin Man” (December 7, 1938)
“The Thin Man and the Flack” (Dec 7, 1941, Click)
“A Man Named Thin” (Mar 1961, EQMM)
“Seven Pages” (2005)
“Faith” (2007)
“So I Shot Him” (Winter/Spring 2011, The Strand Magazine)
“The Cure” (2011)
“An Inch and a Half of Glory” (Jun 10-17, 2013, The New Yorker)
ORIGINALLY UNPUBLISHED
[All published by 2013]
“A Knife will Cut for Anybody”
“A Throne for the Worm”
“Action and the Quiz Kid”
“Devil’s Playground”
“Fragments of Justice”
“Magic”
“Monk and Johnny Fox”
“Nelson Redline”
“On the Make”
“The Breech-Born”
“The Hunter”
“The Kiss-off”
“The Lovely Strangers”
“The Sign of the Potent Pills”
“Week-End”
UNKNOWN
“The Man Who Loved Ugly Women” (Experience, ?)
“A Tale of Two Women” (Saturday Home Magazine, ?)
“First Aide to Murder” (Saturday Home Magazine, ?)
I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.
—Dashiell Hammett
THE PARTHIAN SHOT
When the boy was six months old Paulette Key acknowledged that her hopes and efforts had been futile, that the baby was indubitably and irredeemably a replica of its father. She could have endured the physical resemblance, but the duplication of Harold Key’s stupid obstinacy—unmistakable in the fixity of the child’s inarticulate demands for its food, its toys—was too much for Paulette. She knew she could not go on living with two such natures! A year and a half of Harold’s domination had not subdued her entirely. She took the little boy to church, had him christened Don, sent him home by his nurse, and boarded a train for the West.
IMMORTALITY
I know little of science or art or finance or adventure. I have never written anything except brief and infrequent letters to my sister in Sacramento. My name, were it not painted on the windows of my shop, would be unknown to even the Polish family that lives and has many children across the street. Yet I shall live in the memories of men when those names are on every one’s lips now are forgotten, and when the events of today are dim. I do not know whether I shall be remembered as a great wit, a dreamer of strange dreams, a great thinker, or a philosopher; but I do know that I, Oscar Blichy, the grocer, shall be an immortal. I have saved nearly seventeen thousand dollars from the profits of my shop during the last twenty years. I shall add to this amount as much as I can until the day of my death, and then it is to go to the writer of the best biography of me!
THE BARBER AND HIS WIFE
Each morning at seven-thirty the alarm clock on the table beside their bed awakened the Stemlers to perform their daily comedy; a comedy that varied fro
m week to week in degree only. This morning was about the mean.
Louis Stemler, disregarding the still ringing clock, leaped out of bed and went to the open window, where he stood inhaling and exhaling with a great show of enjoyment—throwing out his chest and stretching his arms voluptuously. He enjoyed this most in the winter, and would prolong his stay before the open window until his body was icy under his pajamas. In the coast city where the Stemlers lived the morning breezes were chill enough, whatever the season, to make his display of ruggedness sufficiently irritating to Pearl.
Meanwhile, Pearl had turned off the alarm and closed her eyes again in semblance of sleep. Louis was reasonably confident that his wife was still awake; but he could not be certain. So when he ran into the bath-room to turn on the water in the tub, he was none too quiet.
He then re-entered the bed-room to go through an elaborate and complicated set of exercises, after which he returned to the bath-room, got into the tub and splashed merrily—long enough to assure any listener that to him a cold bath was a thing of pleasure. Rubbing himself with a coarse towel, he began whistling; and always it was a tune reminiscent of the war. Just now “Keep the Home Fires Burning” was his choice. This was his favorite, rivaled only by “Till We Meet Again,” though occasionally he rendered “Katy,” “What Are You Going to Do to Help the Boys?” or “How’re You Going to Keep Them Down on the Farm?” He whistled low and flatly, keeping time with the brisk movements of the towel. At this point Pearl would usually give way to her irritation to the extent of turning over in bed, and the rustling of the sheets would come pleasantly from the bed-room to her husband’s ears. This morning as she turned she sighed faintly, and Louis, his eager ears catching the sound, felt a glow of satisfaction.
Dry and ruddy, he came back to the bed-room and began dressing, whistling under his breath and paying as little apparent attention to Pearl as she to him, though each was on the alert for any chance opening through which the other might be vexed. Long practice in this sort of warfare had schooled them to such a degree, however, that an opening seldom presented itself. Pearl was at a decided disadvantage in these morning encounters, inasmuch as she was on the defensive, and her only weapon was a pretense of sleep in the face of her husband’s posturing. Louis, even aside from his wife’s vexation, enjoyed every bit of his part in the silent wrangle; the possibility that perhaps after all she was really asleep and not witnessing his display of manliness was the only damper on his enjoyment.
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