Download or read book Red Harvest written by Dashiell Hammett and published by Vintage Crime/Black Lizard. This book was released on 2010-12-29 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The steadfast and sturdy Continental Op has been summoned to the town of Personville—known as Poisonville—a dusty mining community splintered by competing factions of gangsters and petty criminals. The Op has been hired by Donald Willsson, publisher of the local newspaper, who gave little indication about the reason for the visit. No sooner does the Op arrive, than the body count begins to climb . . . starting with his client. With this last honest citizen of Poisonville murdered, the Op decides to stay on and force a reckoning—even if that means taking on an entire town. Red Harvest is more than a superb crime novel: it is a classic exploration of corruption and violence in the American grain.
Download or read book The Big Book of the Continental Op written by Dashiell Hammett and published by Vintage Crime/Black Lizard. This book was released on 2017-11-28 with total page 754 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now for the first time ever in one volume, all twenty-eight stories and two serialized novels starring the Continental Op—one of the greatest characters in storied history of detective fiction. Dashiell Hammett is the father of modern hard-boiled detective stories. His legendary works have been lauded for almost one hundred years by fans, and his novel The Maltese Falcon was adapted into a classic film starring Humphrey Bogart. One of Dashiell Hammett's most memorable characters, the Continental Op made his debut in Black Mask magazine on October 1, 1923, narrating the first of twenty-eight stories and two novels that would change forever the face of detective fiction. The Op is a tough, wry, unglamorous gumshoe who has inspired a following that is both global and enduring. He has been published in periodicals, paperback digests, and short story collections, but until now, he has never, in all his ninety-two years, had the whole of his exploits contained in one book. The book features all twenty-eight of the original standalone Continental Op stories, the original serialized versions of Red Harvest and The Dain Curse, and previously unpublished material. This anthology of Continental Op stories is the only complete, one-volume work of its kind.
Download or read book The Dain Curse written by Dashiell Hammett and published by Vintage Crime/Black Lizard. This book was released on 2011-02-23 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When eight diamonds are stolen from a prominent San Francisco family, the Continental Op is called in to investigate. But the missing jewels aren’t the only thing out of the ordinary. The man who reported the burglary ends up dead, ostensibly a suicide. His daughter, one of the suspects, Miss Gabrielle Dain Leggett, has a penchant for morphine and religious cults. She also has an unfortunate effect on the people around her: they have a habit of dying. Might Gabrielle be the victim of an arcane family curse? Or is the truth about her stranger and even more dangerous? The Dain Curse is one of the Continental Op’s most bizarre cases and a tautly crafted masterpiece of suspense.
Download or read book Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett Book Analysis written by Bright Summaries and published by BrightSummaries.com. This book was released on 2019-05-20 with total page 22 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unlock the more straightforward side of Red Harvest with this concise and insightful summary and analysis! This engaging summary presents an analysis of Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett, which follows a private detective known only as the Continental Operative, or the Op, as he travels to the town of Personville (known to its inhabitants as Poisonville) and witnesses the crime and corruption that are rife there. He soon gets caught up in the endemic violence, and as the body count rises we see the true extent of the greed and double-dealing that are tearing the town apart. Red Harvest is among Dashiell Hammett’s best-known works (he is also famously the author of The Maltese Falcon) and had a major influence on American gangster films and American crime fiction. Find out everything you need to know about Red Harvest in a fraction of the time! This in-depth and informative reading guide brings you: • A complete plot summary • Character studies • Key themes and symbols • Questions for further reflection Why choose BrightSummaries.com? Available in print and digital format, our publications are designed to accompany you on your reading journey. The clear and concise style makes for easy understanding, providing the perfect opportunity to improve your literary knowledge in no time. See the very best of literature in a whole new light with BrightSummaries.com!
Download or read book The Thin Man written by Dashiell Hammett and published by Wildside Press LLC. This book was released on 2023-02-21 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Thin Man (1934) is a detective novel by Dashiell Hammett, made famouos by the series of movies based on it starring William Powell and Myrna Loy. The story is set in New York City during the Christmas season of 1932, in the last days of Prohibition in the United States. Nick Charles, a retired private detective, and Nora, his socialite wife, become embroiled in a mystery.
Download or read book Slither written by Edward Lee and published by Crossroad Press. This book was released on 2022-05-30 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The trichinosis worm is one of nature’s most revolting parasites. Certain types of this tiny worm alter a host’s DNA by injecting a virus which mutates the reproductive system. This forces the host to bear the worm’s young. Typically these worms are never longer than a few millimeters. But guess what? Now there’s a subspecies that’s thirty feet long... When Nora and her team arrive at the island, she expects a routine zoological excursion...but it doesn’t take her long to realize they’re not alone. Are her lurid sexual dreams making her paranoid...or is she being watched? The dead bodies they find are bad enough, but then her own team members begin to disappear, and when they return, they’ve...changed. Indeed, there are other people on the island...along with something else far worse.
Download or read book Woman in the Dark written by Dashiell Hammett and published by Wildside Press LLC. This book was released on 2022-10-19 with total page 73 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On a dark night a young woman seeks refuge at an isolated house. She is hurt and frightened. The man and woman who live there take her in. But their decency is utterly unequipped to deal with the Woman in the Dark, or with the designs of the men who want her.
Download or read book The Four Great Novels written by Dashiell Hammett and published by MacMillan. This book was released on 1983 with total page 792 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: La corruption du monde des affaires et de la classe politique s'étale dans les romans et nouvelles de Hammett. Son privé de la Continental Op sera le protagoniste de la Moisson rouge et de Sang maudit. Le premier roman traite du thème de la municipalité pourrie nettoyée par une guerre entre bandes rivales déclenchée par l'Op. Le second nous plonge dans l'univers des sectes, de la manipulation des esprits et de la folie. Le Faucon maltais confirme le rôle du privé, garant d'une morale nécessaire : Sam Spade vengera le meurtre de son associé, quitte à livrer à la justice la coupable dont il est pourtant amoureux. La Clé de verre dévoile les rapports entre la politique et le gangstérisme. Un joueur professionnel, Ned Beaumont, mène l'enquête afin de disculper un ami accusé de meurtre en pleine période électorale.
Download or read book The Lost Detective written by Nathan Ward and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2015-09-15 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A 2016 Edgar Award Nominee Before he became a household name in America as perhaps our greatest hard-boiled crime writer, before his attachment to Lillian Hellman and blacklisting during the McCarthy era, and his subsequent downward spiral, Dashiell Hammett led a life of action. Born in 1894 into a poor Maryland family, Hammett left school at fourteen and held several jobs before joining the Pinkerton National Detective Agency as an operative in 1915 and, with time off in 1918 to serve at the end of World War I, he remained with the agency until 1922, participating alike in the banal and dramatic action of an operative. The tuberculosis he contracted during the war forced him to leave the Pinkertons--but it may well have prompted one of America's most acclaimed writing careers. While Hammett's life on center stage has been well-documented, the question of how he got there has not. That largely overlooked phase is the subject of Nathan Ward's enthralling The Lost Detective. Hammett's childhood, his life in San Francisco, and especially his experience as a detective deeply informed his writing and his characters, from the nameless Continental Op, hero of his stories and early novels, to Sam Spade and Nick Charles. The success of his many stories in the pulp magazine Black Mask following his departure from the Pinkertons led him to novels; he would write five between 1929 and 1934, two of them (The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man) now American classics. Though he inspired generations of writers, from Chandler to Connelly and all in between, after The Thin Man he never finished another book, a painful silence for his devoted readers; and his popular image has long been shaped by the remembrance of Hellman, who knew him after his literary reputation had been made. Based on original research across the country, The Lost Detective is the first book to illuminate Hammett's transformation from real detective to great American detective writer, throwing brilliant new light on one of America's most celebrated and remembered novelists and his world.
Download or read book Nightmare Town written by Dashiell Hammett and published by Vintage Crime/Black Lizard. This book was released on 2015-09-16 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty long-unavailable stories by Dashiell Hammett, the author of The Maltese Falcon and the incomparable master of detective fiction. In the title story, a man on a bender enters a small town and ends up unraveling the dark mystery at its heart. A woman confronts the brutal truth about her husband in the chilling story "Ruffian's Wife." "His Brother's Keeper" is a half-wit boxer's eulogy to the brother who betrayed him. "The Second-Story Angel" recounts one of the most novel cons ever devised. In seven stories, the tough and taciturn Continental Op takes on a motley collection of the deceitful, the duped, and the dead, and once again shows his uncanny ability to get at the truth. In three stories, Sam Spade confronts the darkness in the human soul while rolling his own cigarettes. And the first study for The Thin Man sends John Guild on a murder investigation in which almost every witness may be lying. In Nightmare Town, Dashiell Hammett, America's poet laureate of the dispossessed, shows us a world where people confront a multitude of evils. Whether they are trying to right wrongs or just trying to survive, all of them are rendered with Hammett's signature gifts for sharp-edged characters and blunt dialogue. Hammett said that his ambition was to elevate mystery fiction to the level of art. This collection of masterful stories clearly illustrates Hammett's success, and shows the remarkable range and variety of the fiction he produced.
Download or read book The Critical Response to Dashiell Hammett written by Christop Metress and published by Greenwood. This book was released on 1994-12-30 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As one of the most popular American writers of detective fiction, Dashiell Hammett has drawn a diverse range of criticism. The author of The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, and other works, Hammett is now receiving additional attention from scholars who seek to reassess his writing. Spanning more than sixty years of critical response, this volume includes reviews of Hammett's novels from the 1920s and 1930s, as well as recent scholarly essays.
Download or read book The Glass Key written by Dashiell Hammett and published by Good Press. This book was released on 2021-08-31 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'The Glass Key' by Dashiell Hammett is a gripping tale of loyalty, betrayal, and political intrigue. Ned Beaumont, a trusted advisor to the powerful political boss Paul Madvig, becomes entangled in a murder investigation when he discovers the body of a senator's son. As Ned delves deeper into the case, he faces danger, deceit, and a web of secrets that threatens to destroy everything he holds dear. With unexpected alliances and shocking revelations, Ned must navigate a treacherous world to uncover the truth and bring justice to those responsible.
Download or read book The Big Knockover written by Dashiell Hammett and published by Vintage Crime/Black Lizard. This book was released on 1989-07-17 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Short, thick-bodied, mulishly stubborn, and indifferent to physical pain, Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op was the prototype for generations of tough-guy detectives. He is also the hero of most of the nine stories in this volume. The Op's one enthusiasm is doing his job, and in The Big Knockover the jobs entail taking on a gang of modern-day freebooters, a vice-ridden hell's acre in the Arizona desert, and the bank job to end all bank jobs, along with such assorted grifters as Babe McCloor, Bluepoint Vance, Alphabet Shorty McCoy, and the Dis-and-Dat Kid.
Download or read book Private Investigations written by Sinda Gregory and published by . This book was released on 1985 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gregory examines each of Hammett's novels--Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, and The Thin Man--interms of their form and theme to make clear their twofold appeal. She shows that they succeed not only as popular fiction but as literature. Through literary analysis she shows that within each of his works there are intricate literary strategies to be probed and analyzed symbolically, metaphysically, and metafictionally to yield the sharp vision we expect of art. His first novel, Red Harvest, provides an excellent example of his strategies. Filled with action, vivid characters, and remarkable colloquial dialogue, Red Harvest is a study of personal systems, of ethical responsibility, of the individual's impotence against an overwhelming destructiveness of corruption, chaos, and death; yet all of this is subtly woven into dramatic action that thrilled audiences of sensationalized fiction. This dual structure provides an ongoing sense of revelation. Once a reader discerns that there is meaning beyond the action-filled maelstrom of motion and death that marks Hammett's works, a pattern of increasing complexity appears. Thus not only is The Dain Curse an exciting story of murder and a family curse, it is a metafictional survey of detective fiction styles. Gregory shows that Hammett uses the conventions of detective fiction in this novel as a means of addressing epistemological issues that bring into question the basic premises of the genre. Indeed, in his most famous work, The Maltese Falcon, Hammett creates a work that is itself a testament to the unknowability of human conduct, for in it he manipulates details, characterization, and plot until the very concept of mystery emerges as the central point of the book. For Hammett the greatest mystery was always the complexities of human consciousness.
Download or read book Tapping the Source written by Kem Nunn and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-06-19 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST Kem Nunn’s “surf noir” classic is a thrilling plunge into the seedy underbelly of a Southern California beach town—the inspiration for the film Point Break. People go to Huntington Beach in search of the endless parties, the ultimate highs, and the perfect waves. Ike Tucker has come to look for his missing sister and for the three men who may have murdered her. In that place of gilded surfers and sun-bleached blonds, Ike’s search takes him on a journey through a twisted world of crazed Vietnam vets, sadistic surfers, drug dealers, and mysterious seducers. He looks into the shadows and finds parties that drift toward pointless violence, joyless vacations, and highs you may never come down from...and a sea of old hatreds and dreams gone bad. And if he’s not careful, his is a journey from which he will never return.
Download or read book The Maltese Falcon written by Dashiell Hammett and published by Good Press. This book was released on 2021-12-24 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fragrant Miss Wonderley hires Sam Spade, a private detective, to track down her sister, who has eloped with an immoral man called Floyd Thursby. But trouble finds Spade when his partner Miles Archer gets shot while on Thursby's trail. "The Maltese Falcon" is a classic mystery novel that shaped how writers told detective stories.
Download or read book Classic American Crime Fiction of the 1920s written by Leslie S Klinger and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 1666 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Classic American Crime Writing of the 1920s—including House Without a Key, The Benson Murder Case, The Tower Treasure, The Roman Hat Mystery, The Tower Treasure, and Little Caesar—offers some of the very best of that decade’s writing. Earl Derr Biggers wrote about Charlie Chan, a Chinese-American detective, at a time when racism was rampant. S. S. Van Dine invented Philo Vance, an effete, rich amateur psychologist who flourished while America danced and the stock market rose. Edwin Stratemeyer, a man of mystery himself, singlehandedly created the juvenile mystery, with the beloved Hardy Boys series. The quintessential American detective Ellery Queen leapt onto the stage, to remain popular for fifty years. W. R. Burnett, created the indelible character of Rico, the first gangster antihero. Each of the five novels included is presented in its original published form, with extensive historical and cultural annotations and illustrations added by Edgar-winning editor Leslie S. Klinger, allowing the reader to experience the story to its fullest. Klinger's detailed foreword gives an overview of the history of American crime writing from its beginnings in the early years of America to the twentieth century.
