Works by
Dashiell Hammett
(Writer)
[1894 - 1961]

Fiction

• Red Harvest (1929)
  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.
  
  Movie:  Roadhouse Nights (1930), Hobart Henley, director

• The Dain Curse (1929)
  The Continental Op is a short, squat, and utterly unsentimental tank of a private detective. Miss Gabrielle Dain Leggett is young, wealthy, and a devotee of morphine and religious cults. She has an unfortunate effect on the people around her: they have a habit of dying violently. Is Gabrielle the victim of a family curse? Or is the truth about her weirder and infinitely more dangerous? The Dain Curse is one of the Continental Op's most bizarre cases, and a tautly crafted masterpiece of suspense.
  Movies:  See DVD  VHS

• The Maltese Falcon(1930)
  A treasure worth killing for. Sam Spade, a slightly shopworn private eye with his own solitary code of ethics. A perfumed grafter named Joel Cairo, a fat man name Gutman, and Brigid O’Shaughnessy, a beautiful and treacherous woman whose loyalties shift at the drop of a dime. These are the ingredients of Dashiell Hammett’s coolly glittering gem of detective fiction, a novel that has haunted three generations of readers.
  
    -- Movie: The Maltese Falcon (1931), Roy Del Ruth, director  See DVD VHS
    -- Movie: Satan Met a Lady (1936), William Dieterle, director  DVD VHS
    -- Movie: The Maltese Falcon (1941), John Huston, director with Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Peter Lorre, and Sydney Greenstreet.  See DVD VHS
    -- Movie Parody The Maltese Falcon: The Black Bird (1975), David Giler, director.  VHS

• The Glass Key (1931)
  Paul Madvig was a cheerfully corrupt ward-heeler who aspired to something better: the daughter of Senator Ralph Bancroft Henry, the heiress to a dynasty of political purebreds. Did he want her badly enough to commit murder? And if Madvig was innocent, which of his dozens of enemies was doing an awfully good job of framing him? Dashiell Hammett's tour de force of detective fiction combines an airtight plot, authentically venal characters, and writing of telegraphic crispness.
  
  A one-time detective and a master of deft understatement, Dashiell Hammett virtually invented the hard-boiled crime novel.  This classic Hammet work of detective fiction combines an airtight plot, authentically venal characters, and writing of telegraphic crispness.
  
  Movie: The Glass Key (1942), Frank Tuttle, director.  VHS

• Creeps By Night (1931)

• Woman in the Dark (1933)
  A young, frightened, foreign woman appears at the door of an isolated house. The man and woman inside take her in. Other strangers appear in pursuit of the girl. Menace is in the air.

• Secret Agent X-9 (1934)

• The Thin Man (1934)
  Nick and Nora Charles are Hammett's most enchanting creations, a rich, glamorous couple who solve homicides in between wisecracks and martinis.
  
  Movie: The Thin Man Series with Myrna Loy and William Powell as Nora Charles and Nick Charles.  See DVD VHS
    -- The Thin Man (1934), W.S. Van Dyke, director
    -- After the Thin Man (1936) W.S. Van Dyke, director.  DVD VHS
    -- Another Thin Man (1939), W.S. Dyke, director.  DVD VHS
    -- Shadow of the Thin Man (1941), W.S. Van Dyke, director.  DVD VHS
    -- The Thin Man Goes Home (1944), Richard Thorpe, director.  DVD VHS
    -- The Song of the Thin Man (1947), Edward Buzzell, director.  DVD VHS
  TV Movie:  Nick and Nora (1975), Seymour Burns, director, with Craig Stevens and Jo Ann Pflug.  See DVD

• Dashiell Hammett Omnibus (1935)

• The Complete Dashiell Hammett (1942)

• Blood Money (1943)

• The Adventures of Sam Spade (1944)

• The Battle of the Aleutians (1944)

• The Continental Op (1945)
  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 girl with eyes the color of shadows on polished silver, and tangles with a crooked-eared gunman called the Whosis Kid.

• The Adventures of Sam Spade and Other Stories (1945 )

• The Return of the Continental Op (1945)

• Hammett Homicides (1946)

• Dead Yellow Women: Detective and Murder Stories (1947)

• Nightmare Town (1948)
  Here are twenty long-unavailable stories by the master who brought us The Maltese Falcon. Laconic coppers, lowlifes, and mysterious women double- and triple-cross their colleagues with practiced nonchalance. A man on a bender awakens in a small town with a dark mystery at its heart. A woman confronts a brutal truth about her husband. Here is classic noir: hard-boiled descriptions to rival Hemingway, verbal exchanges punctuated with pistol shots and fisticuffs. Devilishly plotted, whip-smart, impassioned, Nightmare Town is a treasury of tales from America's poet laureate of the dispossessed.

• The Creeping Siamese (1950)

• A Man Called Thin (1962)

• Novels (1965)

• The Big Knockover(1966), Lillian Hellman, ed.
  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.

• The Continental Op: More Stories from the Big Knockover (1967)

• The Continental Op (1974)

• Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett: 1921 - 1960 (2001), Richard Layman, ed. with Julie M. Rivett

• City Streets (1931) with Oliver H.P. Garrett and Max Marcin, Rouben Mamoulian, director

• Mister Dynamite (1935) with Doris Malloy and Harry Clork

• After the Thin Man (1936) with Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett

• Another Thin Man (1939) with Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett

• Watch on the Rhine (1943) with Lillian Hellman
  See VHS