Books : Complete Novels: Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, and The Thin Man (Library of America #110)
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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.52
EAN num: 9781883011673
ISBN number: 1883011671
Label: Library of America
Manufacturer: Library of America
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 967
Printing Date: August 30, 1999
Publishing house: Library of America
Sale Popularity Level: 26312
Studio: Library of America
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Brief Book Summary:
Complete in one volume, the five books that created the modern American crime novel
In a few years of extraordinary creative energy, Dashiell Hammett invented the modern American crime novel. In the words of Raymond Chandler, 'Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse.... He put these people down on paper as they were, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes.'
The five novels that Hammett published between 1929 and 1934, collected here in one volume, have become part of modern American culture, creating archetypal characters and establishing the ground rules and characteristic tone for a whole tradition of hardboiled writing. Drawing on his own experiences as a Pinkerton detective, Hammett gave a harshly realistic edge to novels that were at the same time infused with a spirit of romantic adventure. His lean and deliberately simplified prose won admiration from such contemporaries as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner.
Each novel is distinct in mood and structure. Red Harvest (1929) epitomizes the violence and momentum of his Black Mask stories about the anonymous detective the Continental Op, in a raucous and nightmarish evocation of political corruption and gang warfare in a western mining town. In The Dain Curse (1929) the Op returns in a more melodramatic tale involving jewel theft, drugs, and a religious cult. With The Maltese Falcon (1930) and its protagonist Sam Spade, Hammett achieved his most enduring popular success, a tightly constructed quest story shot through with a sense of disillusionment and the arbitrariness of personal destiny. The Glass Key (1931) is a further exploration of city politics at their most scurrilous. His last novel was The Thin Man (1934), a ruefully comic tale paying homage to the traditional mystery form and featuring Nick and Nora Charles, the sophisticated inebriates who would enjoy a long afterlife in the movies.
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Rated by buyers 
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Truly a classic collection, this exemplifies an excellent selection of stories from one of the true masters of the hardboiled detective fiction genre. Wonderful reads that I am reading for a fourth and fifth time since I very first discovered them in the late 1960s.
Rated by buyers -
This was the perfect vol for the survey of hard-boiled detective fiction I've been doing. A nicely formatted hardcover (nothing's sexier than a hardcover book) with good info on Hammett's life and times.
Rated by buyers -
Complete Novels: Red Harvest / The Dain Curse / The Maltese Falcon / The Glass Key / The Thin Man (Library of America) What a great anthology of the works of the father of the modern detective novel. All of Hammett's novels in one book. It does not get any better than this.
Rated by buyers -
An intriguing plot with just the right blend of wry humor, sex and secrets.
Rated by buyers -
I do like these stories, though they are so rough! It is very helpful to be able to have them all together in this one good volume, I think. But it is dangerous to read them late at night, because you either get too excited to sleep, or you dream of bad men with their car headlamps switched off in the dark!
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