Dashiell Hammett

New edition of the Penguin Essential set among the speakeasies of 1930s Manhattan - hardboiled crime at its wisecracking best. 'When I opened my eyes and sat up in bed Nora was shaking me and a man with a gun in his hand was standing in the bedroom doorway.' Ex-detective Nick Charles attracts trouble like a magnet. He thinks his...

Dashiell Hammett's influential detective novel, ranked one of Time Magazine's best mystery and thriller books of all time, now freshly repackaged for the Union Square & Co. Signature Editions line. Detective Sam Spade is a private eye with his own solitary code of ethics. When his partner is killed during a stakeout, he is drawn into the hunt for a...

One of the greatest detective stories of all time from the pen of the genre's most accomplished writer. In The Maltese Falcon, private detective Sam Spade is hired by Miss Wonderley to find her missing sister. But not all is as it seems. Soon, his partner has been shot, his employer has turned treacherous, and he is engaged in a...

A priceless object. A handful of people willing to lie, betray, and kill for it. And at the centre, a man who knows exactly what everyone is doing—and how far he is willing to go himself. The Maltese Falcon strips the detective story to its core: not the solving of a crime, but the negotiation of a world where nothing...

Sam Spade is hired by the fragrant Miss Wonderley to track down her sister, who has eloped with a louse called Floyd Thursby. But Miss Wonderley is in fact the beautiful and treacherous Brigid O'Shaughnessy, and when Spade's partner Miles Archer is shot while on Thursby's trail, Spade finds himself both hunter and hunted: can he track down the jewel-encrusted...

Ned Beaumont is a tall, thin, moustache-wearing, TB-ridden, drinking, gambling, hanger-on to the political boss of a corrupt Eastern city. Nevertheless, like every Hammett hero (and like Hammett himself), he has an unbreakable, if idiosyncratic moral code. Ned's boss wants to better himself with a thoroughbred senator's daughter; but does he want it badly enough to commit murder? If he's...

The Continental Op first heard Personville called Poisonville by Hickey Dewey. But since Dewey also called a shirt a shoit, he didn't think anything of it. Until he went there and his client, the only honest man in Poisonville, was murdered. Then the Op decided to stay to punish the guilty. And that meant taking on the entire town... Red...