Miss Gabriel Dain Leggett is young and wealthy, with a penchant for morphine and religious cults. She also has an unfortunate effect on the people around her. They die - violently. Is she the victim of a family curse? The short, squat, utterly unsentimental Continental Op, the best private detective around, has his doubts and finds himself confronting something infinitely more dangerous. This is the Continental Op's most bizarre case.
He thinks his sleuthing days are over, but when Julia Wolf, a former acquaintance, is found dead, her body riddled with bullets, Nick can't resist making a few enquiries. Clyde Miller Wynant, Julia's lover and boss, has disappeared. Everyone is after him, from the cops, and his lawyer, to his cool cookie, blond ex-wife. But Nick is not convinced Wynant is the murderer and when he finds a junked-up hoodlum with a careless attitude to guns in his bedroom, it's only the beginning of his troubles.
Of Hammett's sixth book, published in 1931, The New York Times wrote "the developing relationships among the characters are as exciting as the unfolding story".
THE MALTESE FALCON (1930) set the standard by which the private eye genre is judged. 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 bird, a treasure worth killing for, before the Fat Man finds him?
Dramatisation starring Tom Wilkinson, Jane Lapotaire and Nickolas Grace. 2 cassettes, running time 1 hr 55 mins. When Sam Spade is investigating the murder of his partner, he finds himself surrounded by a host of strange characters all after one thing - a statue of a falcon reputed to contain priceless jewels.
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. Red Harvest is more than a superb crime novel: it is a classic exploration of corruption and violence in the American grain.
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.
Novela cuya lectura recomendó vivamente André Malraux a André Gide, La llave de cristal (1931) se centra en la investigación de un homicidio en el ambiente preelectoral de una ciudad norteamericana dominada por dos bandas de gángsters rivales. El protagonista, Ned Beaumont, guardaespaldas del gángster Paul Madvig, se ve forzado por las circunstancias a descubrir al culpable del crimen, a pesar de las repercusiones que la investigación tiene en la lucha electoral. Junto a la fuerza bruta, los instintos criminales y la crítica de la vida política norteamericana, laten en todo el relato los comportamientos generosos y desinteresados y los sentimientos nobles. Bajo la crudeza y el sarcasmo exteriores, el sutil arte narrativo de Dhasiell Hammett(1894-1961) consigue plasmar la compleja ambigüedad de los personajes.
