Nightmare Town
by Dashiell Hammett
- Used
- Paperback
- first
- Condition
- See description
- Seller
-
Camden, Maine, United States
Payment Methods Accepted
About This Item
The American Mercury 1948. softcover Good 1st Ed thus 12mo, book is cocked with aspine crease, page edges browning, a few pages loose in middle, mystery stories, 128 pages.
Synopsis
Dashiell Samuel Hammett was born in St. Mary’s County. He grew up in Philadelphia and Baltimore. Hammett left school at the age of fourteen and held several kinds of jobs thereafter—messenger boy, newsboy, clerk, operator, and stevedore, finally becoming an operative for Pinkerton’s Detective Agency. Sleuthing suited young Hammett, but World War I intervened, interrupting his work and injuring his health. When Sergeant Hammett was discharged from the last of several hospitals, he resumed detective work. He soon turned to writing, and in the late 1920s Hammett became the unquestioned master of detective-story fiction in America. In The Maltese Falcon (1930) he first introduced his famous private eye, Sam Spade. The Thin Man (1932) offered another immortal sleuth, Nick Charles. Red Harvest (1929), The Dain Curse (1929), and The Glass Key (1931) are among his most successful novels. During World War II, Hammett again served as sergeant in the Army, this time for more than two years, most of which he spent in the Aleutians. Hammett’s later life was marked in part by ill health, alcoholism, a period of imprisonment related to his alleged membership in the Communist Party, and by his long-time companion, the author Lillian Hellman, with whom he had a very volatile relationship. His attempt at autobiographical fiction survives in the story “Tulip,” which is contained in the posthumous collection The Big Knockover (1966, edited by Lillian Hellman). Another volume of his stories, The Continental Op (1974, edited by Stephen Marcus), introduced the final Hammett character: the “Op,” a nameless detective (or “operative”) who displays little of his personality, making him a classic tough guy in the hard-boiled mold—a bit like Hammett himself.
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Details
- Bookseller
- Stone Soup Books (US)
- Bookseller's Inventory #
- 5108
- Title
- Nightmare Town
- Author
- Dashiell Hammett
- Book Condition
- Used
- Quantity Available
- 1
- Binding
- Paperback
- Publisher
- The American Mercury
- Date Published
- 1948
Terms of Sale
Stone Soup Books
Books are returnable within 14 days. Full refund upon return.
About the Seller
Stone Soup Books
About Stone Soup Books
Glossary
Some terminology that may be used in this description includes:
- 12mo
- A duodecimo is a book approximately 7 by 4.5 inches in size, or similar in size to a contemporary mass market paperback. Also...
- Edges
- The collective of the top, fore and bottom edges of the text block of the book, being that part of the edges of the pages of a...
- Cocked
- Refers to a state where the spine of a book is lightly "twisted" in such a way that the front and rear boards of a book do not...