Nightmare Town: Twenty long unavailable short stori

Biographie de l'auteur Samuel Dashiel Hammett was born on a farm in Maryland in 1896. He left school when he was 13 years old and held several jobs before working for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. He was an operative for the Pinkertons from 1915 to February 1922, with time off to serve in World War I. When his first marriage failed, Hammett turned to alcohol before working in advertising and, eventually, writing. His work at the detective agency provided him the inspiration for his writings. Hammett wrote most of his detective fiction during the 1920s when he was living in San Francisco. In 1931 Hammett embarked on a 30-year affair with playwright Lillian Hellman. He wrote his final novel The Thin Man in 1934. Despite it being his most successful work to date, he gave up writing and devoted much of the rest of his life to left-wing activism. He was black-listed as a Communist in the 1950s and he gradually withdrew from public life, the effects of tobacco and alcohol having a detrimental effect on his health. He died of lung cancer in 1961. Présentation de l'éditeur Elevating mystery fiction to the level of art, Hammett is one of the finest writers of the twentieth century: Nightmare Town is a stunning collection of twenty short stories with an introduction by Colin Dexter.In the title story, a man on a bender enters a small town and ends up unravelling the dark mystery at its heart. In three stories, Sam Spade confronts the darkness in the human soul while rolling his own cigarettes. A woman confronts the brutal truth about her husband in the chilling story, 'Ruffian's Wife'. And the first study for The Thin Man sends John Guild on a murder investigation in which almost every witness may be lying. In Nightmare Town Hammett shows us a world where people confront a multitude of evils . . . 'Hammett was spare, hard-boiled, but he did over and over what only the best writers can ever do. He wrotes scenes that seemed never to have been written before'Raymond Chandler