Woman In the Dark - Hardcover

Hammett, Dashiell

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0747200866 ISBN 13: 9780747200864

Publisher: Headline, 1988

Synopsis

"Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, and not just to provide a corpse. He did over and over again what only the best writers can do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before"Raymond Chandler

Luise Fischer looked like trouble from the moment she limped through the door. But she was the kind of woman men go to a lot of trouble for. Kane Robson wanted her back, but she didn't want to go. Brazil helped her escape, but didn't realize what a ruthless enemy he was making in the process.

A new Dashiell Hammett novella is a major literary event. Published for the first time in the British Commonwealth, Woman in the Dark shows him at the top of his inimitable form.

Introduction by Robert B. Parker.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

ghtened, foreign woman appears at the door of an isolated house. The man and woman inside take her in. Other strangers appear in pursuit of the girl. Menace is in the air.

Originally published in 1933, Hammett's Woman in the Dark shows the author at the peak of his narrative powers. With an introduction by Robert B. Parker, the author of the celebrated Spenser novels.

About the Author

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Headline
• Publication date: 1988
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0747200866
• ISBN 13: 9780747200864
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 81