DETECTIVE STORIES AND OTHER WRITINGS IBD

Sinopse

Dashiell Hammett is the innovative master and inventor of hard-boiled fiction, an unsentimental style of American crime writing in which the isolated hero exists in a sordid world where treachery is the only norm. Many of these stories first appeared in the pulp magazine Black Mask and exemplify Hammett&rsquo,s formidable literary and moral imagination operating at full strength. These stories introduce the Continental Op, the dispassionate operative from the Continental Detective Agency, a company molded on the Pinkerton Agency, for which Hammett worked prior to taking up writing. In these stories the reader will find the main themes of Hammett&rsquo,s later fiction &mdash, the skewed moral environment where nothing and no one can be trusted, the steely-eyed detective whose only interest is to do his job, and the criminals whose depravity mocks the pretensions of the modern world. These stories create a universe of violence and stealth, of cold passion, desperate action, and great excitement. They prefigure not only the world of subsequent detective fiction, but the contemporary world itself.