Hammett’s pioneering hard-boiled style has been much imitated, but the originalpacks a wallop. *The New Yorker*
Here are twenty long-unavailable stories by the master who brought us **The Maltese Falcon**. Laconic coppers, lowlifes, and mysterious women double- and triple-cross their colleagues with practiced nonchalance. A man on a bender awakens in a small town with a dark mystery at its heart. A woman confronts a brutal truth about her husband. Here is classic noir: hard-boiled descriptions to rival Hemingway, verbal exchanges punctuated with pistol shots and fisticuffs. Devilishly plotted, whip-smart, impassioned, **Nightmare Town** is a treasury of tales from America’s poet laureate of the dispossessed.