'An acknowledged literary landmark' Robert Graves

'Not just the first of the tough school of crime-writing but the best' THE TIMES

Dashiell Hammett is the true inventor of modern detective fiction and the creator of the private eye, the isolated hero in a world where treachery is the norm. The Continental Op was his great first contribution to the genre and these seven stories, which first appeared in the magazine Black Mask, are the best examples of Hammett's early writing, in which his formidable literary and moral imagination is already operating at full strength. The Continental Op is the dispassionate fat man working for the Continental Detective Agency, modelled on the Pinkerton Agency, whose only interest is in doing his job in a world of violence, passion, desperate action and great excitement.

"His name remains one of the most important and recognisable in the crime fiction genre. Hammett set the standard for much of the work that would follow" - INDEPENDENT

"Seven brilliant short stories based on the author's experience as a detective" - THE WEEK

"He put these people down on paper as they are, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used" - Raymond Chandler

"He is master of the detective novel, yes, but also one hell of a writer" - BOSTON GLOBE

"The first fully "hard-boiled" hero in American letters" - NEW YORKER

"Hammett's prose is clean and entirely unique. His characters are as sharp and economically defined as any in American literature" - NEW YORK TIMES

"Not just the first of the tough school of crime-writing but the best" - THE TIMES

"Seven brilliant short stories based on the author's experience as a detective" - THE WEEK