Samuel Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) is recognized as the first master of hard-boiled detective fiction. His lean writing style, cynical characters and complex plots brought a new energy to pulp magazines then went on to define the genre in movies, radio and television where the private eye series became an entertainment staple. Hammett wrote more than 80 short stories and five novels: "Red Harvest" (1929), "The Dain Curse" (1929), "The Maltese Falcon" (1930), "The Glass Key" (1931) and "The Thin Man" (1934). He created tough guys Sam Spade and the Continental Op as well as debonaire sleuths Nick and Nora Charles. He wrote a comic strip ("Secret Agent X-9"), an original radio series ("The Fat Man") and worked on numerous scripts, often simply to polish dialogue. Hammett's crisp, colorful language brought gangster slang into everyday speech.

With his diamond-sharp prose and artfully handled intrigue, Dashiell Hammett virtually invented hard-boiled crime fiction. This omnibus edition includes four linked stories -- The House in Turk Street, The Girl with the Silver Eyes, The Big Knockove and $106,000 Blood Money -- featuring the Continental Op, Hammett's anonymous tough-guy detective. In The Dain Curse, the Op takes on a wealthy young woman who appears to be the victim of a deadly family curse. And in The Glass Key -- Hammett’s own favourite among his works -- we encounter his most cynical, morally ambiguous hero and a hard-boiled version of a love triangle. In the works collected here, we can observe the process by which Hammett both stripped crime fiction down to its most subtle and searing essentials and elevated it to high literature.