Ex-ace detective Nick Charles attracts trouble like a magnet. He thinks his sleuthing days are over, but when Julia Wolf, a former acquaintance, is found dead, her body riddled with bullets, Nick can't resist making a few enquiries.

Ex-detective Nick Charles attracts trouble like a magnet. He thinks his sleuthing days are over, but when Julia Wolf, a former acquaintance, is found dead, her body riddled with bullets, Nick - along with his glamorous wife, Nora - can't resist making a few enquiries.

One of the greatest crime novels of the 20th century.

Hammett's strangest and most personal work.

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

'Dashiell Hammett is an original. He is a master of the detective novel, yes, but also one hell of a writer' BOSTON GLOBE

'An acknowledged literary landmark' Robert Graves

The Continental Op first heard Personville called Poisonville by Hickey Dewey. But since Dewey also called a shirt a shoit, he didn't think anything of it. Until he went there and his client, the only honest man in Poisonville, was murdered. Then the Op decided to stay to punish the guilty.

Includes four linked stories - "The House in Turk Street", "The Girl with the Silver Eyes", "The Big Knockover" and "$106,000 Blood Money" - featuring the Continental Op, Hammett's anonymous tough-guy detective.

As an operative for Pinkerton's Detective Agency the author knew about sleuthing from the inside, but his career was cut short by the ruin of his health in World War I. Taking detective fiction out of the drawing-room, the author 'gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it', as Raymond Chandler said.