| Product Summary | | Format: Paperback | | ISBN: 9780679722632 | | Publisher: Vintage Books | | Publish Date: 8/1/1992 | | Buy.com Sku: 30117868 | | Item#: RPHRNV | | Dimensions (in Inches) 8H x 5.25L x 0.75T |
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| | | | "I was leaning against the bar in a speakeasy on Fifty-second Street, waiting for Nora to finish her Christmas shopping, when a girl got up from the table where she had been sitting with three other people and came over to me..." (from the first line) Nick and Nora Charles are Hammett's most enchanting creations, a rich, glamorous couple who solve homicides in between wisecracks and martinis. At once knowing and unabashedly romantic, The Thin Man is a murder mystery that doubles as a sophisticated comedy of manners.
| Author Bio| Dashiell Hammett | | Born in 1894 to a tobacco-farming Maryland family, Samuel Dashiell Hammett left school at the age of 14 and held many jobs, including messenger, newsboy, clerk and yardman. In 1915, he accepted a job as a detective operative with the Pinkerton Detective Agency, located in Baltimore. Hammett stayed with the agency for seven years, during which time he found himself entangled in many dangerous cases, one in which he was offered five thousand dollars to kill a union agitator. Such experiences inspired what would later become a major theme in Hammett's life and work: man's corruptibility. After leaving the agency in 1918, he served as an Army sergeant in World War I, contracted tuberculosis, and married an Army nurse with whom he had two daughters. Hammett's writing career began in 1922 when he sold a story called "The Road Home" to the pulp magazine Black Mask. This magazine and its editor Joseph T. Shaw helped establish Hammett as the nation's premier writer of detective fiction. During the course of his relatively brief 12-year writing career, Hammett penned eight novels--which include the classics RED HARVEST, THE MALTESE FALCON, and THE GLASS KEY--and more than one hundred stories and is credited for launching a new style of American detective fiction. Bitter, tough, and unsentimental, his most famous characters, Sam Spade, the Continental Op, and Nick Charles, hurled the traditional English gentleman detective off his pedestal. For 31 years, Hammett and the playwright Lillian Hellman maintained a volatile yet devoted relationship; she was caring for him when he died of lung cancer in 1961, at the age of sixty-six. |
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