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.

"Hammett's pioneering hard-boiled style has been much imitated, but the original--packs a wallop."--The New Yorker

Author: Dashiell Hammett
Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
Pages: 432pp
Size: 5.25 x 8
Notes: paperback
Release Date: September 12, 2000
ISBN: 978-0375701023