Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett

This work is compiled of the letters, both private and professional, of Dashiell Hammett, creator of Sam Spade. In his five great crime novels, all of them written between 1927 and 1935, Dashiell Hammett gave America a cast of immortal characters - Sam Spade, the Continental Op, and Nick and Nora Charles, mold-breaking, red-blooded alternatives to Sherlock Holmes and Lord Peter Wimsey. A popular writer from the start, he aspired to a higher goal. As he was working on his classic The Maltese Falcon, he wrote a letter to his publisher about the potential of the detective-story form: Someday somebody's going to make literature out of it.