Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Vol. 131, No. 1. Whole No. 797, January 2008

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Among the many good collections of the work of Dashiell Hammett is the recently published The Drain Curse, The Glass Key, and Selected Stories (Everyman’s Library, September 2007) with an introduction by James Ellroy. Also well worth a look is the 2005 collection Lost Stories (Vince Emery Productions), introduced by Joe Gores, which includes some stories never before reprinted in book form.

The Montgomery Hotel’s regular detective had taken his last week’s rake-off from the hotel bootlegger in merchandise in-stead of cash, had drunk it down, had fallen asleep in the lobby, and had been fired. I happened to be the only idle operative in the Continental Detective Agency’s San Francisco branch at the time, and thus it came about that I had three days of hotel-coppering while a man was being found to take the job permanently.

The Montgomery is a quiet hotel of the better sort, and so I had a very restful time of it — until the third and last day. Then things changed.

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