Nightmare Town

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From the English-speaking world there are a good many instances of great writers carrying only a few slimmish volumes of their works as they file past St Peter; and just behind Thomas Gray and A.E. Housman we may well spot Samuel Dashiell Hammett in the queue at the ‘no-more-than-six-items’ counter in the celestial supermarket.

Hammett’s six? The five full-length novels written in the brief period 1929-34, including the universally acknowledged masterpieces The Maltese

Falcon and The Glass Key; plus a collection (fairly considerable) of short stories, covering a much longer period. Nightmare Town presents the reader with twenty of these stories, most of which have been unavailable in print for some time.

In view then of his comparatively limited output, we may reasonably ask if the high praise bestowed on Hammett by Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald – his two most distinguished heirs in the ‘hard-boiled’ lineage – was perhaps a little over the top. And to put readers’ minds at rest (there are enough questions to be sorted out in the stories) the answer is ‘decidedly not’. Each of these three writers was practising his craft in a society that was corrupt – with even some of the private eyes potentially corruptible themselves – and in a world that seemed randomly ordained. The advice to fellow writers who were in some doubt about the continuation of a plot was usually ‘Have a man come through the door with a gun!’ and the ubiquity of guns then was a match for that of mobile phones today. Furthermore, as Chandler maintained, murder was committed not just to provide a detective-story writer with a plot.

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