‘Not just the first of the tough school of crime-writing but the best’ THE TIMES
Miss Gabriel Dain Leggett is young and wealthy, with a penchant for morphine and religious cults. She also has an unfortunate effect on the people around her. They die – violently.
Is she the victim of a family curse? The short, squat, utterly unsentimental Continental Op, the best private detective around, has his doubts and finds himself confronting something infinitely more dangerous.
This is the Continental Op’s most bizarre case and a tautly crafted masterpiece of suspense.
Miss Gabriel Dain Leggett is young and wealthy, with a penchant for morphine and religious cults. She also has an unfortunate effect on the people around her. They die – violently.
Is she the victim of a family curse? The short, squat, utterly unsentimental Continental Op, the best private detective around, has his doubts and finds himself confronting something infinitely more dangerous.
This is the Continental Op’s most bizarre case and a tautly crafted masterpiece of suspense.
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Reviews
His name remains one of the most important and recognisable in the crime fiction genre. Hammett set the standard for much of the work that would follow
One of the foremost practitioners of the hard-boiled detective story
The dean of the school of hard-boiled fiction
He is master of the detective novel, yes, but also one hell of a writer
Great crime fiction started with Hammett
Hammett's prose is clean and entirely unique. His characters are as sharp and economically defined as any in American literature
He put these people down on paper as they are, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used
Not just the first of the tough school of crime-writing but the best
