The Four Great Novels

I discovered this omnibus edition of Hammett when I was 13 and it changed everything. Previously I’d been into a much softer kind of crime fiction: the Hardy Boys, Poirot, Holmes, Scoobydoo… and now here I was with a bumper collection of hard-boiled noir: The Dain Curse, The Glass Key, Red Harvest, and The Maltese Falcon. The grit and darkness of Hammett’s work couldn’t have been further from what I was used to, and I loved it. His novels are taut, often brutal, where life is cheap and the bourbon cheaper, in a world made dark by unscrupulous men.