Dashiell Hammett is the innovative master and inventor of hard-boiled fiction, an unsentimental style of American crime writing in which the isolated hero exists in a sordid world where treachery is the only norm. Many of these stories first appeared in the pulp magazine Black Mask and exemplify Hammett's formidable literary and moral imagination operating at full strength. These stories introduce the Continental Op, the dispassionate operative from the Continental Detective Agency, a company molded on the Pinkerton Agency, for which Hammett worked prior to taking up writing. In these stories the reader will find the main themes of Hammett's later fiction -- the skewed moral environment where nothing and no one can be trusted, the steely-eyed detective whose only interest is to do his job, and the criminals whose depravity mocks the pretensions of the modern world. These stories create a universe of violence and stealth, of cold passion, desperate action, and great excitement. They prefigure not only the world of subsequent detective fiction, but the contemporary world itself.