“Yes, in a way. There seems to be enough of it, but it’s not very neat.”
“It’s neat enough to send him to the chair,” I said, “and that’s all that counts. It takes care of all the angles and I can’t think of any other theory that would. Naturally it wouldn’t hurt to find the pistol, and the typewriter he used for the Wynant letters, and they must be somewhere around where he can get at them when he needs them. (We found them in the Brooklyn apartment he had rented as George Foley.)
“Have it your own way,” she said, “but I always thought detectives waited until they had every little detail fixed in—”
“And then wonder why the suspect’s had time to get to the farthest country that has no extradition treaty.”
She laughed. “All right, all right. Still want to leave for San Francisco tomorrow?”
“Not unless you’re in a hurry. Let’s stick around awhile. This excitement has put us behind in our drinking.”
“It’s all right by me. What do you think will happen to Mimi and Dorothy and Gilbert now?”
“Nothing new. They’ll go on being Mimi and Dorothy and Gilbert just as you and I will go on being us and the Quinns will go on being the Quinns. Murder doesn’t round out anybody’s life except the murdered’s and sometimes the murderer’s.”
“That may be,” Nora said, “but it’s all pretty unsatisfactory.”
Dashiell Hammett was born in St. Marys County, Maryland, in 1894. He grew up in Philadelphia and Baltimore. He left school at the age of fourteen and held several kinds of jobs thereafter—messenger boy, newsboy, clerk, timekeeper, yardman, machine operator, and stevedore. He finally became an operative for Pinkerton’s Detective Agency.
World War I, in which he served as a sergeant, interrupted his sleuthing and injured his health. When he was finally discharged from the last of several hospitals, he resumed detective work. Subsequently, he turned to writing, and in the late 1920s he became the unquestioned master of detective-story fiction in America. During World War II, Mr. Hammett again served as a sergeant in the Army, this time for more than two years, most of which he spent in the Aleutians. He died in 1961.
Books by Dashiell Hammett
The Big Knockover
The Continental OP
The Dain Curse
The Glass Key
The Maltese Falcon
Nightmare Town
Red Harvest
The Thin Man
Woman in the Dark
ALSO BY DASHIELL HAMMETT
THE DAIN CURSE
The Continental Op is a short, squat, and utterly unsentimental tank of a private detective. Miss Gabrielle Dain Leggett is young, wealthy, and a devotee of morphine and religious cults. She has an unfortunate effect on the people around her: they have a habit of dying violently. Is Gabrielle the victim of a family curse? Or is the truth about her weirder and infinitely more dangerous? The Dain Curse is one of the Continental Op’s most bizarre cases, and a tautly crafted masterpiece of suspense.
Fiction/Crime/978-0-679-72260-1
THE GLASS KEY
Paul Madvig was a cheerfully corrupt ward-heeler who aspired to something better: the daughter of Senator Ralph Bancroft Henry, the heiress to a dynasty of political purebreds. Did he want her badly enough to commit murder? And if Madvig was innocent, which of his dozens of enemies was doing an awfully good job of framing him? Dashiell Hammett’s tour de force of detective fiction combines an airtight plot, authentically venal characters, and writing of telegraphic crispness.
Fiction/Crime/978-0-679-72262-5
THE MALTESE FALCON
A treasure worth killing for. Sam Spade, a slightly shopworn private eye with his own solitary code of ethics. A perfumed grafter named Joel Cairo, a fat man named Gutman, and Brigid O’Shaughnessy, a beautiful and treacherous woman whose loyalties shift at the drop of a dime. These are the ingredients of Dashiell Hammett’s coolly glittering gem of detective fiction, a novel that has haunted three generations of readers.
Fiction/Crime/978-0-679-72264-9
NIGHTMARE TOWN
Laconic coppers, lowlifes, and mysterious women double-and triple-cross their colleagues with practiced nonchalance. A man on a bender awakens in a small town with a dark mystery at its heart. A woman confronts a brutal truth about her husband. Here is classic noir: hard-boiled descriptions to rival Hemingway, verbal exchanges punctuated with pistol shots and fisticuffs. Devilishly plotted, whip-smart, impassioned, Nightmare Town is a treasury of tales from America’s poet laureate of the dispossessed.
Fiction/Crime/978-0-375-70102-3
RED HARVEST
When the last honest citizen of Poisonville was murdered, the Continental Op stayed on to punish the guilty—even if that meant taking on an entire town. Red Harvest is more than a superb crime noveclass="underline" it is a classic exploration of corruption and violence in the American grain.
Fiction/Crime/978-0-679-72261-8
THE THIN MAN
Nick and Nora Charles are Hammett’s most enchanting creations, a rich, glamorous couple who solve homicides in between wisecracks and martinis. At once knowing and unabashedly romantic, The Thin Man is a murder mystery that doubles as a sophisticated comedy of manners.
Fiction/Crime/978-0-679-72263-2
WOMAN IN THE DARK
On a dark night a young woman seeks refuge at an isolated house. She is hurt and frightened. The man and woman who live there take her in. But their decency is utterly unequipped to deal with the Woman in the Dark, or with the designs of the men who want her. First published in installments in Liberty magazine and now rediscovered after many years, Woman in the Dark shows Dashiell Hammett at the peak of his narrative powers.
Fiction/Crime/978-0-679-72265-6
ALSO AVAILABLE:
The Big Knockover, 978-0-679-72259-5
The Continental OP, 978-0-679-72258-5
VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com
First Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Edition, August 1992
Copyright 1933, 1934 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Copyright renewed 1961, 1962 by Dashiell Hammett
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc.,
New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1934.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Hammett, Dashiell, 1894–1961.
The thin man / Dashiell Hammett.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-76750-9
I. Title.
PS3515.A4347T47 1989
813’.52–dcl9
91-50920
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