In The Maltese falcon, Sam Spade is a partner in a private-eye firm who finds himself hounded by police when his partner is killed while tailing a man. The woman who asked his partner to follow the man turns out to be someone who is not what she says she is, and is really involved in something to do with the 'Maltese Falcon', a gold-encrusted life-sized statue of a falcon, the only one of its kind. In Satan met a lady, Sam Spade is now PI Ted Shane,...

Dashiell Hammett has retired from his career as a Pinkerton detective to write fiction. An old friend calls, and Hammett becomes involved in a search for a missing girl in Chinatown.

"Dashiell Hammett changed the face of crime fiction. In five novels published over five years as well as a string of stories, he transformed the mystery genre into literature and left us with the figure of the hard-boiled detective, from the Continental Op to Sam Spade--immortalized on film by Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon--and the more glamorous Thin Man, also made iconic with the aid of Hollywood. A brilliant writer, Hammett was a complex...

In this noir crime classic about one of the most notorious trials in American history--the 1921 manslaughter case against silent-screen comedy star Roscoe Fatty Arbuckle--Dashiell Hammett investigates what really happened at Arbuckle's San Francisco party and discovers a truth that will change American legal history--and his own life forever.

Each volume provides discussions of the literary and historical background of novels from various cultures and time periods. Includes concise synopses of plot, characters and themes, a brief author biography, discussion of the story's cultural and historical significance, and excerpted criticism.