The Essential Noir Bundle Read online

  The Collected Dashiell Hammett

  DASHIELL HAMMETT

  All rights reserved.

  This title is in the public domain in Canada and is not subject to any license or copyright.

  Cover Design and Illustration: Andrew Roberts

  ISBN: 978-1-55199-800-8

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Red Harvest

  Dedication

  1: A Woman in Green and a Man in Gray

  2: The Czar of Poisonville

  3: Dinah Brand

  4: Hurricane Street

  5: Old Elihu Talks Sense

  6: Whisper’s Joint

  7: That’s Why I Sewed You Up

  8: A Tip on Kid Cooper

  9: A Black Knife

  10: Crime Wanted—Male or Female

  11: The Swell Spoon

  12: A New Deal

  13: –$200.10–

  14: Max

  15: Cedar Hill Inn

  16: Exit Jerry

  17: Reno

  18: Painter Street

  19: The Peace Conference

  20: Laudanum

  21: The Seventeenth Murder

  22: The Ice Pick

  23: Mr. Charles Proctor Dawn

  24: Wanted

  25: Whiskeytown

  26: Blackmail

  27: Warehouses

  The Dain Curse

  Dedication

  Part 1: The Dains

  1: Eight Diamonds

  2: Long-Nose

  3: Something Black

  4: The Vague Harpers

  5: Gabrielle

  6: The Man from Devil’s Island

  7: The Curse

  8: But and If

  Part 2: The Temple

  9: Tad’s Blind Man

  10: Dead Flowers

  11: God

  12: The Unholy Grail

  Part 3: Quesada

  13: The Cliff Road

  14: The Crumpled Chrysler

  15: I’ve Killed Him

  16: The Night Hunt

  17: Below Dull Point

  18: The Pineapple

  19: The Degenerate

  20: The House in The Cove

  21: Aaronia Haldorn

  22: Confessional

  23: The Circus

  The Maltese Falcon

  Dedication

  1: Spade & Archer

  2: Death in The Fog

  3: Three Women

  4: The Black Bird

  5: The Levantine

  6: The Undersized Shadow

  7: G in The Air

  8: Horse Feathers

  9: Brigid

  10: The Belvedere Divan

  11: The Fat Man

  12: Merry-Go-Round

  13: The Emperor’s Gift

  14: La Paloma

  15: Every Crackpot

  16: The Third Murder

  17: Saturday Night

  18: The Fall-Guy

  19: The Russian’s Hand

  20: If They Hang You

  The Glass Key

  Dedication

  1: The Body in China Street

  2: The Hat Trick

  3: The Cyclone Shot

  4: The Dog House

  5: The Hospital

  6: The Observer

  7: The Henchmen

  8: The Kiss-Off

  9: The Heels

  10: The Shattered Key

  The Thin Man

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Woman in the Dark

  1: The Flight

  2: The Police Close In

  3: Conclusion

  The Tenth Clew

  The Golden Horseshoe

  The House in Turk Street

  The Girl with the Silver Eyes

  The Whosis Kid

  The Main Death

  The Farewell Murder

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  The Gutting of Couffignal

  Fly Paper

  The Scorched Face

  This King Business

  The Gatewood Caper

  Dead Yellow Women

  Corkscrew

  Tulip

  The Big Knockover

  $106,000 Blood Money

  Nightmare Town

  House Dick

  Ruffian’s Wife

  The Man who Killed Dan Odams

  Night Shots

  Zigzags of Treachery

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 12

  The Assistant Murderer

  His Brother’s Keeper

  Two Sharp Knives

  Death on Pine Street

  The Second-Story Angel

  Afraid of a Gun

  Tom, Dick, or Harry

  One Hour

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Who Killed Bob Teal?

  A Man Called Spade

  Too Many Have Lived

  They Can Only Hang You Once

  A Man Named Thin

  The First Thin Man

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  RED HARVEST

  TO JOSEPH THOMPSON SHAW

  CHAPTER 1: A WOMAN IN GREEN AND A MAN IN GRAY

  I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit. I didn’t think anything of what he had done to the city’s name. Later I heard men who could manage their r’s give it the same pronunciation. I still didn’t see anything in it but the meaningless sort of humor that used to make richardsnary the thieves’ word for dictionary. A few years later I went to Personville and learned better.

  Using one of the phones in the station, I called the Herald, asked for Donald Willsson, and told him I had arrived.

  “Will you come out to my house at ten this evening?” He had a pleasantly crisp voice. “It’s 2101 Mountain Boulevard. Take a Broadway car, get off at Laurel Avenue, and walk two blocks west.”

  I promised to do that. Then I rode up to the Great Western Hotel, dumped my bags, and went out to look at the city.

  The city wasn’t p
retty. Most of its builders had gone in for gaudiness. Maybe they had been successful at first. Since then the smelters whose brick stacks stuck up tall against a gloomy mountain to the south had yellow-smoked everything into uniform dinginess. The result was an ugly city of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining. Spread over this was a grimy sky that looked as if it had come out of the smelters’ stacks.

  The first policeman I saw needed a shave. The second had a couple of buttons off his shabby uniform. The third stood in the center of the city’s main intersection—Broadway and Union Street—directing traffic, with a cigar in one corner of his mouth. After that I stopped checking them up.

  At nine-thirty I caught a Broadway car and followed the directions Donald Willsson had given me. They brought me to a house set in a hedged grassplot on a corner.

  The maid who opened the door told me Mr. Willsson was not home. While I was explaining that I had an appointment with him a slender blonde woman of something less than thirty in green crěpe came to the door. When she smiled her blue eyes didn’t lose their stoniness. I repeated my explanation to her.

  “My husband isn’t in now.” A barely noticeable accent slurred her s’s. “But if he’s expecting you he’ll probably be home shortly.”

  She took me upstairs to a room on the Laurel Avenue side of the house, a brown and red room with a lot of books in it. We sat in leather chairs, half facing each other, half facing a burning coal grate, and she set about learning my business with her husband.

  “Do you live in Personville?” she asked first.

  “No. San Francisco.”

  “But this isn’t your first visit?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really? How do you like our city?”

  “I haven’t seen enough of it to know.” That was a lie. I had. “I got in only this afternoon.”

  Her shiny eyes stopped prying while she said:

  “You’ll find it a dreary place.” She returned to her digging with: “I suppose all mining towns are like this. Are you engaged in mining?”

  “Not just now.”

  She looked at the clock on the mantel and said:

  “It’s inconsiderate of Donald to bring you out here and then keep you waiting, at this time of night, long after business hours.”

  I said that was all right.

  “Though perhaps it isn’t a business matter,” she suggested.

  I didn’t say anything.

  She laughed—a short laugh with something sharp in it.

  “I’m really not ordinarily so much of a busybody as you probably think,” she said gaily. “But you’re so excessively secretive that I can’t help being curious. You aren’t a bootlegger, are you? Donald changes them so often.”

  I let her get whatever she could out of a grin.

  A telephone bell rang downstairs. Mrs. Willsson stretched her green-slippered feet out toward the burning coal and pretended she hadn’t heard the bell. I didn’t know why she thought that necessary.

  She began: “I’m afraid I’ll ha—” and stopped to look at the maid in the doorway.

  The maid said Mrs. Willsson was wanted at the phone. She excused herself and followed the maid out. She didn’t go downstairs, but spoke over an extension within earshot.

  I heard: “Mrs. Willsson speaking.… Yes.… I beg your pardon? … Who? … Can’t you speak a little louder? … What? … Yes.… Yes.… Who is this? … Hello! Hello!”

  The telephone hook rattled. Her steps sounded down the hallway—rapid steps.

  I set fire to a cigarette and stared at it until I heard her going down the steps. Then I went to a window, lifted an edge of the blind, and looked out at Laurel Avenue, and at the square white garage that stood in the rear of the house on that side.

  Presently a slender woman in dark coat and hat came into sight hurrying from house to garage. It was Mrs. Willsson. She drove away in a Buick coupé. I went back to my chair and waited.

  Three-quarters of an hour went by. At five minutes after eleven, automobile brakes screeched outside. Two minutes later Mrs. Willsson came into the room. She had taken off hat and coat. Her face was white, her eyes almost black.

  “I’m awfully sorry,” she said, her tight-lipped mouth moving jerkily, “but you’ve had all this waiting for nothing. My husband won’t be home tonight.”

  I said I would get in touch with him at the Herald in the morning.

  I went away wondering why the green toe of her left slipper was dark and damp with something that could have been blood.

  I walked over to Broadway and caught a street car. Three blocks north of my hotel I got off to see what the crowd was doing around a side entrance of the City Hall.

  Thirty or forty men and a sprinkling of women stood on the sidewalk looking at a door marked Police Department. There were men from mines and smelters still in their working clothes, gaudy boys from pool rooms and dance halls, sleek men with slick pale faces, men with the dull look of respectable husbands, a few just as respectable and dull women, and some ladies of the night.

  On the edge of this congregation I stopped beside a square-set man in rumpled gray clothes. His face was grayish too, even the thick lips, though he wasn’t much older than thirty. His face was broad, thick-featured and intelligent. For color he depended on a red windsor tie that blossomed over his gray flannel shirt.

  “What’s the rumpus?” I asked him.

  He looked at me carefully before he replied, as if he wanted to be sure that the information was going into safe hands. His eyes were gray as his clothes, but not so soft.

  “Don Willsson’s gone to sit on the right hand of God, if God don’t mind looking at bullet holes.”

  “Who shot him?” I asked.

  The gray man scratched the back of his neck and said:

  “Somebody with a gun.”

  I wanted information, not wit. I would have tried my luck with some other member of the crowd if the red tie hadn’t interested me. I said:

  “I’m a stranger in town. Hang the Punch and Judy on me. That’s what strangers are for.”

  “Donald Willsson, Esquire, publisher of the Morning and Evening Heralds, was found in Hurricane Street a little while ago, shot very dead by parties unknown,” he recited in a rapid singsong. “Does that keep your feelings from being hurt?”

  “Thanks.” I put out a finger and touched a loose end of his tie. “Mean anything? Or just wearing it?”

  “I’m Bill Quint.”

  “The hell you are!” I exclaimed, trying to place the name. “By God, I’m glad to meet you!”

  I dug out my card case and ran through the collection of credentials I had picked up here and there by one means or another. The red card was the one I wanted. It identified me as Henry F. Neill, A. B. seaman, member in good standing of the Industrial Workers of the World. There wasn’t a word of truth in it.

  I passed this card to Bill Quint. He read it carefully, front and back, returned it to my hand, and looked me over from hat to shoes, not trustfully.

  “He’s not going to die any more,” he said. “Which way you going?”

  “Any.”

  We walked down the street together, turned a corner, aimlessly as far as I knew.

  “What brought you in here, if you’re a sailor?” he asked casually.

  “Where’d you get that idea?”

  “There’s the card.”

  “I got another that proves I’m a timber beast,” I said. “If you want me to be a miner I’ll get one for that tomorrow.”

  “You won’t. I run ’em here.”

  “Suppose you got a wire from Chi?” I asked.

  “Hell with Chi! I run ’em here.” He nodded at a restaurant door and asked: “Drink?”