Dashiell Hammett's Detective Stories Now Published

 
March 30, 2009—Coyote Canyon Press is pleased to announce the publication of Detective Stories by Dashiell Hammett, a pioneer of the art of the hardboiled detecive story.

“Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley. . . . He wrote at first (and almost to the end) for people with a sharp, aggressive attitude to life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street. . . . He gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse. He put these people down on paper as they are, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes. He had style, but his audience didn’t know it, because it was in a language not supposed to be capable of such refinements. . . . He was spare, frugal, hardboiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before. . . . He demonstrated that the detective story can be important writing.”—Raymond Chandler

“Hammett’s prose [is] clean and entirely unique. His characters [are] as sharply and economically defined as any in American fiction.””—The New York Times

More books from Coyote Canyon Press:

The Dead By James Joyce “A triumph of pure sound, of language as music. No one has ever equaled it; it makes those who have come after him pause for a minute, in awed gratitude, in discouragement.” —Mary Gordon

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button By F. Scott Fitzgerald “Fitzgerald was probably attracted to this form by its tension between romanticism and realism, for the challenge of fantasy is to make impossible events convincing.” —Matthew J. Bruccoli

The Elements of Style By William Strunk, Jr. “Coyote Canyon Press is about to release the original ‘Elements of Style’ as penned and privately published by Cornell University English Prof. William Strunk, Jr. in1918.” —Chicago Tribune