Nightmare Town: Stories (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

"Nightmare Town" is a collection of 20 stories written by Dashiell Hammett between 1924 and 1934, spanning nearly his entire writing career. Seven of the stories feature the indomitable Continental Op: "House Dick", "Night Shots", "Zig Zags of Treachery", "Death on Pine Street", "Tom, Dick, or Harry", "One Hour", and "Who Killed Bob Teal". "Zig Zags of Treachery", about the apparent suicide of a prominent San Francisco surgeon, is superb, perhaps the best story in this collection. The Continental Op is a character rooted in realism whom Hammett based on a fellow detective from his days at Pinkerton Detective Agency, Jimmy Wright, and on himself. Hammett's second most famous detective, Sam Spade, hero of his novel "The Maltese Falcon", is featured in 3 stories: "A Man Called Spade", "Too Many Have Lived", and "They can only Hang You Once". These are the only short stories Hammett wrote about Spade, who was in some ways the flip side of the Continental Op. At first glance, the two detectives have more in common that not, but where the Op represents the way detectives of the era really were, Sam Spade represents the way they wanted to be.

The stories in this anthology demonstrate the variety of writing techniques that Hammett applied to hard-boiled detective fiction. "His Brother's Keeper" and "A Man Named Thin" feature first-person narration, but are otherwise divergent in style. "A Man Named Thin" is narrated by a poet who is a reluctant detective. I can't say that I like the ornate prose style, but it suits the narrator. "The Second-Story Angel" shows that Hammett wasn't above making fun of himself. The last story in this collection is the first ten chapters of a story that Hammett wrote in 1930 and never finished. The editors have called it "The First Thin Man". Hammett apparently intended the story to be called "The Thin Man", but by the time that novel was published in 1934, he had reworked it entirely. The only resemblance this story bares to the later novel is that one of characters is named "Wynant". "The First Thin Man" is interesting, though. It introduces a new detective, John Guild of the Associated Detective Bureau, Inc. Guild's manner is smoother than than Hammett's earlier detectives. The story is pretty good; it's a shame it wasn't completed. Hammett may have intended to make a novel out of it, but it lends itself well to a novella, which would have taken little further work.

"Nightmare Town" offers a broad selection of Dashiell Hammett's short stories, representing a variety of narrative techniques. All but one ("A Man Named Thin") are from the hard-boiled school of detective fiction, which Hammett invented and perhaps perfected. Hammett biographer William F. Nolan has written an informative introduction to the book. So this is an excellent collection for Hammett fans and and a good introduction for newcomers as well. If you have other Hammett short story collections and are wondering what might be repeated in this one: Nothing from the two Vintage Crime collections, "The Continental Op" and "The Big Knockover", is found in "Nightmare Town". Four short stories plus the novel fragment "The First Thin Man" in "Nightmare Town" are also found in the Library of America's "Hammett: Crime Stories and other Writings".

We are jaded. At the end of the twentieth century, our society has lost sight of the horrors of crime; we listen idly to reports of yet another school shooting, yet another cross-burning. Somehow, we have come to equate crime with visible, tangible violence, and we demand an ever-growing level of gore to deem an act criminal. The true measure of a crime, however, lies in its effects upon society, not in the amount of bloodshed. We have forgotten that real crime requires subtlety, alacrity, cunning. Dashiell Hammett's Nightmare Town, however, a collection of stories from early in the author's career, reminds us that crime is not only visible violence; it is the hidden schemes of the villainous, the ones that may never come to light, which contain the frightening truth of evil.

At first, the reader might find some details predictable. But if such tropes have become conventional now, it is thanks to Hammett's masterful creation of them. Hammett, once an operative for the Pinkerton Detective Agency, understood the inner workings of the nefarious underworld. Writing during Prohibition, he delved into the machinations of the criminal mind. His tales fail to privilege gore and mindless violence; rather, he constructs a constant battle of wits between the calculating crook and the equally crafty detective.

In Nightmare Town's eponymous first story, Steve Threefall has no qualms about staying in a dreary desert outpost town, even after watching one businessman pull a gun on another. An innocent man dies in "Zigzags of Treachery," but while the detective knows the murderer and the motive, the issue is left to resolve itself when the primary mystery¡Va tale of extortion¡Vis solved. For Hammett, violence was not a problem in itself, but rather an indication of deeper evil lurking beneath. He repeatedly leads us down a winding path of calculations and conjectures, based on an intimate knowledge of the crook's modus operandi, into a world where no one really knows the good from the wicked. And while today we may have become cynical enough to believe that its ubiquity and violence have made crime less detrimental to society, Hammett's stories chill us into remembering that the most serious crimes remain invisible - and there lies the true horror of evil.

echo through the twenty short stories and novellas by Dashiell Hammett contained in Nightmare Town.

Before turning to a full-time writing career, Hammett traveled around the country holding a series of different jobs. Most notably he spent considerable time as a detective for the Pinkerton Agency. He worked in Baltimore, San Francisco, and in mining towns throughout the American west. He was exposed to murderers, grifters, con artists, graft, violent union-busting by the Pinkertons (which he abhorred and which help turn him into a lifelong radical) and corporate and governmental corruption. He made friends with other hardboiled detectives and saw first hand how life was on the dark side of town. He drank in bars that served `hard drinks for hard men. These experiences suffused Hammett's writings and the ultra-realistic atmosphere he created lifted almost single-handedly the detective genre from parlor room mysteries to the very real, very gritty streets of the country.

Although best known as the author of such detective classics as The Thin Man, The Maltese Falcon, and The Glass Key, Hammett wrote almost one hundred stories in a twelve-year period from 1922 to 1934 for pulp detective magazines such as Black Mask, True Detective Stories, and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Many of the stories in Nightmare Town have not been seen in print since their original publication. Some of the stories are rough around the edges but they are all terse and well-written. It is easy to see how Hammett's craft evolved from these short stories evolved into his full length classic.

The title story, "Nightmare Town", is a barn-burner. Steve Threefall awakens from a drunken bender in a small-town jail on the California-Nevada border. The town is violent and corrupt. From the time he awakes from his drunken stupor until the stories climax the reader is taken on a dramatic roller coaster ride. This short story reminded me of a classic boxing match between Marvin Hagler and Tommy Hearns which lasted under three short rounds but which many boxing fans claim to be the most intense nine minutes of boxing they have seen. This is early Hammett and the story is not terribly polished but it is immensely enjoyable. This sea-change brought about by Hammett was described succinctly by Raymond Candler (noted in William Nolan's excellent introduction): "He took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley. Hammett gave murder back to the people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse."

In "Ruffian's Wife" we see the hard-edged life through the eyes of the wife of a seemingly violent thug. She takes delight in having such a husband and living on the edge of violence, until the violence comes to her door step. There are stories involving Sam Spade and the Continental Op, two figures made famous in Hammett's full-length novels. The cynical world-weary view of the world is already apparent even if it is clearly a work in progress. In an unusual turn the detective in "The Assistant Murderer" is painted by Hammett as fat, squat, and ugly. No matinee idol for Hammett.

The last story is perhaps the most intriguing. Entitled "The First Thin Man", it is an early, incomplete, draft of The Thin Man. The story line is dramatically different even if some of the characters remained the same. Further, Nick and Nora Charles are nowhere to be found. It is the equivalent of a literary archeological dig and well worth the price of the book on its own.

Nightmare Town may not be the best place to start for someone who has not yet read Hammett. Because these stories represent some of Hammett's earliest work I think it best for a reader to start with The Thin Man, Maltese Falcon, and the like. Once someone reads those books I think it a safe bet they will thirst for more. Nightmare Town is an excellent way for someone to drink in a bit more Hammett than I previously thought existed. These are terrific stories.

L. Fleisig