"Dashiell Hammett is an original. He is a master of the detective novel, yes, but also one hell of a writer."
–BOSTON GLOBE
"Hammett could no more vulgarize his imaginative methods than he could his spare and elegant style . . . Hammett's art . . . transform[ed] the possibilities for art among his successors."
–NEW YORK TIMES
"These [Continental Op] tales show Hammett writing with the precision of a diamond cutter."
–NEWSWEEK
"Not just the first of the tough school of crime-writing but the best."
–THE TIMES (London)
"Hammett had to fit social realism into a suffocatingly contrived form. He did it with language–densely spare exposition and multilayered dialogue. He gave us a spellbinding male discourse–The Maneuver as moral crusade, the job holder's aria and torch song."
–from the Introduction by James Ellroy