New Dashiell Hammett Short Stories Found at University of Texas

Famed crime author, Dashiell Hammett, who wrote such classics as The Thin Man, The Maltese Falcon, and Red Harvest, and who died in 1961, will soon have new publishing credits to his name. A collection of 15 short stories by Hammett, which may have been authored any time between the 1920s and the 1940s has been unearthed by Andrew Gulli, publisher of The Strand magazine. The Strand will publish one of these Dashiell Hammett stories titled So I Shot Him later this month and a new Dashiell Hammett book may be in the works.

Dashiell Hammett is considered a genius of popular fiction and, along with Raymond Chandler, pioneered a new style of American fiction wherein the lines between good and evil, dark and light, are blurred. Hammett characters often have a foot on both sides of the divide. Hammett characters were a major influence on the development of the film noir genre, his Maltese Falcon, which starred Humphrey Bogart, providing the story line for one for one of the classics of the era.

Hammett largely stopped writing in the 1930s to devote himself to the labor movement, and he was blacklisted in the 1950s by the committee for un-American activities. Dashiell Hammett died as a result of alcoholism in a New York City hospital in 1961. Dashiell Hammett is still considered one of the great innovators of the detective novel and crime fiction and the new stories will be greeted with enthusiasm by scholars and fans alike.