SOURCE: "Hammett: Profiler of Hard-Boiled Yeggs," in Los Angeles Times, November 21, 1965, "Calendar" section, p. 1.

In the following review of The Novels of Dashiell Hammett, Durham notes the importance of Hammett's short stories and their influence on his novels.

What can one say about the novels of Dashiell Hammett except that they are as superbly written as one remembers them from more than 30 years ago? Here are five novels, all familiar to my generation: Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key and The Thin Man. But for the present generation—whose only contact with Hammett may be through a television rerun of "The Maltese Falcon"—Knopf [the publisher of The Novels of Dashiell Hammett] could have provided a preface. A short one might have gone like this:

What is now known in America and England as the Black Mask school of writing began in the...