Dashiell Hammett is universally regarded as one of the finest American writers of "hard boiled" detective fiction and his short stories and novels have been hailed as some of the best mystery stories ever written. Hammett would doubtless have gone down in literary history simply for his creation of the detective Sam Spade ("The Maltese Falcon") as well as Nick and Nora Charles ("The Thin Man" series), but he is also the creator of another of the most popular detectives in fiction: the nameless private investigator known as the Continental Op, who appears in dozens of his stories. Collected here is the complete collection of Dashiell Hammett's short fiction (though, in fairness, it seems that a old, forgotten story is unearthed every few years and added to the canon). Volume II contains stories penned by Hammett from 1924 through 1925 (mostly for Black Mask magazine), a number of the most popular Continental Op stories. Thrilling, brutal, spine-tingling and just plain brilliant, no mystery collection would be complete without the collected works of the master of the genre: Dashiell Hammett.