The Big Knockover
Selected Stories and Short Novels
Short, thick-bodied, mulishly stubborn, and indifferent to physical pain, Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op was the prototype for generations of tough-guy detectives. He is also the hero of most of the nine stories in this volume. The Op's one enthusiasm is doing his job, and in The Big Knockover the jobs entail taking on a gang of modern-day freebooters, a vice-ridden hell's acre in the Arizona desert, and the bank job to end all bank jobs, along with such assorted grifters as Babe McCloor, Bluepoint Vance, Alphabet Shorty McCoy, and the Dis-and-Dat Kid.
$27.99
July 17, 1989
Samuel Dashiell Hammett was born in 1894 in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, and his family moved to Baltimore when he was five. He dropped out of high school after his freshman year and held a series of odd jobs—messenger boy, newsboy, clerk, and stevedore—before becoming an operative for Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency in 1915, at the age of twenty-one. In 1918, during World War I, he joined the U.S. Army Medical Corps, where he contracted the Spanish influenza and tuberculosis. Discharged with a medical disability and a sergeant’s rank, he resumed detective work as he was able. When his health worsened, he turned to writing to support himself and his family, publishing his first fiction in 1922.
By the late 1920s…
The Maltese Falcon (Special Edition)
Dashiell Hammett
The Big Book of the Continental Op
Dashiell Hammett Edited by Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett
The Collected Short Stories
Dashiell Hammett
The Essential Noir Bundle
Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler
The Collected Dashiell Hammett
Dashiell Hammett
Vintage Hammett
Dashiell Hammett
The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, Red Harvest
Dashiell Hammett; Introduction by Robert Polito
Nightmare Town
Dashiell Hammett
Red Harvest
Dashiell Hammett
The Big Knockover
Dashiell Hammett
The Continental Op
Dashiell Hammett
The Dain Curse
Dashiell Hammett
The Glass Key
Dashiell Hammett