The Thin Man
Dashiell Hammett's classic The Thin Man introduced the world to Nick and Nora Charles, further made famous by the popular Thin Man films. With a new introduction by Denise Mina.
Nick Charles seems to find trouble wherever he goes. He thinks his sleuthing days are behind him when Julia Wolf, a former acquaintance, turns up dead. Nick—thanks to some persuasion from his enchanting wife, Nora—finds himself falling back into old habits and making a few polite inquiries. The prime suspect, Julia’s lover and boss Clyde Miller Wynant, has vanished without a trace. Everyone is after him, but Nick is not so sure Wynant is the culprit. And when another dubious figure bursts into their bedroom, waving a loaded handgun, it…
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…