"Nightmare Town" by Dashiell Hammett

You may have noticed this book was in my sidebar for like three months.  That's because I was savoring it.  For three months?  Indeed.  It's a collection of a novella and a lot of short stories by Dashiell Hammett, and I was using it as inspiration while I hammered my way through the first draft of my own 1940s mystery book, Murder Most Foul, which I talked about here on my other blog earlier this week.

I had a great time reading this collection.  My favorites in it were:

+ Nightmare Town, the titular novella about a corrupt desert town and two people who try to escape it.

+ "Ruffian's Wife," a short story about a woman who loses confidence in her husband when he turns out to not be the big, bad tough guy she believes him to be.

+ "The Man Who Killed Dan Odoms," a short story about a man seeking sanctuary on a remote farm as he hides from people who want to avenge the man he killed.

+ "The Second-Story Angel," a short story about a writer who gets a surprise visitor in the middle of the night, then learns something even more surprising about her a few weeks later.

+ "Tom, Dick, or Harry," a short story about a robbery that has a really cool twist on the identity of the robber.

+ "A Man Called Spade," a short story featuring Sam Spade, the detective from The Maltese Falcon, and has him solve a murder that seems to be open-and-shut, but isn't.

Particularly Good Bits:

...where knowledge of trickery is evenly distributed, honesty not infrequently prevails (Nightmare Town, p. 15).

I don't like eloquence: if it isn't effective enough to pierce your hide, it's tiresome; and if it is effective enough, then it muddles your thoughts ("Zigzags of Treachery," p. 99).

Ninety-nine per cent of detective work is a patient collecting of details -- and your details must be got as nearly first-hand as possible, regardless of who else has worked the territory before you ("One Hour," p. 253).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-13 for lots of different kinds of violence, some light and occasional bad language, and the occasional oblique reference to sexual activity in a non-descriptive and non-titillating way.

This is my 17th book read from my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2023.