<DIV>Here, for the first time in a deluxe collector’s box, is the most comprehensive edition of the hard-boiled crime fiction of Dashiell Hammett ever published. <i>Complete Novels</i>, the first of two volumes gathered here, presents the five groundbreaking books whose gritty, lean prose won admiration from such contemporaries as Stein, Hemingway, and Faulkner: <i>Red Harvest</i>, <i>The Dain Curse</i>, <i>The Maltese Falcon</i>, <i>The Glass Key,</i>, and <i>The Thin Man</i>.<br><br> In the stories he wrote for <i>Black Mask</i> and other pulp magazines in the 1920s and 1930s, Hammett used the vernacular adventure tale to register the jarring textures and revved-up cadences of modern America. <i>Crime Stories & Other Writings</i> presents 24 of these classic tales, along with revealing essays and an early, unfinished version of his novel <i>The Thin Man</i>. The texts, reprinted here for the first time, are those that appeared originally in the pulps, without the revisions introduced by later editors.<br><br> “An invaluable collection.” —<i>Kirkus Reviews</i></div>