Elevating mystery fiction to the level of art, Hammett is one of the finest writers of the twentieth century: Nightmare Town is a stunning collection of twenty short stories with an introduction by Colin Dexter.In the title story, a man on a bender enters a small town and ends up unravelling the dark mystery at its heart. In three stories, Sam Spade confronts the darkness in the human soul while rolling his own cigarettes. A woman confronts the brutal truth about her husband in the chilling story, 'Ruffian's Wife'. And the first study for The Thin Man sends John Guild on a murder investigation in which almost every witness may be lying. In Nightmare Town Hammett shows us a world where people confront a multitude of evils . . . 'Hammett was spare, hard-boiled, but he did over and over what only the best writers can ever do. He wrotes scenes that seemed never to have been written before'Raymond Chandler