With his diamond-sharp prose and artfully handled intrigue, Dashiell Hammett virtually invented hard-boiled crime fiction. This omnibus edition includes four linked stories - ''The House in Turk Street'', ''The Girl with the Silver Eyes'', ''The Big Knockover'' and ''$106,000 Blood Money - featuring the Continental Op, Hammett''s anonymous tough-guy detective. In The Dain Curse, the Op takes on a wealthy young woman who appears to be the victim of a deadly family curse. And in The Glass Key - Hammett''s own favourite among his works - we encounter his most cynical, morally ambiguous hero and a hard-boiled version of a love triangle. In the works collected here, we can observe the process by which Hammett both stripped crime fiction down to its most subtle and searing essentials and elevated it to high literature.