It was a necessary train ride, off the eastcoast grid to the center of the rust belt. It was a necessary six hours, even before whistle-stops and unexplained lulls were counted in. After a high-proof holiday and a few sleepless celebrations, the ride back to college was generally comfortable and quiet. This was still the era of The National Limited, The Broadway Limited and other time-honored routes. New fabric protective mats every trip on the shoulders of the seats. Smoking cars, Pullman Captains and lounge cars with a bartender; linen tablecloths in the dining car, a single-stem carnation in a weighted glass flute on every table. Somehow like ships, long-distance trains sometimes seem to lose the edge of the wind, waste their energy on the flats and find themselves grounded somewhere, becalmed, on a siding near ... nothing at all. On a good day, that happened only once or twice.It was my luck to slip into a coma-like sleep after the doldrums and false starts, lulled by the quieting of the train from the light snow falling on the rails. When I woke up the car was pitch black and gliding through unfamiliar terrain. Conductors no longer loudly announced the stops, but headed down the aisles whispering "somewheretown, next," or "mumbleville, arriving shortly," just under their breath, so as not to disturb the pervasive, rumbling quiet. I didn't recall ever hearing these towns before. I had overslept my stop. In a disquieted lurch, I grabbed my luggage, perhaps including the manual typewriter's carrier case that disguised a thick pack of Lps, and went for the exit in bloodshot fury. Having seen this sort of Holden Caulfield reenactment before, the night porter suggested that I wait until the city of Johnstown came up, where they had, he explained, taxis, hotels, lights. At this hour. There were no more trains today, and I'd have to overnight in this unforeseen urban center, if it wouldn't be too much trouble. The meeker and more polite the Pullman porters got, the more everyone knew that was the sign they were interacting with grand-scale assholes. So you knew at that first lowered glance and demure suggestion that they were still with you but, well, you were pushing your luck. These were generally clever, reasonably paid black men at a time of tricky, changeable racial conditions and unsaid segregation codes; they operated both north and south of the Mason-Dixon line, sometimes in a single trip. They knew how to control carloads of white businessmen with less than a gesture and no fuss. I would wait, in a seat nearby the door, until the glitter of Johnstown's skyline gently shimmered into view. Finding myself at the only lit building in a scruffy warehouse section of a dead city, I checked into the Penn-Hunt-Dimentia Hotel, where I was tossed the keys to a 13th floor doornumber somewhere in the thousands. Nothing added up, or made much sense, and the elevators were upstairs, on a darkened mezzanine landing. My suite's ambience wasn't aided by the bare-bulb ceiling fixture, so I switched that off and went back to the coma I had been missing since the train. It wasn't till the cold light of day that I began to have a real look around. College wasn't at any danger of going anywhere in my absence, so I began to have ideas about having some kind of adventure. Something unusual, explainably unavoidable, while doing my duty to get back, within a completely reasonable delay. As soon as I called down for "room service" it became obvious that I might want to get back on a train quicker than all that. Seems there was no such thing, not now, not ever, no sir, and it wasn't really understood very well by the morning desk staff, who seemed pleasurably confused by the inquiry. As I spoke I was looking around. The Hotel was massive. The train station far below the window ledges fit perfectly into the picture. I was in a depression era city, bleak and gray and unappealing in the hard winter light. The closed-up storefronts on the street below must have served an industrious populace once, forty or fifty years ago, but were now immobilized, seized-up and still, like the barber's poll with it's stripes derailed, skewed and dusty, the stopped station clock, and the shop windows featuring broken mannequin parts. The room was threadbare of course, but nondescript and banal in the décor of the Thirties Commerce Traveller, flat and unadorned by design. The phone I was holding in my hand was a kind of museum-piece, so obsolete as to seem installed for culture shock, curated for its shiny, black antiquity.Dashiell Hammett's Nightmare Town is at its best when it gets to these kind of banalities, the astringent quality in an Edward Hopper interior. It hardly needs saying that I was down that old elevator to the street, and out of there long before the first train of the day rumbled into mumbletown. Suspiciously heavy typewriter case in hand, I did have the whole rest of college to consider, didn't I?
Clearly, Hammett is a legend. The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key are both great, but I would rate the title piece of this collection, a short novella of 40 pages, just as highly. It's got everything: it's painstakingly and impeccably written, it's fast, it's fun, it's furious. The only reason no-one's made a movie out of it yet is surely that it gets hidden away in these kinds of collections. It's a hoot! It's so ridiculous it verges on post modern, this story - the kind of thing that is both a parody of a genre and a supreme example of that genre. Most of the other stories are high quality too, and the writing is so consistently polished that it's hard to imagine how the young Hammett could have earned a reasonable wage for his efforts, publishing in pulp magazines alongside writers who could churn out their stories on auto-pilot. All of this goes some way to proving that Hammett was an artist, who just happened to write crime because, as a professional detective himself, it was what he knew. This guy is one of a kind.
What do You think about Nightmare Town (2002)?
So... the ending of "Nightmare Town"... please send me a message on how you think it ended. I don't want to spoil it for anyone but I'm curious of your opinion.Contains the following short stories: Nightmare Town, House Dick (also known as Bodies Piled Up), Ruffian's Wife, The Man Who Killed Dan Odams, Night Shots, Zigzags of Treachery, The Assistant Murderer, His Brother's Keeper, Two Sharp Knives, Death on Pine Street, The Second Story Angel, Afraid of a Gun, Tom, Dick, or Harry (also known as Mike, Alec, or Rufus), One Hour, Who Killed Bob Teal, A Man Called Spade, Too Many Have Lived, They Can Only Hang You Once, A Man Named Thin, The First Thin Man.
—Sonic
A mix of Continental Op stories with other unrelated crime fiction. I tend to like the Op stuff best, although the title story is really inventive and worth your while if you read no other story in the collection. It's so brutal and almost 100 years old. The end of the book is an early attempt at the Thin Man with a different plot. It's a shame Hammett got lazy with all of that Hollywood money because I wish he had spent the last 30 years of his life writing more of these stories. Hammett's novels are great, but like Hemingway he is as good if not better at the short story.
—Tom Stamper
This collection of short stories by Dashiell Hammett is as diverse as it is exciting. There is no central character or plot, but this package does provide Hammett’s signature fast paced adventure coupled with his illustrations of who we are as human animals. Some are better than others, but all are generally good at least. Some seem to have been written to provide action-packed pulp that would produce more of a paycheck than substance, but overall this collection is solid and is always entertaining.
—Jeff
