Wednesday 30 March 2016

The Dashiell Hammett Omnibus (Cassell, 1950)

No. 5 in a series of posts on books I've bought but haven't got round to blogging about properly – indeed may never get round to blogging about properly – so this will have to do. NB: linked in Friday's Forgotten Books, 1/4/16.


What is it?
A hardback first edition/first printing of The Dashiell Hammett Omnibus, published by Cassell in 1950. Running to nearly a thousand pages, it contains six of Hammett's Continental Op novels and stories – Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, "Dead Yellow Women", "The Golden Horseshoe", "House Dick" (a.k.a. "Bodies Piled Up") and "Who Killed Bob Teal?" – along with the Sam Spade novel The Maltese Falcon and the novels The Glass Key and The Thin Man.

Who designed the dust jacket?
Couldn't tell you – it's uncredited – but although it's a little wordy – and a little scruffy, condition-wise – it's still stylish enough, I feel, to be added to Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s under "Designer Unknown".

Where and when did I buy it?
Online, last year.

Why did I buy it?
I'd never read any Hammett, and wanted to try some of his hardboiled and noir classics, and The Dashiell Hammett Omnibus seemed a good way to do that; it's an uncommon edition, especially in first/first and in its dust jacket, even a scruffy one (I can only see two or three jacketed first impressions online at present), and represents the first British publication of many of the stories within.

Have I read it yet?
Some of it...

4 comments:

  1. Don't feel too much of a Hammett misfit, Nick. I still haven't read RED HARVEST or *any* of the short stories though I own every single Hammett anthology from the 1940s so I'm sure I have all his stories, probably many of them duplicated in various editions.

    What have you read so far? I hope THE MALTESE FALCON was among your first choices. I think I read THE DAIN CURSE first (because as a teen I was obsessed with anything dealing with occultism) then moved onto ...FALCON and finally THE THIN MAN which is *very* different from the movie if that's all you know. William Powell doesn't look or behave at all like the son of Greek immigrants Hammett created.

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  2. Nick, that is some edition you've got there. Except for some comics and spiritual books, I don't think I have first editions of any novels. I have not read Dashiell Hammett and I'd certainly like to sample his Continental Op series.

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  3. I just finished reading THE LOST DETECTIVE: BECOMING DASHIELL HAMMET by Nathan Ward. Now I want to go back and reread Hammett's works like you did.

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  4. Shit, this volume has even more content than my Library of America edition of the five novels. And since this book is now vintage, I could still be the pretentious hipster I feel like for buying a Library of America volume of a pulp writer!

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