Recommended reading - The Big Knockover and Other Stories

The Big Knockover and Other Stories

by Dashiell Hammett.

 

Published by Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Published 1981.

Paperback.

ISBN-10: 0140029419

ISBN-13: 978-0140029413

Description:

Nine short stories. Includes the unfinished novel, Tulip, and a memoir by Lillian Hellman. Short, thick-bodied, mulishly stubborn, and indifferent to physical pain, Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op was the prototype for generations of tough-guy detectives. He is also the hero of most of the nine stories in this volume. The Op's one enthusiasm is doing his job, and in The Big Knockover the jobs entail taking on a gang of modern-day freebooters, a vice-ridden hell's acre in the Arizona desert, and the bank job to end all bank jobs, along with such assorted grifters as Babe McCloor, Bluepoint Vance, Alphabet Shorty McCoy, and the Dis-and-Dat Kid.