All of Hammett's novels have been in print for decades, though primarily in paperback. His upwards of 70 shorter pieces have had a spottier history. He preferred it that way, considering them products of an earlier, pulpier time in his career. In the mid-1940s, however, author and editor Ellery Queen (the pseudonym used by cousins Manfred B. Lee and Frederic Dannay) talked him into freeing a handful of the short stories for a limited-run trade paperback edition. Its success led to a second collection, then a third, until a total of nine Queen-edited collections were published. Regardless of their popularity, Hammett was adamant that the stories never appear in hardcover or mass-market editions.

After his death in 1961 (from a combination of lung cancer, emphysema and heart disease), according to his wishes Hellman was appointed executor of his estate. Though she guarded her real or imagined memory of him with an unwavering possessiveness that became the bane of would-be biographers, she was not averse to putting his pulp fiction back into print. As Joan Mellen notes in her hefty, fact-filled 1996 joint biography, "Hellman and Hammett" (Harper Collins), the playwright had a financial as well as a romantic interest in Dash's past. She had purchased the rights to much of his literary work from the estate. Mellen devotes pages and pages to the methods she employed to secure the copyrights, often acting in apparent opposition to the dictates of Hammett's will, which stated that only a quarter of his assets was to go to her. An additional 25 percent was to go to his adopted daughter, Mary, and 50 percent to his biological daughter, Jo. Mellen quotes Hellman as saying, "I bought the estate. I'll leave them something when I die."

In 1966, she edited the first hardcover collection of Hammett stories, "The Big Knockover." It consisted of nine of the best Continental Op novelettes and "Tulip," a rather painful beginning to a stalled autobiographical novel. In 1974, she granted Random House permission to bring out a second volume, "The Continental Op," edited by literary historian and Columbia University professor Stephen Marcus (who also provided a chronology and notes for the Library of America collection). Together, the two books put 16 of the Op stories back into print. That barely scratched the surface of the material Queen had unearthed, as editor McCauley came to realize five years ago.

"It took me about a year to get around to discovering that the agency that handled the novels wasn't the same one that handled the stories," he told me recently. "They gave me a tentative OK to put the collection together, and that took another year. Then there was the time spent by the lawyers at Random House and the lawyers for the estate. It wasn't that unusual a situation. I'm a literary agent myself, and I know you run into these complications with estates. There are always a lot of people that have to be consulted."

Though McCauley wouldn't say so, this one was probably a little more complicated than most. Mellen's biography states that Hellman's will arranged for her own literary executors to make all decisions concerning "the use, disposition, retention and control of the works of Dashiell Hammett, both published and unpublished." In other words, everything pertaining to his estate has to flow through her estate.

"Once the book started to fall together," McCauley says, "it went very quickly." He and co-editors Greenberg and Gorman settled on 20 tales, more than in the two previous collections combined, that cover a comprehensive, 11-year span. Again, the earlier work outshines the post-1930 stories.

The former are represented by seven diamond-hard Continental Op capers and a few other gems. "Ruffian's Wife" is told from the point of view of a sensitive woman married to a swaggering adventurer who clearly doesn't understand her. "The Second-Story Angel," an O. Henry-like short story, has an ending that manages not only to surprise, but to do so in a way that mocks romance and satirizes pulp writers.

The comparatively fewer selections from the '30s, written primarily for slick magazine money, are typified by three Sam Spade stories -- "A Man Called Spade," "They Can Only Hang You Once" and "Too Many Have Lived" -- all of which lack the painstaking care and technique that Hammett brought to his pulp work. "Hang" does have the distinction of a terrific opening line: "Sam Spade said: 'My name is Ronald Ames.'" Past that, it is an inferior reworking of the Continental Op short, "Night Shots," which, purposefully or not, is also part of this collection.

What "Complete Novels" and "Nightmare Town" do not do, and what no amount of literary truffle hounding or biographical interpretation has been able to accomplish, is to solve definitively the mystery of Hammett's 27-year-long writer's block. Whodunit? Whydunit? And what in the world could he have been thinking and/or drinking that night in 1930 when he fell under Hellman's spell?

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