Both "Harvest" and "Curse" had their origins in the pulp detective magazine Black Mask, where each originally appeared as a quartet of linked novelettes. "Curse," in which the Op must save an addled young woman from an obsessed murderer, still shows its hinges, but makes up for it with some of the author's sparest prose and most striking imagery. It also presents a surprisingly dimensional portrait of the Op.

"The Glass Key," set in a fictional version of Baltimore, where Hammett grew up, focuses on Nick Beaumont, a shrewd and resourceful advisor to and best friend of a powerful city boss named Madvig. When the big guy falls hard for socialite Janet Henry, Beaumont, to prove that she isn't worthy of his pal, seduces her and then apparently falls in love with her himself. What makes the novel both frustrating and fascinating is the author's "what you see is what you get" presentation. While Hammett is careful to resolve the power struggle between Madvig and the crime boss, Shad, and to clear up the whodunit element, he offers little insight into what's going on in Beaumont's head. Is he really in love with Janet? Is he merely using her to better his own lot? Is he in love with Madvig?

The Op, a thorough professional whose main interest is in getting the job done, offers us some evidence of self-analysis. ("I've got horny skin over what's left of my soul.") Spade discards his cool objectivity to tell us that he's not the sort of guy who'll play the sap for anyone. Beaumont steadfastly refuses to give us a clue as to what he's thinking. Maybe his thoughts have been beaten out of him. Rarely has a protagonist been subject to so many blows to the head. (This point is amusingly made in "Miller's Crossing," the Coen brothers film unofficially based on "Key" in which Gabriel Byrne gets slugged every 10 or 15 minutes. Official movie adaptations in 1935 and 1942 featured, respectively, George Raft and Alan Ladd, two exemplars of the minimalist school of performing arts; they were ideal as the enigmatic Beaumont, with the Ladd version being a little better than average, thanks to a script by another hard-boiled master, Jonathan Latimer.)

The remarkable thing is that the book works so beautifully, no matter how you choose to interpret Beaumont's motives. Hammett considered it his best novel and others have agreed, including authors Somerset Maugham, Ellery Queen, Julian Symons and Rex Stout.

The Library of America collection clearly shows "The Thin Man" to be Hammett's weakest novel. Thanks to "Nightmare Town" -- among its pleasures is the author's discarded early draft, which editor McCauley has retitled "The First Thin Man" -- we can see precisely the effect that the movie money and booze and, yes, Hellman, had on his writing. The manuscript he began and put aside in 1930 (resurrected by Francis Ford Coppola's City magazine in a 1975 issue devoted to Hammett) has little in common with the published novel. "Some of the incidents in this original version I later used in 'After the Thin Man,' a motion picture sequel," Hammett wrote about the earlier start. "But, except for that and for the use of the characters' names Guild and Wynant (both recurring in the final version) this unfinished manuscript has a clear claim to virginity."

The original protagonist is private detective John Guild, a tanned, blue-eyed, steely brother to Spade and the Op. Though neither of those tough guys could be called sentimental, Guild lacks even their touch of the romantic. The guy is all work. His quarry is a missing scientist, the slim jim of the title, who has apparently murdered his secretary in a small community near San Francisco called Hell Bend. The 10 chapters have an economy of words and a purity of style that clearly identify their author. It is, however, Hammett's Black Mask style, strongly influenced by his experience as a Pinkerton Op.

By the time he returned to the project, he was a changed man -- a financial and literary success and an accepted member of an intellectual crowd of novelists and screenwriters that included William Faulkner, Ben Hecht and Dorothy Parker. Feeling it was time to move on to a different kind of book, he discarded the tight, hard-boiled West Coast thriller in favor of a more "sophisticated" Manhattan sort of novel -- a mystery-comedy of manners in which a witty and wealthy young bicoastal couple, Nick and Nora Charles, interrupt their Christmastime partying in the big city to solve a murder or two.

In the past, Hammett had used his experiences as a detective to fuel his fiction. Now he was relying on his present lifestyle. He told Hellman she was the basis for Nora. It doesn't take a master's in lit to figure out his inspiration for Nick, an alcoholic ex-detective who has opted for an indolent life over a meaningful occupation.

"The Thin Man" isn't a disaster by any means. The dialogue has wit. Nick and Nora, at least on the surface, are charming and good company. The story moves along nicely. By most standards, it would be considered a prime example of a bracing whodunit. But it isn't in the same league with Hammett's other, meticulously crafted books. Alfred Knopf, his publisher, may have known this. He tried to inflate sales with a full-page ad in the New York Times, calling attention to the novel's then-daring use of the word "erection." He needn't have bothered. "The Thin Man" was a hit. Still, in an interview in 1957, Hammett said that he had always found the novel boring. It was probably his most financially rewarding work, spinning off into six much-beloved motion pictures (in which William Powell and Myrna Loy had such wonderful chemistry it was easy to overlook the shallowness of their lives), a long-running radio program, a television series and, in 1992, a Broadway musical.

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