Sam Spade, a private eye with his own solitary code of ethics, stars in Hammett\'s cooly glittering gem of detective fiction, a novel that has haunted 2 generations of readers. FROM THE PUBLISHER A treasure worth killing for. Sam Spade, a slightly shopworn private eye with his own solitary code of ethics. A perfumed grifter named Joel Cairo, a fat man named Gutman, and Brigid O\'Shaughnessy, a beautiful and treacherous woman whose loyalties shift at the drop of a dime. These are the ingredients of Dashiell Hammett\'s coolly glittering gem of detective fiction, a novel that has haunted three generations of readers. FROM THE CRITICS New York Times Book ReviewIf the locution \'hard-boiled\' had not already been coined it would be necessary to coin it now to describe the characters of Dashiell Hammett\'s latest detective story. . . there is plenty of excitement. — Books of the Century; New York Times review, February 1930