The Hunter and Other Stories -- Dashiell Hammett, Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett, edtors

The Hunter is a book for completists and collectors.  It contains three screen treatments and seventeen short stories, none of which have been previously collected.  All but one of them come from the collection donated by Lillian Hellman to the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin.

Many of the works here are seeing print for the first time.  Nothing here is top-shelf Hammett, but if you're like me, you want it, anyway.  Also, some stories have nothing to do with crime fiction.  Take a look at "Magic," which might be the most interesting story in the book to some of us.  It's an unpublished fantasy, about as far from realistic hardboiled fiction as you can get, and the style is quite different from that of the crime tales.  In fact, so is the style of a number of things here.  Hammett was far from a one-trick pony, though anybody who's read both The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man already knows that.

There's crime here, too, and the opening story is plenty hardboiled.  The closing story isn't complete. It's a fragment of a Sam Spade story.  I've never been particularly fond of the short stories featuring Spade, but I'm still glad to see this material.

Richard Layman has a short introduction and adds commentary to each section of the book.  Julie M. Rivett, Hammett's granddaughter provides the afterword.  

We're told that the e-book edition of The Hunter provides additional fragmentary works.  Pretty sneaky.  You completists (you know who you are) will want that one, too.