HAMMETT RESPONDS TO A FAN'S NOTE ABOUT THE THIN MAN.
HAMMETT, DASHIELL. 18914-1961. Typed Letter Signed ('Dashiell Hammett'), 1 p, 4to, New York City, January 10, 1924 (but 1934), on Lombardy Hotel stationery, with manuscript correction to second paragraph, leaf toned, creased, lightly soiled, old mounting remnants on the verso.
Provenance: Sold Christies New York, Books and Autographs, December 4, 1996, lot 102.

After an early career as a Pinkerton detective, Dashiell Hammett turned to writing crime fiction, publishing stories in Black Mask and other periodicals before producing a series of classic crime novels including Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, and The Glass Key. Following on the success of these works which featured a lone private detective moving in a dark criminal underworld, he pivoted to a new genre, the comedic mystery. In December of 1933 he published The Thin Man, which introduced the witty crime-solving couple Nick and Nora Charles, in Redbook, a month before its appearance in book form.
In this letter, written to a Mr. Bierstadt, Hammett is grateful for the reader's note: 'It's readers like you who keep us from lazily guessing at all our facts.' Bierstadt is responding to the following description by one of the policemen: 'He'd been sawed up in pieces and buried in lime or something so there wasn't much flesh left on him, according to the report I got.' It's not clear what the reader's issue is, but Hammett writes, 'My defense—naturally I would have one— is that at the time Guild says 'lime or something, he has had only a brief and inexpert report by phone from the copper who found the body, and, in the only other mention—Nick's 'lime or whatever it was'— Guild is being loosely quoted.'
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