HAMMETT, Dashiell.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

"The Hunter", draft typescript, with corrections. The original draft typescript for an early detective story, unpublished in the author's lifetime, with six corrections in his hand.The work is written "in the mold of the Black Mask Continental Op stories, but with an important difference. Here the detective, named Vitt, is as hard-boiled as a detective gets. He has a job to do, and he does it with neither distraction nor emotional involvement, and then he turns ironically to his own mundane domestic concerns at the end" (Layman & Rivett, p. 11).As well as his changes to the text, Hammett has altered the address in manuscript from "620 Eddy Street" to "20 Monroe St", dating the typescript to 1926, when a resurgence of tuberculosis obliged him to live in a rented studio apartment separately from his wife and two daughters.The typescript was given by Hammett to Marjorie May, one of his students at the communist-sponsored Jefferson School of Social Science, where he taught a course on mystery writing in the 1940s. The two became close, and Hammett began referring to May as his "secretary". May was an aspiring writer, and, one day in 1947, Hammett "tossed her a fragment of a story called 'The Hunter' and challenged her to finish it" (Mellen, p. 255). He gave May several manuscripts around this time, which she auctioned in 1990; the present example later passed into the collection of Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts (1941-2021), who took a passionate interest in crime fiction,

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