Unpublished work by crime master set to be unveiled.

A cache of unpublished works by famed writer Dashiell Hammett, often looked upon as the father of hardboiled detective fiction, has been found and is set to be unveiled in America.
Hammett, whose best-known work, The Maltese Falcon, was made into a film starring Humphrey Bogart, died in 1961. But now, 15 unpublished short stories are set to hit the bookshelves after being discovered by magazine editor, Andrew Gulli, among the literary archives of the Harry Ransom Centre at the University of Texas in Austin.

Gulli, who will now publish one of the stories in his crime magazine, The Strand, later this month, said, "There are some very, very good pieces of fiction here. Some of them are classic Hammett and fit in with the style we know and others are very different and go off to places that were a different direction for him,"
The Hammett discovery is just the latest in a series of coups by Gulli's magazine. In recent years The Strand has also printed previously unseen works by Graham Greene, Mark Twain and Agatha Christie.
The Hammett story that will feature in The Strand, Called So I Shot Him, is a piece of straight talking detective fiction in the rat-a-tat style familiar to Hammett's legion of fans that tells the tale of an afternoon by a lake that goes horribly wrong.
The dialogue is said to be crisp and deadpan and the characters memorable, which, to anyone familiar with Hammetts work, will come as no surprise.
The news of the undiscovered works has some crime fiction experts delighted at the prospect of studying fresh material from a man many consider to be a popular genius. Besides The Maltese Falcon, whose hero was the crafty hard-bitten gumshoe Sam Spade, Hammett also wrote The Thin Man and Red Harvest – the latter was once named on a list of Time's 100 best novels in the English language.
"We can never have enough Hammett."said Tom Nolan, an expert on detective fiction and a literary critic for the Wall Street Journal. "The prospect of being able to research and understand stories that have never been published before is truly exciting. Hammett is as relevant as any of the better known American writers of the day like Ernest Hemingway or John O'Hara."
Hammett, along with other writers of the 1920s, 30s and 40s such as Raymond Chandler, defined a new fictional world with their gritty portrayals of urban America. They shunned straightforward heroes and villains for chancers and grifters who worked on both sides of the law. The low-life characters and anti-heroes were a ground-breaking development for most mass fiction and still influence crime novels today.
Hammett lived as colourful a life as any other writer or indeed any of his characters. His inspiration for the worlds he created came from his time spent as a detective for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency from 1915 to 1922.
However, he was also a political activist and a fervent supporter of leftwing causes and the labour movement. By 1934 he stopped writing full novels and devoted most of his time to political causes, including joining the American Communist party. He was eventually blacklisted in the 1950s by Congress's notorious house un-American activities committee. A fondness for hard drink also took its toll and he died a virtual recluse in a New York city hospital.
Now the discovery of new work adds an unexpected final chapter to Hammett's literary life. Gulli said he had no idea how or why the works were in the Texas archive or when they were written as none are dated. "They could have been written anytime in the 1920s or 1930s or 1940s," he said.
But, in a typical Hammett plot device, they now provide an unexpected twist at the end of a narrative. As many of the works, including So I Shot Him, deviate from the traditional settings of his previous detective fiction, they show that Hammett was a talented writer beyond the literary niche he was best known for. Hammett, Gulli says, should now be seen in a very different light. "He was drifting into something else. We have discovered that he was a far more versatile writer than he ever gets credit for," Gulli said.