Dashiell Hammett stuff

    Memory is dropping in and out on me a bit lately. The other week, something caused me to wonder if any previously unpublished Dashiell Hammett stories had come out since I had last checked. Unrepublished? Unbooked? As this was only a week or two ago, I'm almost embarrassed that I can't remember what put the question in my mind, but regardless I checked the library and found what I thought were books I hadn't seen before. They were "Lost Stories," "Nightmare Town" and "The Return of the Thin Man."
    "Lost Stories" was a little short on Hammett, as the stories were generally very, very short. The book could be fairly described as padded, but that isn't to say that it wasn't entertaining. "Nightmare Town" came out at the end of the last millennium; apparently I read it then, because I could just barely remember some elements of some of the stories. This was what inspired me to post on Facebook that aging isn't so bad; you get to read stuff for the first time over and over again! This is true, but another instance where I'm starting to worry a little about my formerly nearly infallible memory.
    An odd thing about "Nightmare Town" is that in the introduction, written in 1999, a writer remarked on something happening early in "this century." It seems like in 1999, one would have a pretty good notion that most of his readers would be reading him in the next century and would therefore say "early in the twentieth century." At least he didn't say "turn-of-the-century," though it wasn't that early.
    "Return of the Thin Man" is Hammett's story treatments for two Thin Man movie sequels. In the book, the editors point out that the second sequel is lifted pretty completely from Hammett's Continental Op story "The Farewell Murder." Even though I haven't read that recently, I've read it often and would probably have recognized the plot and characters without the tipoff. Anyway, it would have made me crazy, knowing I'd seen it before somewhere! The first sequel lifts a lot of stuff including complete scenes from Hammett's original draft of "The Thin Man," published in, you guessed it, 1999 in "Nightmare Town." I was suddenly very glad to have reread that, because I definitely wouldn't have remembered that I had read it before and the editors for some reason didn't mention the, uh, recycling.
    The original "Thin Man" draft is fun and interesting and worth the look at "Nightmare Town" for it alone. The only similarities with the actual Thin Man book are an eccentric genius named Wynant and a detective named John Guild. In the novel, Guild is a NYC police detective; here he's a private detective and the main character. Wynant has different given names, but is already thin. Hammett didn't get far enough in the draft to be able to say for sure that the ending would be similarly tricky, but Guild was very suspicious that Wynant wasn't the crazed killer he was being painted as, just as in the novel. Anyway, it's a hoot; Hammett fans who haven't read it, or who haven't read it this millennium, should definitely give it a look.