Creeping Siamese by Dashiell Hammett (1926)
Tuesday’s Detective Tale May 24, 2022
A man stumbles into the Continental Detective Agency. He drops dead on the floor. Stabbed in the left breast, the man’s wound is staunched with red silk—which seems to be a sarong.
If you love crime stories with ace detectives, then you must be a fan of Dashiell Hammett. This story is a cool little plot puzzle with imaginative clues. Good one!
“Hammett did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.” Raymond Chandler.
Read the short story here:
Click to access Hammett_Creeping_Siamese.pdf
Listen to other short stories by Dashiell Hammett (Creeping Siamese is not available in audio).
We like to remember Dashiell Hammett as the inventor of hardboiled detective fiction with brutal realism and wry humor. Hammett worked for the Pinkerton Detective Agency for eight years before he began writing his stories. His first short story was published by The Black Mask in 1923.
Don’t forget to view the INDEX OF AUTHORS’ TALES above for more free reading at Reading Fiction Blog. This is a compendium of over 250 short stories by more than 150 famous storytellers of mystery, suspense, supernatural, ghost stories, crime, sci-fi, romance, ‘quiet horror,’ and mainstream fiction.
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Paula Cappa 
Hammett was an honest-to-goodness private eye before he became a mystery writer? I didn’t know that! No wonder his stories are so tangible.
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