The Thin Man

ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING meets MONSIEUR SPADE It's 1932, and Nick and Nora Charles, and their pet schnauzer, Asta, are in New York City for the Christmas holidays. With the privilege of wealth, they can enjoy whatever they want - the best food and drink, open-topped rides through the city; speakeasies where the rich rub shoulders with gangsters... Rich they may be, but they are also great fun to be with, kind to those in need, and more than capable of keeping their cool in a fight. So when a friend asks Nick to help him find a killer they accept - and are soon plunged into the world of the eccentric Wynant family, the head of which is an inventor who disappeared ten years before. Nick and Nora have to pick through implausible alibis, false identities, a highly glamorous but dysfunctional family - and the mystery of The Thin Man - in order to find out the truth.

Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) was born in Maryland, left school at 14 and had several jobs - messenger boy, newsboy, clerk, timekeeper, yardman, machine operator and stevedore - until he became an operative for the Pinkerton Detective Agency. His experiences as a private detective laid the foundations for his writing career. His work includes The Maltese Falcon, Red Harvest, The Glass Key, The Thin Man and some eighty short stories, mostly published in Black Mask magazine.