HAMMETT, Dashiell (1894-1961)

Corrected typescript of the short story 'The Hunter', 20 Monroe St, San Francisco, [1926].

8½ pages, 278 x 215mm, address in typescript at upper left, and at upper right '2,500 words / First serial rights offered'. Autograph emendation to the address (cancelling '620 Eddy Street') and autograph additions of three single words and one letter to the text, a few other cancellations. Provenance: collection of Marjorie May, New York City (Hammett's secretary 1946-48 and subsequently friend); Christie's New York, 8 June 1990, lot 179.

The typescript for an early detective story, unpublished in Hammett's lifetime.

'There are people who, coming for the first time in contact with one they know for a detective, look at his feet. These glances, at times mockingly frank, but more often furtive and somewhat scientific in purpose, are doubtless annoying to the detective whose feet are in the broad-toed tradition: Fred Vitt enjoyed them. His feet were small and he kept them neatly shod in the shiniest of blacks'.

The story relates the hunt for the forger of a check. A carbon copy of the typescript held at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas bears the date 12 June 1924: the alteration of the address to 20 Monroe Street dates the present typescript to 1926, when a resurgence of his tuberculosis obliged Hammett to live in a rented studio apartment separately from his wife and two daughters.