I picked up Lost Stories right after reading in What in the Word? (see yesterday's Shelf Awareness) that Dashiell is pronounced "duh-SHEEL", not "DASH-ul." Somehow, I have a hard time matching that information with classic lines like "I'll tell you right out, I'm a man who likes talking to a man who likes to talk." But this collection of 21 long-lost Hammett stories took my mind off pronunciation, and back to what's important, the incomparable writing ("She wasn't exactly beautiful, but if you were alone with her you kept looking at her, and you wished she didn't belong to a man you were afraid of."). As Joe Gores says in his introduction, not only is Hammett wonderful to read, but his fiction "has affected almost all subsequent American writers' work whether they know it or not." Vince Emery presents the stories--detective fiction, satire, adventure tales--with biographical commentary and critical analysis, making this a necessary addition to any mystery library.