The Scorched Face

One of Hammett's best, an intriguing tale of murder, suicide, blackmail, revenge, decadence and deceit that packs more complexity into its thirty some pages than most novels, yet without seeming idiotically contrived. Hammett's muscular prose is excellent here: "A small room, packed and tangled with bodies. Live bodies, seething, writhing. The room was a funnel into which men and women had been poured. They boiled noisily toward the one small window that was the funnel's outlet. Men and women, youths and girls, screaming, struggling, squirming, fighting. Some had no clothes. 'We'll get through and block the window!' Pat yelled in my ear. 'Like Hell--' I began, but he was gone ahead of me into the confusion."