If you recall, the way Terry Zobeck tallied up Hammett’s output a few years ago was that he did 79 known stories and 2 “short miscellaneous pieces” — so, 79 stories or 81 stories, depending on how you count the disputed miscellanea.
But even if you concur with Terry that the 2 tidbit items don’t really count as “stories,” I guess you should correct the tally to an even 80, because “The Glass That Laughed” is running today online in Electric Literature.
An authentic “lost” Hammett short story, it appeared in the November 1925 number of True Police Stories and was spotted by a Hammett fan who happened to land a copy of that issue.
Someday someone is going to stumble across the mag with “The Man Who Loved Ugly Women,” otherwise the only unlocated Hammett yarn (that people know of, anyway — yeah, how many more may lurk in forgotten troves of vanished magazines?).
Brian Wallace, ever exploring the net for any slight mention of Hammett (and Chandler and noir and the usual stuff) is the one who tipped me to the dope. He knows that I ignore casual news, and get my info straight off the street — where, by the way, on a tour by appointment yesterday I met a woman who as a fourteen year old in Miami Beach met Meyer Lansky.
Now I have one degree of separation from the “Mob’s Accountant.” Cool. (I told her that the only person on the tour who trumped her was the guy who had the Unabomber as a math teacher in Berkeley.)
