A decade ago Terry Zobeck did the pure text treatment on the minor Hammett yarn “The Judge Laughed Last” — originally published in 1924 in Black Mask as “The New Racket” — but Evan Lewis has sleuthed out a good reason to bring it up again.
If you’re a longtime collector you may have one of the collections for which Terry makes the corrections, but Evan has noticed:
The story was somehow overlooked by the several collections of “lost” stories published between 1999 and 2013, and is one of the very few Hammett tales still out of print.
So, if you’re a New Guy, you may have missed that one.
And if so, Evan spreads out a few yellowed pages from yesteryear for you to cut another notch in your Hammett Reading List.
