A young, frightened, foreign woman appears at the door of an
isolated house. The man and woman inside take her in. Other
strangers appear in pursuit of the girl. Menace is in the air.
Originally published in 1933, Hammett''s Woman in the Dark shows the
author at the peak of his narrative powers. With an introduction by
Robert B. Parker, the author of the celebrated Spenser novels.
關於作者：
Dashiell Samuel Hammett was born in St. Mary’s County. He grew
up in Philadelphia and Baltimore. Hammett left school at the age of
fourteen and held several kinds of jobs thereafter—messenger boy,
newsboy, clerk, operator, and stevedore, finally becoming an
operative for Pinkerton’s Detective Agency. Sleuthing suited young
Hammett, but World War I intervened, interrupting his work and
injuring his health. When Sergeant Hammett was discharged from the
last of several hospitals, he resumed detective work. He soon
turned to writing, and in the late 1920s Hammett became the
unquestioned master of detective-story fiction in America. In
The Maltese Falcon 1930 he first introduced his famous
private eye, Sam Spade. The Thin Man 1932 offered another
immortal sleuth, Nick Charles. Red Harvest 1929, The
Dain Curse 1929, and The Glass Key 1931 are among
his most successful novels. During World War II, Hammett again
served as sergeant in the Army, this time for more than two years,
most of which he spent in the Aleutians. Hammett’s later life was
marked in part by ill health, alcoholism, a period of imprisonment
related to his alleged membership in the Communist Party, and by
his long-time companion, the author Lillian Hellman, with whom he
had a very volatile relationship. His attempt at autobiographical
fiction survives in the story “Tulip,” which is contained in the
posthumous collection The Big Knockover 1966, edited by
Lillian Hellman. Another volume of his stories, The Continental
Op 1974, edited by Stephen Marcus, introduced the final
Hammett character: the “Op,” a nameless detective or “operative”
who displays little of his personality, making him a classic tough
guy in the hard-boiled mold—a bit like Hammett himself.
內容試閱：
Her right ankle turned under her and she fell. The wind
blowing downhill from the south, whipping the trees beside the
road, made a whisper of her exclamation and snatched her scarf away
into the darkness. She sat up slowly, palms on the gravel pushing
her up, and twisted her body sidewise to release the leg bent
beneath her.
Her right slipper lay in the road close to her feet. When she put
it on she found its heel was missing. She peered around, then began
to hunt for the heel, hunting on hands and knees uphill into the
wind, wincing a little when her right knee touched the road.
Presently she gave it up and tried to break the heel off her left
slipper, but could not. She replaced the slipper and rose with her
back to the wind, leaning back against the wind''s violence and the
road''s steep sloping. Her gown clung to her back, flew fluttering
out before her. Hair lashed her cheeks. Walking high on the ball of
her right foot to make up for the missing heel, she hobbled on down
the hill.
At the bottom of the hill there was a wooden bridge, and, a
hundred yards beyond, a sign that could not be read in the darkness
marked a fork in the road. She halted there, not looking at the
sign but around her, shivering now, though the wind had less force
than it had had on the hill. Foliage to her left moved to show and
hide yellow light. She took the left-hand fork.
In a little while she came to a gap in the bushes beside the road
and sufficient light to show a path running off the road through
the gap. The light came from the thinly curtained window of a house
at the other end of the path.
She went up the path to the door and knocked. When there was no
answer she knocked again.
A hoarse, unemotional masculine voice said: "Come in."
She put her hand on the latch; hesitated. No sound came from
within the house. Outside, the wind was noisy everywhere. She
knocked once more, gently.
The voice said, exactly as before: "Come in."
She opened the door. The wind blew it in sharply, her hold on the
latch dragging her with it so that she had to cling to the door
with both hands to keep from falling. The wind went past her into
the room, to balloon curtains and scatter the sheets of a newspaper
that had been on a table. She forced the door shut and, still
leaning against it, said: "I am sorry." She took pains with her
words to make them clear notwithstanding her accent.
The man cleaning a pipe at the hearth said: "It''s all right." His
copperish eyes were as impersonal as his hoarse voice. "I''ll be
through in a minute." He did not rise from his chair. The edge of
the knife in his hand rasped inside the brier bowl of his
pipe.
She left the door and came forward, limping, examining him with
perplexed eyes under brows drawn a little together. She was a tall
woman and carried herself proudly, for all she was lame and the
wind had tousled her hair and the gravel of the road had cut and
dirtied her hands and bare arms and the red crepe of her
gown.
She said, still taking pains with her words: "I must go to the
railroad. I have hurt my ankle on the road. Eh?"
He looked up from his work then. His sallow, heavily featured
face, under coarse hair nearly the color of his eyes, was not
definitely hostile or friendly. He looked at the woman''s face, at
her torn skirt. He did not turn his head to call: "Hey,
Evelyn."
A girl--slim maturing body in tan sport clothes, slender
sunburned face with dark bright eyes and dark short hair--came into
the room through a doorway behind him.
The man did not look around at her. He nodded at the woman in red
and said: "This--"
The woman interrupted him: "My name is Luise Fischer."
The man said: "She''s got a bum leg."
Evelyn''s dark prying eyes shifted their focus from the woman to
the man--she could not see his face--and to the woman again. She
smiled, speaking hurriedly: "I''m just leaving. I can drop you at
Mile Valley on my way home."
The woman seemed about to smile. Under her curious gaze Evelyn
suddenly blushed, and her face became defiant while it reddened.
The girl was pretty. Facing her, the woman had become beautiful;
her eyes were long, heavily lashed, set well apart under a smooth
broad brow, her mouth was not small but sensitively carved and
mobile, and in the light from the open fire the surfaces of her
face were as clearly defined as sculptured planes.
The man blew through his pipe, forcing out a small cloud of black
powder. "No use hurrying," he said. "There''s no train till six." He
looked up at the clock on the mantelpiece. It said
ten-thirty-three. "Why don''t you her with her leg?"
The woman said: "No, it is not necessary. I--" She put her weight
on her injured leg and flinched, steadying herself with a hand on
the back of a chair.
The girl hurried to her, stammering contritely: "I--I didn''t
think. Forgive me." She put an arm around the woman and helped her
into the chair.
The man stood up to put his pipe on the mantelpiece, beside the
clock. He was of medium height, but his sturdiness made him look
shorter. His neck, rising from the V of a gray sweater, was short,
powerfully muscled. Below the sweater he wore loose gray trousers
and heavy brown shoes. He clicked his knife shut and put it in his
pocket before turning to look at Luise Fischer.
Evelyn was on her knees in front of the woman, pulling off her
right stocking, making sympathetic clucking noises, chattering
nervously: "You''ve cut your knee too. Tch-tch-tch! And look how
your ankle''s swelling. You shouldn''t have tried to walk all that
distance in these slippers." Her body hid the woman''s bare leg from
the man. "Now, sit still and I''ll fix it up in a minute." She
pulled the torn red skirt down over the bare leg.
The woman''s smile was polite. She said carefully: "You are very
kind."
The girl ran out of the room.
The man had a paper package of cigarettes in his hand. He shook
it until three cigarettes protruded half an inch and held them out
to her. "Smoke?"
"Thank you." She took a cigarette, put it between her lips, and
looked at his hand when he held a match to it. His hand was
thick-boned, muscular, but not a laborer''s. She looked through her
lashes at his face while he was lighting his cigarette. He was
younger than he had seemed at first glance--perhaps no older than
thirty-two or -three--and his features, in the flare of his match,
seemed less stolid than disciplined.
"Bang it up much?" His tone was merely conversational.
"I hope I have not." She drew up her skirt to look first at her
ankle, then at her knee. The ankle was perceptibly though not
greatly swollen; the knee was cut once deeply, twice less
seriously. She touched the edges of the cuts gently with a
forefinger. "I do not like pain," she said very earnestly.
Evelyn came in with a basin of steaming water, cloths, a roll of
bandage, salve. Her dark eyes widened at the man and woman, but
were hidden by lowered lids by the time their faces had turned
toward her. "I''ll fix it now. I''ll have it all fixed in a minute."
She knelt in front of the woman again, nervous hand sloshing water
on the floor, body between Luise Fischer''s leg and the man.
He went to the door and looked out, holding the door half a foot
open against the wind.
The woman asked the girl bathing her ankle: "There is not a train
before it is morning?" She pursed her lips thoughtfully.
"No."
The man shut the door and said: "It''ll be raining in an hour." He
put more wood on the fire, then stood--legs apart, hands in
pockets, cigarette dangling from one side of his mouth--watching
Evelyn attend to the woman''s leg. His face was placid.
The girl dried the ankle and began to wind a bandage around it,
working with increasing speed, breathing more rapidly now. Once
more the woman seemed about to smile at the girl, but instead she
said, "You are very kind."
The girl murmured: "It''s nothing."
Three sharp knocks sounded on the door.
Luise Fischer started, dropped her cigarette, looked swiftly
around the room with frightened eyes. The girl did not raise her
head from her work. The man, with nothing in his face or manner to
show he had noticed the woman''s fright, turned his face toward the
door and called in his hoarse, matter-of-fact voice: "All right.
Come in."
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