Fly Paper: A Short Story

A ravishingly illustrated version of Dashiell Hammett's Fly Paper--his first truly hard-boiled story--with over two hundred water-based monochromes, that reimagine and recreate in unexpected ways the unsettling atmosphere and sensibility of Hammett's tale. Hans Hillmann (1925-2014) was a German graphic illustrator and teacher, widely known for the 130 movie posters he designed between 1953 and 1974 that accompanied the release in Germany of many of the most important postwar films by internationally celebrated directors such as Buñuel, Bergman, Eisenstein, Huston, Hitchcock, and Godard. In 1974, Hillmann became obsessed with the idea of making a film on paper based on Hammett's story about a wealthy young girl who runs away from her family to live the hard and fast life, and the Continental Detective Agency operative who's hired to find her. That project would consume seven years of his life would include traveling to the United States, photographing and drawing many of the locations and neighborhoods in San Francisco that Hammett frequented. The result is this extraordinary book: the realistically rendered surfaces of the interiors and streetscapes only a thin facade on the distorting and menacing shadows and phantasmagoric motifs that brilliantly evoke the psychological and emotional undercurrents of Hammett's story. INTRODUCTION BY ART SPIEGELMAN PART OF THE PANTHEON GRAPHIC LIBRARY