“I wouldn’t have a dog that was cat-shy,” he wound up. “What good is a dog, or a man, that’s afraid of things?”

Metcalf, the engineer, agreed with his employer. I had never seen him do anything else in the three days I had known them.

“Quite right,” he said. “Useless.”

Those lines are taken from the story “So I Shot Him,” one of 15 new works of fiction by the American crime writer Dashiell Hammett that have been uncovered in Texas. The stories were discovered by Andrew Gulli, editor of the crime fiction magazine The Strand, which will publish “So I Shot Him” in this month’s issue.

From the Guardian:

“There are some very, very good pieces of fiction here. Some of them are classic Hammett and fit in with the style we know and others are very different and go off to places that were a different direction for him,” [Gulli] said. The Hammett discovery is just the latest in a series of coups by Gulli’s magazine. In recent years The Strand has also printed previously unseen works by Graham Greene, Mark Twain, and Agatha Christie.

The Hammett story that will feature in The Strand is a piece of straight detective fiction, but it is written in the style the writer pioneered and perfected. Called “So I Shot Him,” it tells the tale of an afternoon by a lake that goes horribly wrong. It opens bluntly with the title sentence and then goes on in a rat-a-tat style familiar to Hammett’s legion of fans. The dialogue is crisp and deadpan and the characters memorable, said Gulli. “After reading it, you will be debating it and wondering exactly what it means and then you’ll want to go back and read it again.”

Hammett, along with Raymond Chandler, is largely credited with inventing the hardboiled detective story. According to Tom Nolan, critic for The Wall Street Journal, the discovery of new Hammett stories is a reason for celebration: “We can never have enough Hammett.”