When Secret Agent X-9 premiered in January 1934, King Features couldproudly boast that its new adventure strip was written by the world's mostfamous mystery writer - Dashiell Hammett, the man who virtually inventedthe hard-boiled detective in such novels as The Maltese Falcon, TheThin Man, and Red Harvest. The artist chosen was less well-known- at this point, Alex Raymond was merely an uncredited assistant on TimTyler's Luck and the humor strip Blondie - but 1934 was theturning point in Raymond's career. From that cold January forward, Alex Raymondwould become as famous as Hammett, thanks to his Sunday comics double-header,Flash Gordon and Jungle Jim. The Secret Agent X-9 strip was a dailies-only serial. This volumecollects the complete Hammett/Raymond strips, plus the subsequent stories byRaymond and Leslie Charteris, famous himself for 'The Saint' novels, as well asthe Charteris stories drawn by Charles Flanders. Included are strips fromJanuary 22, 1934 through October 31, 1936.