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The Continental Op #2
The Dain Curse
Miss Gabriel Dain Leggett is young and wealthy, with a penchant for morphine and religious cults. She also has an unfortunate effect on the people around her. They die - violently.
Is she the victim of a family curse? She believes so and has been reminded of the curse many times. The short, squat, utterly unsentimental Continental Op, the best private detective around, has his doubts and finds himself confronting something infinitely more dangerous.
It's the Continental Op's most bizarre case.
Is she the victim of a family curse? She believes so and has been reminded of the curse many times. The short, squat, utterly unsentimental Continental Op, the best private detective around, has his doubts and finds himself confronting something infinitely more dangerous.
It's the Continental Op's most bizarre case.
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1929
About the author
Dashiell Hammett
520 books2,458 followersAlso wrote as Peter Collinson, Daghull Hammett, Samuel Dashiell, Mary Jane Hammett
Dashiell Hammett, an American, wrote highly acclaimed detective fiction, including The Maltese Falcon (1930) and The Thin Man (1934).
Samuel Dashiell Hammett authored hardboiled novels and short stories. He created Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon), Nick and Nora Charles (The Thin Man), and the Continental Op (Red Harvest and The Dain Curse) among the enduring characters. In addition to the significant influence his novels and stories had on film, Hammett "is now widely regarded as one of the finest mystery writers of all time" and was called, in his obituary in the New York Times, "the dean of the... 'hard-boiled' school of detective fiction."
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashiell...
Dashiell Hammett, an American, wrote highly acclaimed detective fiction, including The Maltese Falcon (1930) and The Thin Man (1934).
Samuel Dashiell Hammett authored hardboiled novels and short stories. He created Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon), Nick and Nora Charles (The Thin Man), and the Continental Op (Red Harvest and The Dain Curse) among the enduring characters. In addition to the significant influence his novels and stories had on film, Hammett "is now widely regarded as one of the finest mystery writers of all time" and was called, in his obituary in the New York Times, "the dean of the... 'hard-boiled' school of detective fiction."
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashiell...
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 544 reviews
March 29, 2021
The Dain Curse by Dashiell Hammett, father of the modern crime novel, is not only an action-packed tale of misdeeds and murder, but a study of 1920s American culture and society. Within the novel’s pages, here is a sampling of what a reader will encounter:
First-Person Hard Boiled Narrator
The unnamed Continental Op detective tells the tale in crisp, exacting language as he describes the people and places and situations he encounters. For example, here is an account of his first-time meeting a scientist by the name of Edgar Leggett, “His voice was unexpectedly harsh, rasping, though he manner was friendly enough. He was a dark-skinned erect man in his middle forties, muscularly slender and of medium height. He would have been handsome if his brown face hadn’t been so deeply marked with sharp, hard lines across the forehead and from the nostrils down across mouth-corners. Dark hair, worth rather long, curled above and around the broad, grooved forehead. Red-brown eyes were abnormally bright behind horn-rimmed spectacles. His nose was long, thin, and high-bridged. His lips were thin, sharp, nimble, over a small, bony chin. His black and white cloths were well made and cared for.” I quote the detective’s entire study to underscore how careful and laser-sharp observation is required at each step and phase in his solving this complex, convoluted case.
Presto Tempo
Like picking up clues as you read and solving the mystery before reaching the end? Good luck with this one – events are packed so tight and happen so fast, it is like trying to identify each note while listening to a Paganini Caprice. Fortunately, for the mystery-challenged, people like myself, the backstory is given as the end of each of the three parts, along with the Continental Op’s take on the case.
Femme Fatale
What is compelling noir without a femme fatale? This novel features a doozy – Gabrielle. There is something about this slender, large-eyed twenty-year-old that fascinates men and pull them to her like a powerful, deadly magnet. Is it her drug-induced craziness, or her intense personality, made more intense by a family curse, or, then again, her attractive face and exceptionally white, smooth skin? Or, perhaps more likely, a combination of all of these plus that undefinable feminine something.
Novelist Owen Fitzstephan
Hammett probably had lots of fun including a fiction writer in this book, a writer described by the detective as, “A man who pretended to be lazier than he was, would rather talk that do anything else, and had a lot of what seemed to be accurate information and original ideas on any subject that happened to come up, as long as it was a little out of the ordinary.” What kind of ideas does Owen Fitzstephan have on subjects out of the ordinary? I wouldn’t want to give too much away, so I’ll just say we come to see which one of these two – the Continental Op or the talented novelist – has more compassion and a greater grasp of human nature.
America the Violent
Guns are as common as candy – an entire society of people thinking their problems are best solved by shooting others or shooting themselves. Doesn’t matter, law or outlaw, man or woman, young or old, so many people quick to point a gun and pull the trigger. There aren’t as many corpses for the morgue as Hammett's Red Harvest but there are enough to count on more than one hand.
California Fruits and Nuts
By 1928 when Hammett wrote this novel, America was generations removed from a land of traditional believers in traditional religions. Matter of fact, many people relocated to California to escape the ways and beliefs of their parents - so many alternatives; so many sects and cults, so many ways to express yourself in faith and belief and alternate lifestyles. The Continental Op detective has to deal with a California cult calling itself "Temple of the Holy Grail." Here is what he says about the cult and the cult’s leaders: “They brought their cult to California because everybody does, and picked San Francisco because it held less competition than Los Angeles. They didn’t want a mob of converts: they wanted them few but wealthy.” Again, novel as study in the sociology and psychology of gun-crazed America.
American author Dashiell Hammett, 1894 - 1961
December 3, 2020
Here's a better look at the 1966 Penguin mass-market paperback I have. Sets a totally different tone compared to other editions I've seen.
May 26, 2023
11/2014
When I tried to read this in my mid twenties, I decided I didn't like it, and stopped. When I read it at, like, thirty-one, I thought I really loved it (I was going through a Continental Op hysteria - hey, he's short, fat, forty and nameless - dreamy - but, truly, the pulp hero's humble unattractiveness charms me). This time, I didn't love it so much. The Dain Curse was serialized in Black Mask in 1928-29, and I guess it's obvious. Part One and Part Two are just okay and, oh yeah, horribly racist, egregiously so. Part three is almost great, I guess. It has some really good scenes. But all in all, rather dull and convoluted.
When I tried to read this in my mid twenties, I decided I didn't like it, and stopped. When I read it at, like, thirty-one, I thought I really loved it (I was going through a Continental Op hysteria - hey, he's short, fat, forty and nameless - dreamy - but, truly, the pulp hero's humble unattractiveness charms me). This time, I didn't love it so much. The Dain Curse was serialized in Black Mask in 1928-29, and I guess it's obvious. Part One and Part Two are just okay and, oh yeah, horribly racist, egregiously so. Part three is almost great, I guess. It has some really good scenes. But all in all, rather dull and convoluted.
May 15, 2020
“You’re her daughter,” she cried, “and you’re cursed with the same black soul and rotten blood that she and I and all the Dains have had; and you’re cursed with your mother’s blood on your hands in babyhood; and with your twisted mind and the need for drugs that are my gifts to you; and your life will be black as your mother’s and mine were black…”
In The Dain Curse, one of Dashiell Hammett’s “Continental Op” books based (in part!) on his own experience of being, not a detective, but an insurance investigator, Hammett explores one issue some mystery and detective writers have always been interested in (or know some of their readers are interested in): The possibility of psychic or paranormal phenomena. From Sir Arthur Conan Doyle through Agatha Christie, the authors of whodunnits mainly side with the rational, logical, deductive approach to criminal investigation, as far as I can tell. There probably is a paranormal crime sub-genre just as there is a paranormal romance sub-genre, but I am not aware of it. In this one, the unnamed Continental Op(erative, or insurance investigator) thinks psychic stuff is hokum, but he hasn’t met the Dain family!
So, the plot, involving dozens of characters and three different sets of murders focuses (if you can use that word for this plot) on the Continental Op investigating a theft of diamonds from the Leggett family of San Francisco. Along the way to solving all the murders we encounter The Temple of the Holy Grail cult, dope fiends. On the one hand it feels very much like a pulpy mash-up of horror and mystery (see Ed Brubaker’s Fatale as another contemporary example), and on the other hand as a gothic novel, complete with drug-induced hallucinations, dark sexual drives, secret passages, hidden altars used for human sacrifice, bodies falling from cliffs, and so on. The question is whether there is in fact a “curse” or madness or Pure Evil instead of the usual mundane murder motivations such as greed or jealousy.
A key event is the CO attempting to free Gabrielle Leggett (a Dain) fom the religious cult and her addiction to morphine. One issue is whether she is in fact a femme fatale impicated in every death in the book. The cult keeper is a woman named Aaronia (pronounced “Erronia,” as in some version of Just Wrong) Haldorn.
This is kind of an aside but one of the interesting things about most classic noir stories is an area already much written about, that the stories mainly reify heteronormativity and white privilege and also, neurotypicality: The detectives may be lower middle class, they may be alcoholics, but they are smart, witty, reasonably “attractive,” attracted to “Babes” and other dames, but the women themselves are usually femme fatales with “bombshell” bodies, and almost all the characters are sort of seen as “Freaks” : Fat, gay, people of color, sex addicts, dope fiends, all ABnormal, very short (as in “midgets”), or very tall, with “hatchet-faced” or “hawk-faced” or one-eyed or one-armed guys. I saw the same in Ian Fleming’s Bond; all the villains are “physical “freaks” versus the gorgeous straight white upper-middle class martini-drinking male (our hero, what all men must aspire to be).
Many critiques of this basic approach now exist as in women/lesbian/trans detective stories that are in part commentary on the problems in representation in detective stories. But all this to say that in this story, which is an attempt to meld the gothic/horror with the detective story, especially ramps up the “abnormality,” of course; all the characters are “malformed,” odd, weird; in short, everything that the Continental Op is not.
Nevertheless, this is basically a murder mystery (made into a 1978 tv series I never saw), pretty crazy but well-written, in spite of or in some sense because of (!) all the above issues and confusing, at times, but often great fun to read. Not Hammett’s best work, sort of an outlier, but still worth checking out if you are exploring his work.
In The Dain Curse, one of Dashiell Hammett’s “Continental Op” books based (in part!) on his own experience of being, not a detective, but an insurance investigator, Hammett explores one issue some mystery and detective writers have always been interested in (or know some of their readers are interested in): The possibility of psychic or paranormal phenomena. From Sir Arthur Conan Doyle through Agatha Christie, the authors of whodunnits mainly side with the rational, logical, deductive approach to criminal investigation, as far as I can tell. There probably is a paranormal crime sub-genre just as there is a paranormal romance sub-genre, but I am not aware of it. In this one, the unnamed Continental Op(erative, or insurance investigator) thinks psychic stuff is hokum, but he hasn’t met the Dain family!
So, the plot, involving dozens of characters and three different sets of murders focuses (if you can use that word for this plot) on the Continental Op investigating a theft of diamonds from the Leggett family of San Francisco. Along the way to solving all the murders we encounter The Temple of the Holy Grail cult, dope fiends. On the one hand it feels very much like a pulpy mash-up of horror and mystery (see Ed Brubaker’s Fatale as another contemporary example), and on the other hand as a gothic novel, complete with drug-induced hallucinations, dark sexual drives, secret passages, hidden altars used for human sacrifice, bodies falling from cliffs, and so on. The question is whether there is in fact a “curse” or madness or Pure Evil instead of the usual mundane murder motivations such as greed or jealousy.
A key event is the CO attempting to free Gabrielle Leggett (a Dain) fom the religious cult and her addiction to morphine. One issue is whether she is in fact a femme fatale impicated in every death in the book. The cult keeper is a woman named Aaronia (pronounced “Erronia,” as in some version of Just Wrong) Haldorn.
This is kind of an aside but one of the interesting things about most classic noir stories is an area already much written about, that the stories mainly reify heteronormativity and white privilege and also, neurotypicality: The detectives may be lower middle class, they may be alcoholics, but they are smart, witty, reasonably “attractive,” attracted to “Babes” and other dames, but the women themselves are usually femme fatales with “bombshell” bodies, and almost all the characters are sort of seen as “Freaks” : Fat, gay, people of color, sex addicts, dope fiends, all ABnormal, very short (as in “midgets”), or very tall, with “hatchet-faced” or “hawk-faced” or one-eyed or one-armed guys. I saw the same in Ian Fleming’s Bond; all the villains are “physical “freaks” versus the gorgeous straight white upper-middle class martini-drinking male (our hero, what all men must aspire to be).
Many critiques of this basic approach now exist as in women/lesbian/trans detective stories that are in part commentary on the problems in representation in detective stories. But all this to say that in this story, which is an attempt to meld the gothic/horror with the detective story, especially ramps up the “abnormality,” of course; all the characters are “malformed,” odd, weird; in short, everything that the Continental Op is not.
Nevertheless, this is basically a murder mystery (made into a 1978 tv series I never saw), pretty crazy but well-written, in spite of or in some sense because of (!) all the above issues and confusing, at times, but often great fun to read. Not Hammett’s best work, sort of an outlier, but still worth checking out if you are exploring his work.
February 29, 2024
The Dain Curse (1929) was Hammett’s second Continental Op novel following Red Harvest (also 1929). The Dain Curse was originally published in serial format in the Black Mask Magazine in 1928 and 1929 actually in four parts, although the novel form is divided into three parts, the Dains, the Temple, and Quesada. Many years later, it became a television production with James Coburn (1978), where unfortunately the Continental Op is finally given an actual name some fifty years after the Dain Curse was published.
The Continental Op is a private detective whose name is never mentioned of the Continental Detective Agency in San Francisco where he answers to “the Old Man.” Hammett himself was formerly a detective with the Pinkerton Agency out of the Continental Building. He wrote most of his stories while living in San Francisco, the setting for the Dain Curse (at least until the action moves to Quesada, a fictional location eighty miles along the coast from San Francisco).
Reading the Dain Curse in novel form, it is easy to see how it was originally published as a serial. It consists of the three interlinked parts which form one overall story, but each of which contains its own mystery story complete in itself. Recurring characters include the Continental Op (of course), Gabrielle Leggett (of the cursed Dain family by way of her mother), Eric Collinson (Gabrielle’s fiance), and Owen Fitzstephen (a writer and family friend of the Leggets).
Part One introduces the reader to the Dain curse itself as the Continental Op, working for an insurance company, seeks to ferret out the disappearance of some diamonds that Edgar Leggett (a scientist) was lent to see if he could color them the way he had colored glass. They live in an opulent San Francisco mansion, but as we get to know them, we will realize that they have an odd family history that makes the Addams Family look tame by comparison with murder, prison, and the like being par for the course. The blame for the theft seems to fall initially on the maid (Minnie Hershey) who actually plays a part in both parts one and two of the novel. She is often referred to as a “mulatto” who lives in “Darktown” with a boyfriend who is little more than a poolhall hustler. But the Continental Op keeps at it as the Leggetts, by turn, seem to fall upon themselves in utter despair and turn against each other. Part one ends in a manner which would lead the reader initially to believe that it has fully concluded and that the rest of the book is unrelated.
Part two focuses on Gabrielle, who is a dope addict and a cult member and believes she suffers from a horrible family curses that wreaks havoc on anyone close to her. All the action here takes place inside the Temple, a sort of cult mansion where the operators prey on the rich and lonely, keeping them doped up and pranking them with ghosts and fog and the like. The Continental Op’s job is merely to watch over Gabrielle who is in quite a fragile state. He is barely competent at this as the bloody corpses pile up around her. Again, part two (the Temple) ends as if the entire mystery were solved and completed which makes sense as it was originally published separately as were all the parts.
Part three continues the twisted saga of Gabrielle and the Continental Op. Gabrielle is now married to the big dope who keeps getting in the Continental Op’s way in parts one and two, Eric Collinson. Here, all the action pretty much takes place in Quesada, a coastal hamlet eighty miles from San Francisco and having no relation to any location currently on the map. It is a small town along the cliffs and the Continental Op receives a telegram or a call from Collinson to come immediately to the small town where the newlyweds have secluded themselves to escape the media. But the small rural town is no safer for Gabrielle and Eric than the big city as the Continental Op keeps stumbling on corpses and kidnappers are leaving ransom demands and small-town jealousies and infidelities impede the investigation. It all comes to a startling conclusion as the Continental Op finally puts together the entire mystery, linking together the three parts and putting an end to the curse.
All in all, the Dain Curse is an outstanding mystery story even though the parts seem oddly disconnected because they were originally shorter stories.
The Continental Op is a private detective whose name is never mentioned of the Continental Detective Agency in San Francisco where he answers to “the Old Man.” Hammett himself was formerly a detective with the Pinkerton Agency out of the Continental Building. He wrote most of his stories while living in San Francisco, the setting for the Dain Curse (at least until the action moves to Quesada, a fictional location eighty miles along the coast from San Francisco).
Reading the Dain Curse in novel form, it is easy to see how it was originally published as a serial. It consists of the three interlinked parts which form one overall story, but each of which contains its own mystery story complete in itself. Recurring characters include the Continental Op (of course), Gabrielle Leggett (of the cursed Dain family by way of her mother), Eric Collinson (Gabrielle’s fiance), and Owen Fitzstephen (a writer and family friend of the Leggets).
Part One introduces the reader to the Dain curse itself as the Continental Op, working for an insurance company, seeks to ferret out the disappearance of some diamonds that Edgar Leggett (a scientist) was lent to see if he could color them the way he had colored glass. They live in an opulent San Francisco mansion, but as we get to know them, we will realize that they have an odd family history that makes the Addams Family look tame by comparison with murder, prison, and the like being par for the course. The blame for the theft seems to fall initially on the maid (Minnie Hershey) who actually plays a part in both parts one and two of the novel. She is often referred to as a “mulatto” who lives in “Darktown” with a boyfriend who is little more than a poolhall hustler. But the Continental Op keeps at it as the Leggetts, by turn, seem to fall upon themselves in utter despair and turn against each other. Part one ends in a manner which would lead the reader initially to believe that it has fully concluded and that the rest of the book is unrelated.
Part two focuses on Gabrielle, who is a dope addict and a cult member and believes she suffers from a horrible family curses that wreaks havoc on anyone close to her. All the action here takes place inside the Temple, a sort of cult mansion where the operators prey on the rich and lonely, keeping them doped up and pranking them with ghosts and fog and the like. The Continental Op’s job is merely to watch over Gabrielle who is in quite a fragile state. He is barely competent at this as the bloody corpses pile up around her. Again, part two (the Temple) ends as if the entire mystery were solved and completed which makes sense as it was originally published separately as were all the parts.
Part three continues the twisted saga of Gabrielle and the Continental Op. Gabrielle is now married to the big dope who keeps getting in the Continental Op’s way in parts one and two, Eric Collinson. Here, all the action pretty much takes place in Quesada, a coastal hamlet eighty miles from San Francisco and having no relation to any location currently on the map. It is a small town along the cliffs and the Continental Op receives a telegram or a call from Collinson to come immediately to the small town where the newlyweds have secluded themselves to escape the media. But the small rural town is no safer for Gabrielle and Eric than the big city as the Continental Op keeps stumbling on corpses and kidnappers are leaving ransom demands and small-town jealousies and infidelities impede the investigation. It all comes to a startling conclusion as the Continental Op finally puts together the entire mystery, linking together the three parts and putting an end to the curse.
All in all, the Dain Curse is an outstanding mystery story even though the parts seem oddly disconnected because they were originally shorter stories.
August 12, 2014
Towards the end of The Dain Curse, a female character tells the Continental Op affectionately that he is "a monster. A nice one, an especially nice one to have around when you're in trouble, but a monster just the same, without any human foolishness like love in him." While in fact he may have a bit more human foolishness than she gives him credit for, this does sum up the essence of Hammett's anti-hero. Unlike the romantic chess-playing Marlowe and even-keeled Archer who'd follow him, the Continental Op is a short, fat, unattractive beast whose only conquest is the case he's paid to solve.
For me one of the more striking attributes of the Op was his intense, nasty, and thoroughly unapologetic racism. The language and attitudes in this book towards non-white characters, particularly women, are pretty shocking to the modern reader's ostensibly jaded sensibilities. This is one of the main reasons I love old crime fiction, though: for its detailed depiction of the mores of times that have passed. Retrospective representations of old-timey American racism usually seem unrealistic: those racists are villains and their attitudes are supposed to illustrate a moral point. In The Dain Curse, the Op's racism is just taken for granted, and the vulgarity and violence of its expression (as when he instructs another operative to rough up "the mulatto" in order to scare her) is just supposed to be part of what makes him hardboiled.
Maybe reading old crime novels isn't the most responsible way to learn social history, but it is one of the most fun. In addition to showing multi-ethnic 1920s California with all its unpleasantness and white supremacy, this book -- like all twentieth-century crime fiction -- is fascinating for the contrast it illustrates between privacy now and then. It always fascinates me to read about a world where people's home addresses were common knowledge and easily shared, but where no one needed a social security number (no one had a social security number!) to rent an apartment or turn on the lights, there weren't many photographs floating around, and there was nothing really to stop a person from moving to a new city and setting up a life under a new name.
More specific to this book was its period depiction of substance use, in particular of opioid addiction. There is a pretty remarkable sequence of morphine detox, and I found this, and the sympathetic junkie character, a lot more down-to-earth and less sensational than most more modern treatments of the subject.
In terms of this book's plot, it's pretty ridiculous and not one of those brilliantly satisfying, all-comes-together-brilliantly-like-a-puzzle type things, but personally I don't care so much about that. I really liked the structure, which was three major sections in which tons of people were killed and then the case would seem to be solved but the Op was not satisfied that all was really concluded as neatly as it seemed, and he'd be proven right when the murders inevitably started up again. On the whole, I found the book very engaging and fun and satisfying to read. I think I might've read it already, years and years ago, but I don't really remember. I probably won't remember this time very well soon either, but it was a good summer read and now I'm on to the next book in my crime spree, having finally recalled that there's no point in my trying to read anything except that during this time of the year.
For me one of the more striking attributes of the Op was his intense, nasty, and thoroughly unapologetic racism. The language and attitudes in this book towards non-white characters, particularly women, are pretty shocking to the modern reader's ostensibly jaded sensibilities. This is one of the main reasons I love old crime fiction, though: for its detailed depiction of the mores of times that have passed. Retrospective representations of old-timey American racism usually seem unrealistic: those racists are villains and their attitudes are supposed to illustrate a moral point. In The Dain Curse, the Op's racism is just taken for granted, and the vulgarity and violence of its expression (as when he instructs another operative to rough up "the mulatto" in order to scare her) is just supposed to be part of what makes him hardboiled.
Maybe reading old crime novels isn't the most responsible way to learn social history, but it is one of the most fun. In addition to showing multi-ethnic 1920s California with all its unpleasantness and white supremacy, this book -- like all twentieth-century crime fiction -- is fascinating for the contrast it illustrates between privacy now and then. It always fascinates me to read about a world where people's home addresses were common knowledge and easily shared, but where no one needed a social security number (no one had a social security number!) to rent an apartment or turn on the lights, there weren't many photographs floating around, and there was nothing really to stop a person from moving to a new city and setting up a life under a new name.
More specific to this book was its period depiction of substance use, in particular of opioid addiction. There is a pretty remarkable sequence of morphine detox, and I found this, and the sympathetic junkie character, a lot more down-to-earth and less sensational than most more modern treatments of the subject.
In terms of this book's plot, it's pretty ridiculous and not one of those brilliantly satisfying, all-comes-together-brilliantly-like-a-puzzle type things, but personally I don't care so much about that. I really liked the structure, which was three major sections in which tons of people were killed and then the case would seem to be solved but the Op was not satisfied that all was really concluded as neatly as it seemed, and he'd be proven right when the murders inevitably started up again. On the whole, I found the book very engaging and fun and satisfying to read. I think I might've read it already, years and years ago, but I don't really remember. I probably won't remember this time very well soon either, but it was a good summer read and now I'm on to the next book in my crime spree, having finally recalled that there's no point in my trying to read anything except that during this time of the year.
April 15, 2020
Hammett is all business when it comes to his Continental Ops stories, The Dain Curse included, which started out as several separately published stories in the crime pulps. The gruff, short, overweight, middle aged detective remains nameless, his background and personal life a mystery. He gets to work at 9am, piles up a big, hairy mess of clues, and uses his shrewd wit and intuition to bull through them, the hard nosed professional, yet with an occasional flash of heart and compassion.
September 13, 2019
The Continental Op is brought in after some diamonds go missing, but instead of solving a simple case of theft he ends up embroiled in the on-going troubles of a disturbed young woman who believes herself to be the victim of a family curse.
This certainly isn’t the best Hammett you can read, but it’s not bad. The plot is all over the place and doesn’t make much sense, but the main appeal is the attitude of the Op who still shines as the cynical private detective who has seen it all.
This certainly isn’t the best Hammett you can read, but it’s not bad. The plot is all over the place and doesn’t make much sense, but the main appeal is the attitude of the Op who still shines as the cynical private detective who has seen it all.
September 3, 2021
CRITIQUE:
Three's Enough for a Quartet
I plunged straight into "The Dain Curse" after thoroughly enjoying "The Maltese Falcon".
I wondered what resemblances there might be, but I was disappointed not to find any of much significance.
Hammett initially wrote "The Dain Curse" in the form of four stories, which were serialised in "The Black Mask" between November, 1928 and February, 1929. The novel itself was published in July, 1929. By then, Hammett had already finished the manuscript for "The Maltese Falcon". So it seems that he was writing it at the same time he was working on the edit of "The Dain Curse".
Notwithstanding its quaternary genesis, the novel is split into three sections:
1. The burglary and murders at the Leggett's residence;
2. The murders at the Temple of the Holy Grail; and
3. The murders at Quesada.
In the first section, Hammett dumps considerable factual material and multiple characters on the page, and then, in the fashion of Edgar Allan Poe, sets out to discover a manner in which to shape them into a story. He continues to introduce dozens of new characters throughout the novel, a practice that his editor questioned.
To help Hammett accomplish his task, he recruits a narrator (the unnamed Continental Op) and a (fictional?) novelist (Owen Fitzstephan).
The two characters had met each other five years before, when the op was investigating a chain of fake mediums who had defrauded a wealthy widow:
Apart from his familiarity with the subject matter, Fitzstephan gives the op some guidance as to how to structure his (i.e., Hammett's) tale:
The op responds, "We don't do it that way...You're a story-writer. I can't trust you not to build up on what I tell you...with explanations and descriptions that explain and describe nothing. I hope you don't think any of what you've said means anything to me."
After listening to the op recite his own version of the facts, Fitzstephan says, "That's trivial, dull. I've been thinking of Leggett in terms of Dumas, and you bring me a piece of gimcrackery out of O. Henry."
He explains that "I'm a novelist [whose] business is with souls and what goes on in them."
In contrast, the op says, "We're different...I do mine with the object of putting people in jail, and I get paid for it, though not as much as I should."
Fitzstephan counters, "That's not different...I do mine with the object of putting people in books, and I get paid for it, though not as much as I should."
So authors and ops (the two sides of Hammett's character) have something in common after all.
"Two Buts and an If"
After reporting a burglary of eight diamonds, Edgar Leggett is found dead in his laboratory, where he has supposedly committed suicide. On the table is a hand-written note addressed to "the police", which pretends to confess to his true identity, and to his murder of his first wife, Lily, in Paris, and his subsequent marriage to her sister, Alice. He escaped from jail and fled to Venezuela, where he killed a fellow-worker, ostensibly in self-defence, before escaping once again to the United States.
Alice used a private detective to track him to San Francisco, where he lived until his death. A work associate of the detective tries to blackmail him, and Leggett kills both of them, fearing his own discovery.
The op refuses to take the note at face value, believing that Leggett has actually been murdered. At first, he accuses Alice of his murder. Alice was also responsible for killing her sister, Lily, although it's possible that Alice coached Lily's daughter, Gabrielle, to kill her with a pistol, when she was only five. Alice herself incriminates Gabrielle and, by extension, herself.
To the extent that this is the op's tale, he has mastered the skill of convolution, or what Fitzstephan calls "two buts and an if".
The Temple of the Holy Grail
The first story ends there, with the revelation of
the history of the Dain family curse (Lily, Alice and Gabrielle were all members of the Dain family).
After the closure of the Leggett file and the court cases, Gabrielle gets implicated in a cult surrounding the Temple of the Holy Grail (it promotes itself as the revival of an old Gaelic church, dating from King Arthur's time). Gabrielle's become addicted to morphine, so it's difficult to assess the veracity of her confession that she has used a dagger to kill her doctor (Riese) at the temple. The op's investigation takes him into surroundings that are more like the set of a Gothic horror movie fuelled by a perfumed gaseous drug.
Although the op is doped himself, he is astute enough to recognise that "as soon as I saw Riese's body I knew she hadn't killed him."
So, if Gabrielle wasn't responsible, who was? Suspicion turns to Joseph Haldorn.
Fitzstephan remarks, "I see...Joseph is dead, so Joseph did everything. How will you get around that?"
Tiresome Mysteries
The third story follows Gabriele to the one-hotel town of Quesada eighty miles north of San Francisco overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
While staying in a small beachside cottage, the Dain Curse strikes again, and Gabrielle's new husband, Eric Collinson, is pushed off a cliff and dies.
Once again, Gabrielle claims responsibility for the death, but she's an unreliable protagonist.
Fitzstephan says to the op, "You advanced the theory that there was some connecting link between her parents' deaths and the trouble she had at the Haldorns'; but, as I recall it, you had no idea what the link might be. Don't you think that deficiency has a tendency to make your theory a little - say - vaporous?"
"It doesn't make sense," the op responded. "It's dizzy. When we grab our man - or woman - we're going to find it's a goof..."
Fitzstephan replies, "That...is characteristic of you. You're stumped, bewildered, flabbergasted. Do you admit you've met your master, have run into a criminal too wily for you? Not you. He's outwitted you: therefore he's an idiot or a lunatic. Now really. Of course there's a certain unexpected modesty to that attitude...Nobody's mysteries ought to be as tiresome as you're making this one."
Surely it's time somebody threw a bomb into the plot...and they do!
But, as you might expect by now, it serves mainly to "show [Gabrielle] that your curse is a lot of hooey."
Soon, the op confronts the person who he thinks was responsible, and says, "There was, as you agreed, one mind behind all Gabrielle's troubles. You're the one person who has that sort of mind, whose connection with each episode can be traced, and who has the necessary motive."
Its principal flaw is that there are too many characters, too many victims, too many suspects and too many hypotheses, though I enjoyed the proto-metafictional interaction between the Continental Op and Fitzstephan.
HOMAGE TO OWEN FITZSTEPHAN, WRITER:
When Dash Hammett got hold of my story, he not only split it into three or four separate but related stories, but he split me, my life, my character, into two characters, the nameless Continental Op (who would become the narrator of "The Dain Curse") and the remnants of me (who would become just the writer).
In truth, I was already both of these characters in one person, for I was both a Continental Operative and a novelist on each of the two or three occasions we met and knew each other well. However, Dash turned both characters into his alter egos for the purposes of his novel and, later, for the purposes of his biography. So, in his hands, at his fingertips, my biography became his.
Not satisfied with the split, Dash proceeded to canonise one character and demonise the other. He would make a hero of the Op and a villain of the writer, when of course I was neither hero nor villain, just a literary factotum in the "literary grift", as he liked to call it. Admittedly, I was both a saint and a sinner, and couldn't have experienced, let alone written, my own story (and therefore effectively created "The Dain Curse"), unless I was both.
Dash must have truly scorned me to do all this. He never gave me any inkling that this was his opinion or his intention. In retrospect, if you cared enough to ask him, he would probably put it down to some form of poetic licence.
Still, I hardly think that any kind of licence would justify an author demeaning a gentleman in the terms that Dash did me. Judge for yourself:
Well, I suppose that's what people call damning with faint praise, but nobody ever questioned my work ethic or interpreted my demeanour as laziness (feigned or not), certainly not my agency, my editor or my publisher. I suspect Dash just envied my bohemian spirit and well-heeled peer group, like any heavily-drilled sergeant in the army would. Even sorrel describes his own hair colour (before it went silver-grey) more than mine (which was as blonde as Sam Spade's). And even if I was bohemian, I was always stylishly dressed. You had to be in New York publishing circles.
I think the underlying problem was that Dash thought my novels were too literary (i.e., more literary than his). He didn't even venture to read them, because, he once told me, "I was afraid I'd read them and understand them, and then you'd have felt insulted."
As if that wasn't bad enough, he alleged that the critical consensus with respect to one of my novels was that it "bore all the better known indications of authorial degeneracy." What a conceited put down! As if that wasn't enough, he turned my supposed degeneracy into some debauched form of insanity.
They might have called him the dean of the hard-boiled school of fiction, but he still craved success as a more high-brow writer like me, not that I was ever more than modestly successful in commercial terms. Still, I never had a book rejected by my publisher, and I remained a one publisher author until I had to retire from writing after my car accident.
It's weird that when he learned of my accident, he chose to have a character in his book try to kill me with a bomb. I mean, in a work of detective fiction, not a war story, for crying out loud!
Maybe it was Dash's way of trying to put a curse on me.
SOUNDTRACK:
Three's Enough for a Quartet
I plunged straight into "The Dain Curse" after thoroughly enjoying "The Maltese Falcon".
I wondered what resemblances there might be, but I was disappointed not to find any of much significance.
Hammett initially wrote "The Dain Curse" in the form of four stories, which were serialised in "The Black Mask" between November, 1928 and February, 1929. The novel itself was published in July, 1929. By then, Hammett had already finished the manuscript for "The Maltese Falcon". So it seems that he was writing it at the same time he was working on the edit of "The Dain Curse".
Notwithstanding its quaternary genesis, the novel is split into three sections:
1. The burglary and murders at the Leggett's residence;
2. The murders at the Temple of the Holy Grail; and
3. The murders at Quesada.
In the first section, Hammett dumps considerable factual material and multiple characters on the page, and then, in the fashion of Edgar Allan Poe, sets out to discover a manner in which to shape them into a story. He continues to introduce dozens of new characters throughout the novel, a practice that his editor questioned.
To help Hammett accomplish his task, he recruits a narrator (the unnamed Continental Op) and a (fictional?) novelist (Owen Fitzstephan).
The two characters had met each other five years before, when the op was investigating a chain of fake mediums who had defrauded a wealthy widow:
"Fitzstephan was ploughing the same field for literary material. We became acquainted and pooled forces. I got more out of the combination than he did, since he knew the spook racket inside and out."
Apart from his familiarity with the subject matter, Fitzstephan gives the op some guidance as to how to structure his (i.e., Hammett's) tale:
"Come on, out with it. Don't try to be subtle with me, my son; that's not your style at all. Try it and you're sunk."
The op responds, "We don't do it that way...You're a story-writer. I can't trust you not to build up on what I tell you...with explanations and descriptions that explain and describe nothing. I hope you don't think any of what you've said means anything to me."
After listening to the op recite his own version of the facts, Fitzstephan says, "That's trivial, dull. I've been thinking of Leggett in terms of Dumas, and you bring me a piece of gimcrackery out of O. Henry."
He explains that "I'm a novelist [whose] business is with souls and what goes on in them."
In contrast, the op says, "We're different...I do mine with the object of putting people in jail, and I get paid for it, though not as much as I should."
Fitzstephan counters, "That's not different...I do mine with the object of putting people in books, and I get paid for it, though not as much as I should."
So authors and ops (the two sides of Hammett's character) have something in common after all.
"Two Buts and an If"
After reporting a burglary of eight diamonds, Edgar Leggett is found dead in his laboratory, where he has supposedly committed suicide. On the table is a hand-written note addressed to "the police", which pretends to confess to his true identity, and to his murder of his first wife, Lily, in Paris, and his subsequent marriage to her sister, Alice. He escaped from jail and fled to Venezuela, where he killed a fellow-worker, ostensibly in self-defence, before escaping once again to the United States.
Alice used a private detective to track him to San Francisco, where he lived until his death. A work associate of the detective tries to blackmail him, and Leggett kills both of them, fearing his own discovery.
The op refuses to take the note at face value, believing that Leggett has actually been murdered. At first, he accuses Alice of his murder. Alice was also responsible for killing her sister, Lily, although it's possible that Alice coached Lily's daughter, Gabrielle, to kill her with a pistol, when she was only five. Alice herself incriminates Gabrielle and, by extension, herself.
To the extent that this is the op's tale, he has mastered the skill of convolution, or what Fitzstephan calls "two buts and an if".
The Temple of the Holy Grail
The first story ends there, with the revelation of
the history of the Dain family curse (Lily, Alice and Gabrielle were all members of the Dain family).
After the closure of the Leggett file and the court cases, Gabrielle gets implicated in a cult surrounding the Temple of the Holy Grail (it promotes itself as the revival of an old Gaelic church, dating from King Arthur's time). Gabrielle's become addicted to morphine, so it's difficult to assess the veracity of her confession that she has used a dagger to kill her doctor (Riese) at the temple. The op's investigation takes him into surroundings that are more like the set of a Gothic horror movie fuelled by a perfumed gaseous drug.
Although the op is doped himself, he is astute enough to recognise that "as soon as I saw Riese's body I knew she hadn't killed him."
So, if Gabrielle wasn't responsible, who was? Suspicion turns to Joseph Haldorn.
Fitzstephan remarks, "I see...Joseph is dead, so Joseph did everything. How will you get around that?"
Tiresome Mysteries
The third story follows Gabriele to the one-hotel town of Quesada eighty miles north of San Francisco overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
While staying in a small beachside cottage, the Dain Curse strikes again, and Gabrielle's new husband, Eric Collinson, is pushed off a cliff and dies.
Once again, Gabrielle claims responsibility for the death, but she's an unreliable protagonist.
Fitzstephan says to the op, "You advanced the theory that there was some connecting link between her parents' deaths and the trouble she had at the Haldorns'; but, as I recall it, you had no idea what the link might be. Don't you think that deficiency has a tendency to make your theory a little - say - vaporous?"
"It doesn't make sense," the op responded. "It's dizzy. When we grab our man - or woman - we're going to find it's a goof..."
Fitzstephan replies, "That...is characteristic of you. You're stumped, bewildered, flabbergasted. Do you admit you've met your master, have run into a criminal too wily for you? Not you. He's outwitted you: therefore he's an idiot or a lunatic. Now really. Of course there's a certain unexpected modesty to that attitude...Nobody's mysteries ought to be as tiresome as you're making this one."
Surely it's time somebody threw a bomb into the plot...and they do!
But, as you might expect by now, it serves mainly to "show [Gabrielle] that your curse is a lot of hooey."
Soon, the op confronts the person who he thinks was responsible, and says, "There was, as you agreed, one mind behind all Gabrielle's troubles. You're the one person who has that sort of mind, whose connection with each episode can be traced, and who has the necessary motive."
"And so [ended] the Great Dain Curse."
Its principal flaw is that there are too many characters, too many victims, too many suspects and too many hypotheses, though I enjoyed the proto-metafictional interaction between the Continental Op and Fitzstephan.
HOMAGE TO OWEN FITZSTEPHAN, WRITER:
When Dash Hammett got hold of my story, he not only split it into three or four separate but related stories, but he split me, my life, my character, into two characters, the nameless Continental Op (who would become the narrator of "The Dain Curse") and the remnants of me (who would become just the writer).
In truth, I was already both of these characters in one person, for I was both a Continental Operative and a novelist on each of the two or three occasions we met and knew each other well. However, Dash turned both characters into his alter egos for the purposes of his novel and, later, for the purposes of his biography. So, in his hands, at his fingertips, my biography became his.
Not satisfied with the split, Dash proceeded to canonise one character and demonise the other. He would make a hero of the Op and a villain of the writer, when of course I was neither hero nor villain, just a literary factotum in the "literary grift", as he liked to call it. Admittedly, I was both a saint and a sinner, and couldn't have experienced, let alone written, my own story (and therefore effectively created "The Dain Curse"), unless I was both.
Dash must have truly scorned me to do all this. He never gave me any inkling that this was his opinion or his intention. In retrospect, if you cared enough to ask him, he would probably put it down to some form of poetic licence.
Still, I hardly think that any kind of licence would justify an author demeaning a gentleman in the terms that Dash did me. Judge for yourself:
"I remembered Fitzstephan as a long, lean, sorrel-haired man of thirty-two, with sleepy grey eyes, a wide, humorous mouth, and carelessly worn clothes; a man who pretended to be lazier than he was, would rather talk than do anything else, and had a lot of what seemed to be accurate information and original ideas on any subject that happened to come up, as long as it was a little out of the ordinary."
Well, I suppose that's what people call damning with faint praise, but nobody ever questioned my work ethic or interpreted my demeanour as laziness (feigned or not), certainly not my agency, my editor or my publisher. I suspect Dash just envied my bohemian spirit and well-heeled peer group, like any heavily-drilled sergeant in the army would. Even sorrel describes his own hair colour (before it went silver-grey) more than mine (which was as blonde as Sam Spade's). And even if I was bohemian, I was always stylishly dressed. You had to be in New York publishing circles.
I think the underlying problem was that Dash thought my novels were too literary (i.e., more literary than his). He didn't even venture to read them, because, he once told me, "I was afraid I'd read them and understand them, and then you'd have felt insulted."
As if that wasn't bad enough, he alleged that the critical consensus with respect to one of my novels was that it "bore all the better known indications of authorial degeneracy." What a conceited put down! As if that wasn't enough, he turned my supposed degeneracy into some debauched form of insanity.
They might have called him the dean of the hard-boiled school of fiction, but he still craved success as a more high-brow writer like me, not that I was ever more than modestly successful in commercial terms. Still, I never had a book rejected by my publisher, and I remained a one publisher author until I had to retire from writing after my car accident.
It's weird that when he learned of my accident, he chose to have a character in his book try to kill me with a bomb. I mean, in a work of detective fiction, not a war story, for crying out loud!
Maybe it was Dash's way of trying to put a curse on me.
SOUNDTRACK:
September 29, 2016
The best books dissolve in your hands. You get so caught up in them you don't recall moving your eyes over the lines of print or turning the pages. When a good read is open you're a thousand miles away and a hundred years ago. Unfortunately, The Dain Curse (1929) isn't that type of read. You never forget it's a book because of how it bounces when you throw it against the wall.
It starts off like dozens of other mysteries: a home is broken into and some diamonds go missing. The Continental Op is called in to investigate. The thief turns up eventually, and so do the skeletons in the closet, the bats in the belfry, and the bodies in the basement. San Francisco is transformed into a morgue and the carnage spills over into the surrounding counties. At the center of this whirlpool of death and insanity is Gabrielle Leggett, a young woman who's convinced that a family curse is responsible for destroying everyone she is close to. The Op has to recover not only the diamonds but also the young woman's wits.
Hammett's plain, terse style creates an air of verisimilitude in the first few chapters. You may be reminded of Hemingway. But Hemingway got away with this type of writing because he was interested in creating characters, and he understood understatement. Hammett works with stick figures and tries to counterbalance his spare prose with bizarre and over-the-top twists and turns in the plot. Everybody has a name, a gat in the pocket, and a secret to hide. When things get too quiet, Hammett either introduces half a dozen new characters or he just chucks another corpse on the heap. You'll be stymied trying to keep track of who's who. And what a variety of murders. You'd think Hammett was about to move on to another genre and was cleaning out the ice box.
So read The Dain Curse as pure pulp fiction, the kind that sticks in your teeth. You may be frustrated with the long "confessions" that tried to make sense of an otherwise almost incomprehensible plot. The body count is ridiculous. But in the end you may come to like the Op and enjoy the book for its zaniness and its strong period feel.
It starts off like dozens of other mysteries: a home is broken into and some diamonds go missing. The Continental Op is called in to investigate. The thief turns up eventually, and so do the skeletons in the closet, the bats in the belfry, and the bodies in the basement. San Francisco is transformed into a morgue and the carnage spills over into the surrounding counties. At the center of this whirlpool of death and insanity is Gabrielle Leggett, a young woman who's convinced that a family curse is responsible for destroying everyone she is close to. The Op has to recover not only the diamonds but also the young woman's wits.
Hammett's plain, terse style creates an air of verisimilitude in the first few chapters. You may be reminded of Hemingway. But Hemingway got away with this type of writing because he was interested in creating characters, and he understood understatement. Hammett works with stick figures and tries to counterbalance his spare prose with bizarre and over-the-top twists and turns in the plot. Everybody has a name, a gat in the pocket, and a secret to hide. When things get too quiet, Hammett either introduces half a dozen new characters or he just chucks another corpse on the heap. You'll be stymied trying to keep track of who's who. And what a variety of murders. You'd think Hammett was about to move on to another genre and was cleaning out the ice box.
So read The Dain Curse as pure pulp fiction, the kind that sticks in your teeth. You may be frustrated with the long "confessions" that tried to make sense of an otherwise almost incomprehensible plot. The body count is ridiculous. But in the end you may come to like the Op and enjoy the book for its zaniness and its strong period feel.
May 30, 2017
Hammett's first stab at crime fiction as literature (possibly the first ever), the last appearance of the Continental Op and the most misunderstood of his novels.
While every other Op tale was a straight-ahead tough guy detective story, this book is an elaborate satire of three things: 1) the English tea-cozy mystery novel, where at the climax everyone all the characters are gathered in the parlor while the detective explains what happens, 2) the weird menace horror stories like Lovecraft's that were the primary competitor of the crime pulps and 3) the contempt that "real" literary authors had for his work.
So the novel includes such bizarre set-pieces as a parlor scene that does not end in the traditional British manner; a scene where the Op fistfights God; and repeated scenes where literary author Owen Fitzstephan mocks the crimes the Op investigates and his true to life detective methods as boring writing material. The fact that both the Op and Fitzstephan are obviously aspects of Hammett himself makes it even weirder.
The only one of his novels that was not a smash hit with critics, it sadly led him to abandon the Op forever, Hammett no longer believing that a series character would be taken seriously as literature.
While every other Op tale was a straight-ahead tough guy detective story, this book is an elaborate satire of three things: 1) the English tea-cozy mystery novel, where at the climax everyone all the characters are gathered in the parlor while the detective explains what happens, 2) the weird menace horror stories like Lovecraft's that were the primary competitor of the crime pulps and 3) the contempt that "real" literary authors had for his work.
So the novel includes such bizarre set-pieces as a parlor scene that does not end in the traditional British manner; a scene where the Op fistfights God; and repeated scenes where literary author Owen Fitzstephan mocks the crimes the Op investigates and his true to life detective methods as boring writing material. The fact that both the Op and Fitzstephan are obviously aspects of Hammett himself makes it even weirder.
The only one of his novels that was not a smash hit with critics, it sadly led him to abandon the Op forever, Hammett no longer believing that a series character would be taken seriously as literature.
March 30, 2023
“[…] I hadn’t made such a total mess of that first job: my efficiency offset my brutality […]”
What the Clint Eastwood persona is often to the western, Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op is to the world of hard-boiled novels – a disillusioned, tough guy, whose heart is hard to touch but whose sense of justice is not yet entirely deadened so that he often uses questionable methods to see to it that a criminal gets his comeuppance. Not many of us would probably take pleasure in being called brutal but efficient, though the Continental Op most certainly does. Later in the novel, he gets another two-edged compliment by the female protagonist Gabrielle Leggett, whom he helps overcome her addiction to morphine, when she says,
That’s how we are supposed to see the Continental Op, the man who is so aloof from us all that we never even get to know his name, and who still shares his every thought with us, the man who can be equally callous and caring but who chooses to make light of the latter quality as when he downplays the sincerity that makes him help Gabrielle wean herself from her daily dose of dope.
My favourite detective of this ilk is still Philip Marlowe because there is a lot more depth to his character than to the Continental Op’s, and I also enjoy reading Raymond Chandler much more than I do reading Hammett because of the former’s inimitable style and the sense of bitter melancholy that pervades his prose. Still, there is also a lot to say for Dashiell Hammett, especially if you enjoy fast-moving, eventful crime stories, and The Dain Curse is certainly one of those, because the Continental Op has to deal with a number of crimes that all seem to centre on young Gabrielle Leggett, namely a case of jewellery theft, the mysterious occurrences in an esoteric sect meant to plunder rich and gullible people, and a kidnapping. Apart from that, Gabrielle is firmly convinced that she is under the spell of a family curse because by and by all the people around her, for example her father, her stepmother and her newlywed husband, die like flies. Cause of death: Murder.
The Dain Curse has quite an interesting structure in that it falls into three separate parts, each of which centres on one or several crimes somehow linked with Gabrielle, and at the end of each part, the Continental Op presents us with a solution. The fascinating thing, however, is that the detective himself is never quite satisfied with what he comes up with by way of a background story to these acts of evil, and he says that one may certainly take up his mental concoction and regard it as the solution to the crime but that this is an act of belief in the end. In the course of events, one theory will replace or partly alter its predecessor, and this struck me as rather odd for the mystery genre in that its reader generally expects an infallible resolution which will answer all questions. Where there is a mystery, there must also be a truth behind it – period! It seems, though, that the Continental Op’s off-hand dismissal of the notion of somebody being able to explain all facets of a crime challenges this notion of neatness to a certain extent, making the reader aware of the fact that in real life it is sometimes quite difficult, maybe even impossible, to tell what really happened, let alone why. It is this building and re-building of theories that makes The Dain Curse an intriguing read, in addition to the penny dreadful quality of the story itself. And let’s face it, the solutions offered by our protagonist are quite as outlandish and downright crazy as the mysteries they are supposed to explain.
What the Clint Eastwood persona is often to the western, Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op is to the world of hard-boiled novels – a disillusioned, tough guy, whose heart is hard to touch but whose sense of justice is not yet entirely deadened so that he often uses questionable methods to see to it that a criminal gets his comeuppance. Not many of us would probably take pleasure in being called brutal but efficient, though the Continental Op most certainly does. Later in the novel, he gets another two-edged compliment by the female protagonist Gabrielle Leggett, whom he helps overcome her addiction to morphine, when she says,
”’[…] I believed you until you came in just now, and then I saw – ‘ She stopped.
‘Saw what?’
‘A monster. A nice one, an especially nice one to have around when you’re in trouble, but a monster just the same, without any human foolishness like love in him […]’”
That’s how we are supposed to see the Continental Op, the man who is so aloof from us all that we never even get to know his name, and who still shares his every thought with us, the man who can be equally callous and caring but who chooses to make light of the latter quality as when he downplays the sincerity that makes him help Gabrielle wean herself from her daily dose of dope.
My favourite detective of this ilk is still Philip Marlowe because there is a lot more depth to his character than to the Continental Op’s, and I also enjoy reading Raymond Chandler much more than I do reading Hammett because of the former’s inimitable style and the sense of bitter melancholy that pervades his prose. Still, there is also a lot to say for Dashiell Hammett, especially if you enjoy fast-moving, eventful crime stories, and The Dain Curse is certainly one of those, because the Continental Op has to deal with a number of crimes that all seem to centre on young Gabrielle Leggett, namely a case of jewellery theft, the mysterious occurrences in an esoteric sect meant to plunder rich and gullible people, and a kidnapping. Apart from that, Gabrielle is firmly convinced that she is under the spell of a family curse because by and by all the people around her, for example her father, her stepmother and her newlywed husband, die like flies. Cause of death: Murder.
The Dain Curse has quite an interesting structure in that it falls into three separate parts, each of which centres on one or several crimes somehow linked with Gabrielle, and at the end of each part, the Continental Op presents us with a solution. The fascinating thing, however, is that the detective himself is never quite satisfied with what he comes up with by way of a background story to these acts of evil, and he says that one may certainly take up his mental concoction and regard it as the solution to the crime but that this is an act of belief in the end. In the course of events, one theory will replace or partly alter its predecessor, and this struck me as rather odd for the mystery genre in that its reader generally expects an infallible resolution which will answer all questions. Where there is a mystery, there must also be a truth behind it – period! It seems, though, that the Continental Op’s off-hand dismissal of the notion of somebody being able to explain all facets of a crime challenges this notion of neatness to a certain extent, making the reader aware of the fact that in real life it is sometimes quite difficult, maybe even impossible, to tell what really happened, let alone why. It is this building and re-building of theories that makes The Dain Curse an intriguing read, in addition to the penny dreadful quality of the story itself. And let’s face it, the solutions offered by our protagonist are quite as outlandish and downright crazy as the mysteries they are supposed to explain.
April 7, 2017
This is a great hard-boiled story. I really enjoyed the read - the Continental Op deals with a true femme fatale here, and it is classic hard-boiled. Purists will no doubt continue to assert that Hammett is the master of the sub-genre, but I will continue to disagree. I find Chandler and Macdonald more pithy and succinct. By comparison, sections of this novel were a little wordy. Nonetheless, a great read, and it is always fascinating to go back to the originator of the hard-boiled sub-genre. Reading this one, you can really appreciate where Chandler and Macdonald got their influences from.
December 24, 2023
After having success by mashing up some of his Continental Op stories into the hard-boiled classic novel Red Harvest, Hammett tries to repeat the trick again but falls far short. The Continental Op character is a favorite of those who enjoy classic detective stories from the Prohibition Era, but this novel gets off to a bad start by trying to build around a young woman who suffers from heroin addiction and is said to bear a family curse that befouls her acquaintances. The plot feels too episodic and jumpy, and rather than being an enjoyable revelation the ending merely provides relief that the whole thing is over.
December 18, 2013
Really, I'd give it a 3.8, but only because I've read some of Hammett's later works and know the genius he's capable of.
I won't go into plot (if that's what you want, then click here), but I will say that here's something very positive to be said about these old novels; this one was written in 1928 and still has a lot of power to entertain. The Dain Curse first made its appearance in Black Mask magazine as a serial released between October 1928 and January 1929; it was his second Continental Op story after Red Harvest. It may not be Hammett's best, but I still had a lot of fun with it. I mean, seriously -- you have a whacked-out bunch of people involved in a crazy cult, a wealthy drug-addicted, simpering heroine who just might be the victim of a curse, an old house by the sea, a man hiding a secret identity, and of course, a number of murders. What more could you want? The Dain Curse is twisty, and lots of people die in this story before the killer is discovered, making the crime portion of this book good reading. It isn't as hardboiled as I would have imagined, after reading some of his later novels, but this work was written still quite early in Hammett's career.
Another thing to point out is that this book is filled with racist remarks; not that I condone them, but they are a product of the times in which this book was written so keep that in mind as you read. Definitely recommended for those who enjoy vintage crime; cozy readers and strictly police-procedural fans probably wouldn't enjoy it as much. Now I'm going to go back and read Red Harvest ... then make my way through the rest of Hammett's novels that I've missed.
I won't go into plot (if that's what you want, then click here), but I will say that here's something very positive to be said about these old novels; this one was written in 1928 and still has a lot of power to entertain. The Dain Curse first made its appearance in Black Mask magazine as a serial released between October 1928 and January 1929; it was his second Continental Op story after Red Harvest. It may not be Hammett's best, but I still had a lot of fun with it. I mean, seriously -- you have a whacked-out bunch of people involved in a crazy cult, a wealthy drug-addicted, simpering heroine who just might be the victim of a curse, an old house by the sea, a man hiding a secret identity, and of course, a number of murders. What more could you want? The Dain Curse is twisty, and lots of people die in this story before the killer is discovered, making the crime portion of this book good reading. It isn't as hardboiled as I would have imagined, after reading some of his later novels, but this work was written still quite early in Hammett's career.
Another thing to point out is that this book is filled with racist remarks; not that I condone them, but they are a product of the times in which this book was written so keep that in mind as you read. Definitely recommended for those who enjoy vintage crime; cozy readers and strictly police-procedural fans probably wouldn't enjoy it as much. Now I'm going to go back and read Red Harvest ... then make my way through the rest of Hammett's novels that I've missed.
October 2, 2023
3 Stars. This novel came to life as four installments in "Black Mask" magazine in 1928-1929. Reading them, I found it occasionally disjointed and repetitive. A good read nonetheless. Hammett writes so well. With him, you feel a scene. It's in 2017's "The Big Book of the Continental Op," which contains all 29 Op short stories including the incomplete "Three Dimes" plus the "Black Mask" versions of the novels, "Red Harvest" and "The Dain Curse." Convenient, it works for me. For this one specifically, I wish I'd read the novel which brought the parts together and came out later in 1929. Someday I will - just to compare! The lead character is hard to determine in the first installment, "Black Lives." It's Gabrielle Leggett. We first meet her when the Continental Detective Agency is retained by an insurance company because a collection of uncut diamonds has gone missing at the home of inventor Edgar Leggatt, her father. About 20 years old, the Op finds her sullen and uncooperative. She's a Dain, a family cursed to have one nasty after another inflicted on it, murder included. Each event seems more outrageous and farfetched than the last. But the Op comes through. (September 2023)
January 6, 2019
1920s America. The language in this book is at times embarrassing with its sexist and racist comments. But the story is a romp where after 50 pages it seems like a murder or two has been solved. But then there are even more murders all connected to a young woman who thinks she is carrying a family curse. It's all a bit fanciful at times but there is a uniqueness to have a crime novels where the crimes just keep coming.
July 11, 2021
Γρήγορη πλοκή, πολλές ανατροπές και ο πάντα σε μένα συμπαθής πρωταγωνιστής που καλείται να εξιχνιάσει όχι μία αλλά τρεις υποθέσεις που μπορεί η που μπορεί να μη συνδέονται μεταξύ τους αν και έχουν έναν κοινό παρανομαστή!
Το μόνο που δε μου άρεσε πολύ ήταν η απόδοση κάποιων σημείων στα ελληνικά!
Fast paced and with many twists and turns and the always likeable at least for me protagonist who is called this time to solve not one but three cases and whether they are connected or not remains for the reader to discover alongside the detective!
Το μόνο που δε μου άρεσε πολύ ήταν η απόδοση κάποιων σημείων στα ελληνικά!
Fast paced and with many twists and turns and the always likeable at least for me protagonist who is called this time to solve not one but three cases and whether they are connected or not remains for the reader to discover alongside the detective!
June 29, 2018
Bodies galore!
When Edgar Leggett’s home is broken into and some not particularly valuable diamonds go missing, his insurance company send along their operative to investigate – enter the Continental Op, the only name we are given for the first-person narrator. The CO soon decides that there’s been some kind of inside job, and that there’s more to the case than a simple burglary. Leggett has a wife and a weird, strange-looking but oddly attractive daughter, Gabrielle. The plot is entirely incomprehensible so that’s as much of a summary as I’ll give. Suffice it to say, the thing soon turns bloody, with more corpses than you could shake a stick at, supposing you would want to do such a thing. Gabrielle, who seems to be thought of by some as a femme fatale but seems to me way too pathetic to be such a thing, is at the centre of all the mysterious happenings and comes to believe she is cursed. It’s up to the CO to solve whatever it is that’s going on, and amazingly, he does.
Oddly, despite the fact that the plot is nonsensical, episodic, and barely hangs together, I still found the book entertaining. This is largely due to the snappy, hardboiled style of the writing and the relentless pace, which doesn’t give the reader much time to ponder the basic absurdity of the storyline. Plus, in the middle of it there is a passage of very effective horror writing, as the CO battles an evil apparition that may be real or may be the product of hallucination, or is possibly a combination of both. I forgave a lot of the book’s weaknesses for my enjoyment of that piece of writing.
It also gives a snapshot of aspects of Californian life at the time of writing – the late 1920s. Inevitably, this involves some pretty strong racist language, but I felt this was an accurate reflection of the time (built-in and possibly incorrect assumption in that phrase that things have improved since) and in fact Hammett treated his non-white characters no worse than his white ones, so at least he was pretty even-handed in that sense. We also get to see that guns were as ubiquitous then as they still are now. In fact, as I write this, I’m realising that it could as easily have been written today – weird religious cults, casual drug-taking, addiction, money-is-the-root-of-all-evil... Prohibition might be the only thing that has really receded into the past, though I liked that he touched on the idea of moral degeneracy showing as a physical thing, identifiable by physical features – a concept that pops up in true crime cases around the turn of the century and also appears in quite a lot of late Victorian horror writing. (Hammett references Arthur Machen in the text and I felt his influence could be seen both in this concept and in the piece of horror writing in the middle of the book.) Another touch I enjoyed is Hammett’s inclusion of a character who is a novelist, which gives him the chance to include some humorously self-deprecating dialogue...
I feel I should have more to say about this one, but I don’t. It’s quite fun, so long as you can get past the silliness of the plot. But in truth I’m not sure why it would be considered a classic any more than most other books of the era. For me, it’s doesn’t even come close to the only other Hammett I’ve read, The Maltese Falcon, which unlike this one is tightly plotted and has a wonderful femme fatale worthy of the title. I suspect that if it hadn’t been for that later one, this one may have been forgotten along with most of the pulp fiction of the time. According to Martin Edwards in his The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books, Hammett himself later described this book as ‘a silly story... all style’, and I’m forced to agree with him. Still, that style covers a whole lot of weaknesses meaning that I found it an entertaining read overall, and that’s the most important thing...
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When Edgar Leggett’s home is broken into and some not particularly valuable diamonds go missing, his insurance company send along their operative to investigate – enter the Continental Op, the only name we are given for the first-person narrator. The CO soon decides that there’s been some kind of inside job, and that there’s more to the case than a simple burglary. Leggett has a wife and a weird, strange-looking but oddly attractive daughter, Gabrielle. The plot is entirely incomprehensible so that’s as much of a summary as I’ll give. Suffice it to say, the thing soon turns bloody, with more corpses than you could shake a stick at, supposing you would want to do such a thing. Gabrielle, who seems to be thought of by some as a femme fatale but seems to me way too pathetic to be such a thing, is at the centre of all the mysterious happenings and comes to believe she is cursed. It’s up to the CO to solve whatever it is that’s going on, and amazingly, he does.
Oddly, despite the fact that the plot is nonsensical, episodic, and barely hangs together, I still found the book entertaining. This is largely due to the snappy, hardboiled style of the writing and the relentless pace, which doesn’t give the reader much time to ponder the basic absurdity of the storyline. Plus, in the middle of it there is a passage of very effective horror writing, as the CO battles an evil apparition that may be real or may be the product of hallucination, or is possibly a combination of both. I forgave a lot of the book’s weaknesses for my enjoyment of that piece of writing.
Through the thing’s transparent flesh I could see my hands clenched in the center of its damp body. I opened them, struck up and down inside it with stiff crooked fingers, trying to gouge it open; and I could see it being torn apart, could see it flowing together after my clawing fingers had passed; but all I could feel was its dampness.
It also gives a snapshot of aspects of Californian life at the time of writing – the late 1920s. Inevitably, this involves some pretty strong racist language, but I felt this was an accurate reflection of the time (built-in and possibly incorrect assumption in that phrase that things have improved since) and in fact Hammett treated his non-white characters no worse than his white ones, so at least he was pretty even-handed in that sense. We also get to see that guns were as ubiquitous then as they still are now. In fact, as I write this, I’m realising that it could as easily have been written today – weird religious cults, casual drug-taking, addiction, money-is-the-root-of-all-evil... Prohibition might be the only thing that has really receded into the past, though I liked that he touched on the idea of moral degeneracy showing as a physical thing, identifiable by physical features – a concept that pops up in true crime cases around the turn of the century and also appears in quite a lot of late Victorian horror writing. (Hammett references Arthur Machen in the text and I felt his influence could be seen both in this concept and in the piece of horror writing in the middle of the book.) Another touch I enjoyed is Hammett’s inclusion of a character who is a novelist, which gives him the chance to include some humorously self-deprecating dialogue...
“Are you – who make your living snooping – sneering at my curiosity about people and my attempts to satisfy it?”
“We’re different,” I said. “I do mine with the object of putting people in jail, and I get paid for it, though not as much as I should.”
“That’s not different,” he said. “I do mine with the object of putting people in books, and I get paid for it, though not as much as I should.”
“Yeah, but what good does that do?”
“God knows. What good does putting them in jail do?”
“Relieves congestion,” I said. “Put enough people in jail, and cities wouldn’t have traffic problems.”
I feel I should have more to say about this one, but I don’t. It’s quite fun, so long as you can get past the silliness of the plot. But in truth I’m not sure why it would be considered a classic any more than most other books of the era. For me, it’s doesn’t even come close to the only other Hammett I’ve read, The Maltese Falcon, which unlike this one is tightly plotted and has a wonderful femme fatale worthy of the title. I suspect that if it hadn’t been for that later one, this one may have been forgotten along with most of the pulp fiction of the time. According to Martin Edwards in his The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books, Hammett himself later described this book as ‘a silly story... all style’, and I’m forced to agree with him. Still, that style covers a whole lot of weaknesses meaning that I found it an entertaining read overall, and that’s the most important thing...
www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com
January 5, 2008
Thank you, Hammett! There's now no longer any doubt in my mind that this man was a master of detective fiction. Gabrielle Leggett is an endearing character who originally I thought was just another femme fatale who has a strong taste for morphine and cults... but this is only on the surface. After about 70 pages I thought I had everything figured out and that this long and tangled crime thriller was simple and direct. not so. The Continental Op is a tough detective and no 'sentimental sap' he is a character who functions purely on logic and facts. Another quick fun read that bring you back to the 1920s and simpler but just as ruthless times.
May 30, 2022
This is a sequel to Hammett’s Red Harvest, which I really enjoyed. The plot of this one is more complex (or even convoluted?) which makes it harder to follow. It didn’t help that I listened to the audiobook (free on Audible, btw) rather than read it the old-fashioned way. Nor did it help that I was listening while in the lines and buses of Disney World.
I understand that Hammett may strike some as an odd choice in that context, but I downloaded it thinking I may need some breaks from all the fairy dust. In retrospect, I’m sure the wild incongruity of repeatedly switching between cartoon fantasy and noir detective mystery interfered with my immersion and comprehension.
Overall, I would say this book is good, but not as good as Red Harvest (or The Maltese Falcon), but it is clearly the wrong book to listen to while at the purported Happiest Place on Earth. Each experience will likely diminish the enjoyment of the other.
I understand that Hammett may strike some as an odd choice in that context, but I downloaded it thinking I may need some breaks from all the fairy dust. In retrospect, I’m sure the wild incongruity of repeatedly switching between cartoon fantasy and noir detective mystery interfered with my immersion and comprehension.
Overall, I would say this book is good, but not as good as Red Harvest (or The Maltese Falcon), but it is clearly the wrong book to listen to while at the purported Happiest Place on Earth. Each experience will likely diminish the enjoyment of the other.
May 18, 2021
Mid-20th Century North American Crime and Mystery
COUNTDOWN - Book 19 (of 250)
Seriously complicated, yes, but seriously overlooked. And seriously creepy. Not to mention demented at times. This is Dashiell Hammett's longest novel and definitely his most ambitious.
HOOK - 4 stars: "It was a diamond all right, shining in the grass half dozen feet from the blue brick wall," is the opening line. (You may have flashed, like me during my second read, right to the film, "Blue Velvet" which opens with a severed ear in the grass.) "It was small, not more than a quarter of a carat in weight, and unmounted. I put it in my pocket and began searching the lawn as closely as I could without going at it on all fours," Hammett continues, finishing the paragraph. Are there more diamonds? Who is "I"? (We never do learn that person's name.) I found the clarification that the diamond is on a lawn and not THAT kind of grass telling, perhaps because by my 2nd read of this novel and because I've read Hammett's Big Five, and the details count. Oh, and is the P.I. stealing that single diamond?
PACE - 3: Seemingly abrupt plot changes. "Red Harvest" is a one-sit read, "Dain Curse" is NOT.
PLOT - 5: The first time through I didn't understand a few things but a second read is a revelation. There is an early reference to writer Dumas/"Count of Monte Cristo" but is that just a red herring? The story has three parts but everything is related. There is this curse...see...and...
CHARACTERS - 5: First, there is the unnamed P.I. who doesn't want to give a writer/friend a story. This story? Edgar Legget (legit?) is the owner of the diamonds and is supposedly married to Lily Dain. Lily has a twin sister named Alicia, and someone birthed daughter Gabrielle. Mrs. Beggs is a housekeeper but she knows a bit too much. There is a suicide note. So let's move to Part 2. Mr. and Mrs. Haldorn find themselves in one of the best 'grand guignol' scenes I've run across in this genre. You will know it when you read it. Denbar Curt is into algebraism. Mr. Fink is in charge of special effects...at a temple. Mrs. Fink is smart and makes a quick exit. Minnie is another housekeeper, often in a drug haze (hence the early grass reference) and is definitely a trouble maker. Part 3 has Gabby and Eric hiding out as the Carters. Harvey Whidden likes caves and hates Policeman Cotton, while Mrs. Cotton has supposedly written her own suicide note. Yea, everyone is cursed. And they might just all eat each other at the end.
ATMOSPHERE - 5: Back to the first page: the housekeeper is dressed in a "lavender-flowered white housedress" and takes our P.I. to a "green, orange, and chocolate room.." that has "...Japanese pictures on the wall [not] selected by a prude." Gruesome, wildly inventive and later used, no doubt, as a reference tool for 1960's acid trip films.
SUMMARY - 4.4: Just when you think things are spinning out of control, you realize Hammett knows exactly what he is doing. I think I'll read this one again, and soon.
COUNTDOWN - Book 19 (of 250)
Seriously complicated, yes, but seriously overlooked. And seriously creepy. Not to mention demented at times. This is Dashiell Hammett's longest novel and definitely his most ambitious.
HOOK - 4 stars: "It was a diamond all right, shining in the grass half dozen feet from the blue brick wall," is the opening line. (You may have flashed, like me during my second read, right to the film, "Blue Velvet" which opens with a severed ear in the grass.) "It was small, not more than a quarter of a carat in weight, and unmounted. I put it in my pocket and began searching the lawn as closely as I could without going at it on all fours," Hammett continues, finishing the paragraph. Are there more diamonds? Who is "I"? (We never do learn that person's name.) I found the clarification that the diamond is on a lawn and not THAT kind of grass telling, perhaps because by my 2nd read of this novel and because I've read Hammett's Big Five, and the details count. Oh, and is the P.I. stealing that single diamond?
PACE - 3: Seemingly abrupt plot changes. "Red Harvest" is a one-sit read, "Dain Curse" is NOT.
PLOT - 5: The first time through I didn't understand a few things but a second read is a revelation. There is an early reference to writer Dumas/"Count of Monte Cristo" but is that just a red herring? The story has three parts but everything is related. There is this curse...see...and...
CHARACTERS - 5: First, there is the unnamed P.I. who doesn't want to give a writer/friend a story. This story? Edgar Legget (legit?) is the owner of the diamonds and is supposedly married to Lily Dain. Lily has a twin sister named Alicia, and someone birthed daughter Gabrielle. Mrs. Beggs is a housekeeper but she knows a bit too much. There is a suicide note. So let's move to Part 2. Mr. and Mrs. Haldorn find themselves in one of the best 'grand guignol' scenes I've run across in this genre. You will know it when you read it. Denbar Curt is into algebraism. Mr. Fink is in charge of special effects...at a temple. Mrs. Fink is smart and makes a quick exit. Minnie is another housekeeper, often in a drug haze (hence the early grass reference) and is definitely a trouble maker. Part 3 has Gabby and Eric hiding out as the Carters. Harvey Whidden likes caves and hates Policeman Cotton, while Mrs. Cotton has supposedly written her own suicide note. Yea, everyone is cursed. And they might just all eat each other at the end.
ATMOSPHERE - 5: Back to the first page: the housekeeper is dressed in a "lavender-flowered white housedress" and takes our P.I. to a "green, orange, and chocolate room.." that has "...Japanese pictures on the wall [not] selected by a prude." Gruesome, wildly inventive and later used, no doubt, as a reference tool for 1960's acid trip films.
SUMMARY - 4.4: Just when you think things are spinning out of control, you realize Hammett knows exactly what he is doing. I think I'll read this one again, and soon.
May 28, 2023
I enjoy reading these hard-boiled detective stories from time to time. This one by Dashielle Hammett ( 1894-1961) was published in 1928, and it's the second book featuring "the Continental Op." I like this tough no-nonsense character whose name is never mentioned in this story. I like his attitude and way of handling people and problems...but I can only give this story 3 stars, as the plot seemed overly convoluted and there were just too many characters popping up in the story. It didn't help that much that quite a number of the characters died in the course of the story!
The story certainly had possibilities. The "Op" is called in to investigate a theft of diamonds from the Leggetts, a San Francisco family. In the course of his investigation, our nameless detective discovers that the daughter, Gabrielle, is under the influence of a sinister religious cult (and is also addicted to morphine). I would have liked more about the cult in the story...As it is, it's Hammett and a worthwhile read but certainly not his best work...
The story certainly had possibilities. The "Op" is called in to investigate a theft of diamonds from the Leggetts, a San Francisco family. In the course of his investigation, our nameless detective discovers that the daughter, Gabrielle, is under the influence of a sinister religious cult (and is also addicted to morphine). I would have liked more about the cult in the story...As it is, it's Hammett and a worthwhile read but certainly not his best work...
September 18, 2021
A story divided into three parts. The burglary with the diamonds. Second the murders at the Temple. Lastly, the murder of Gabrielle’s husband Eric and her kidnapping. I enjoyed the story but for me Dash had too many characters and murders.
The linking of Owen Fitzstephan the degenerate novelist as the insane murderer was excellent. The story is bizarre with the Dain curse, cults, violence and supernatural hocus pocus.
I lost count how many people died and Gabrielle’s drug addiction was interesting in her behavior. I am looking forward to watching the tv adaptation with James Coburn. I think the producers cast the right actor for the detective
The linking of Owen Fitzstephan the degenerate novelist as the insane murderer was excellent. The story is bizarre with the Dain curse, cults, violence and supernatural hocus pocus.
I lost count how many people died and Gabrielle’s drug addiction was interesting in her behavior. I am looking forward to watching the tv adaptation with James Coburn. I think the producers cast the right actor for the detective
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 16, 2009
I didn't understand this book. It was bizarre enough to keep me reading but it never seemed like a sequential story. It seemed more like a series of scenarios with plausible or outlandish conclusions that just kept switching like a series of slides on a slide projector. The author may be "the best of the tough school of crime writing" but I am not interested in reading him again.
February 3, 2018
This book is a mess. Just when I thought I had reached the end of the mystery Dashiell Hammett kicked off another crazy story arc with a flashback to psychological child abuse and a daring prison escape or a flash forward to a profit-based San Francisco religious cult or an eloping morphine addict. Too much. He sure broke a lot of new ground, though.
March 29, 2014
Re-read this after many years to specifically re-visit Hammett's storytelling structure, which as far as I know is still relatively unique: the Continental Op is called in at the beginning of the book to solve a minor diamond theft.
He does so a quarter of the way through, there's a bloody denouement, and everything seems to resolved. But The Op complains there are some unresolved questions... and in the next chapter, he's hired again to investigate something gone afoul for the same family. And again, he wraps things up, still feeling like something isn't right.
And again, things go wrong and someone ends up dead...
It's a lovely little structure, three mysteries in one, and it resonates with me as I always wondered when I read mysteries what would happen if the detective ever solved a mystery wrong. Although The Op doesn't do that here, each section ends with the case at hand being resolved to everyone else's satisfaction and The Op, as hired hand, having little say in it.
On this re-read, it immediately became apparent to me this book had originally been serialized (as had Red Harvest, which I hadn't noticed). It must've been a treat to be a regular reader of Black Mask magazine and have Hammett pop up in the very next issue to upend the mystery he had just solved.
Also apparent to me is how much Hammett uses The Dain Curse to both cater to, and roll his eyes at, the Weird Pulp tradition of the time--after all, the entire story is predicated around the idea of a family curse that is killing off everyone who gets close to young Gabrielle Leggett, which is exactly part of why The Op remains suspicious about how the cases wrap up. "But the trouble with [the curse] is it's worked out too well, too regularly," he says halfway through the book. "It's the first one I ever ran across that did."
Despite The Op's (and Hammett's) level-headed dismissal of such stuff, The Dain Curse still manages to pile on a cult, phantoms, possession, men incapable of being stopped by bullets, and crazed backstories before finally settling in to an extended third act that's almost like Red Harvest in miniature, where The Op has to quickly suss out the shifting allegiances and true motives of the members of a small town, any of whom could be the murderer of Gabrielle's husband. I wonder in fact if this was Hammett's way of upbraiding the Weird Pulp genre--who cares about cults and altars and phantoms and hypnotism, Hammett seems to be saying: here's a town filled with people, and the people are filled with secrets, and any secret can be a motive, and any motive can make a murderer. What could be interesting than that?
Now that I've spilled a couple hundred words on The Dain Curse, can I be honest? It didn't really fry my burger. Admittedly, I read it before (although a long time ago) so I remembered most of the narrative's great swerves--although there's so much I'd forgotten about the last third of the book I started to wonder if I even finished it and just skipped to the last chapter.
And even more admittedly, I read it at too leisurely a pace this time, so when I did pick up the book I had to scratch my head to remember who the characters were (especially in the last third where characters from previous episodes return as suspects--that last third piles up with people like it was the only working elevator in a busy building)and in some cases had to search on the names in order to remember.
But there are also problems with the nesting doll structure of The Dain Curse: it takes time to set up each mystery, and time to wrap each one up, then re-set the table for the next. It should be noted very few authors could do it as briskly and as efficiently as Hammett, but it still makes for a certain amount of tedium. And in order to craft a satisfying surprise at the third act climax, Hammett then has to unpack a ton of exposition at the end so that every thing all the way through makes "sense."
Another stumbling block is that Gabrielle really has no character whatsoever until the final third, and then what is there is satisfactory but not especially compelling. While authors should never be judged by the successes of adaptations of their work in other media, it's not surprising The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man were huge cinematic successes (as were The Glass Key and Red Harvest in their stealth adaptations as Miller's Crossing and Yojimbo): Hammett pares down people's interactions to their barest minimum--the Op, especially, thrives on spending as much time thinking about a person as he needs to figure them out (and we're lucky if he bothers to share those thoughts with us)--which gives people adapting the work a lot of room to shade those interactions with nuance and life. But sometimes less isn't actually more: less is just less. That's pretty much where the level of characterization is for The Dain Curse, and the book suffers for it.
Finally: yeah, Hammett doesn't like weird pulps and it shows. For me, reading this was like looking at a particularly vivid shadow on a bright summer day--you can tell what you're looking at, but you're not going to mistake it for the thing itself. The Dain Curse is the shadow of a great book--the hardboiled, tightly plotted murder mystery that simultaneously embraces and upends a genre at the same time--but it is not that book. I don't think it would've been even if I'd been reading it for the first time, and reading it as fast as I could.
He does so a quarter of the way through, there's a bloody denouement, and everything seems to resolved. But The Op complains there are some unresolved questions... and in the next chapter, he's hired again to investigate something gone afoul for the same family. And again, he wraps things up, still feeling like something isn't right.
And again, things go wrong and someone ends up dead...
It's a lovely little structure, three mysteries in one, and it resonates with me as I always wondered when I read mysteries what would happen if the detective ever solved a mystery wrong. Although The Op doesn't do that here, each section ends with the case at hand being resolved to everyone else's satisfaction and The Op, as hired hand, having little say in it.
On this re-read, it immediately became apparent to me this book had originally been serialized (as had Red Harvest, which I hadn't noticed). It must've been a treat to be a regular reader of Black Mask magazine and have Hammett pop up in the very next issue to upend the mystery he had just solved.
Also apparent to me is how much Hammett uses The Dain Curse to both cater to, and roll his eyes at, the Weird Pulp tradition of the time--after all, the entire story is predicated around the idea of a family curse that is killing off everyone who gets close to young Gabrielle Leggett, which is exactly part of why The Op remains suspicious about how the cases wrap up. "But the trouble with [the curse] is it's worked out too well, too regularly," he says halfway through the book. "It's the first one I ever ran across that did."
Despite The Op's (and Hammett's) level-headed dismissal of such stuff, The Dain Curse still manages to pile on a cult, phantoms, possession, men incapable of being stopped by bullets, and crazed backstories before finally settling in to an extended third act that's almost like Red Harvest in miniature, where The Op has to quickly suss out the shifting allegiances and true motives of the members of a small town, any of whom could be the murderer of Gabrielle's husband. I wonder in fact if this was Hammett's way of upbraiding the Weird Pulp genre--who cares about cults and altars and phantoms and hypnotism, Hammett seems to be saying: here's a town filled with people, and the people are filled with secrets, and any secret can be a motive, and any motive can make a murderer. What could be interesting than that?
Now that I've spilled a couple hundred words on The Dain Curse, can I be honest? It didn't really fry my burger. Admittedly, I read it before (although a long time ago) so I remembered most of the narrative's great swerves--although there's so much I'd forgotten about the last third of the book I started to wonder if I even finished it and just skipped to the last chapter.
And even more admittedly, I read it at too leisurely a pace this time, so when I did pick up the book I had to scratch my head to remember who the characters were (especially in the last third where characters from previous episodes return as suspects--that last third piles up with people like it was the only working elevator in a busy building)and in some cases had to search on the names in order to remember.
But there are also problems with the nesting doll structure of The Dain Curse: it takes time to set up each mystery, and time to wrap each one up, then re-set the table for the next. It should be noted very few authors could do it as briskly and as efficiently as Hammett, but it still makes for a certain amount of tedium. And in order to craft a satisfying surprise at the third act climax, Hammett then has to unpack a ton of exposition at the end so that every thing all the way through makes "sense."
Another stumbling block is that Gabrielle really has no character whatsoever until the final third, and then what is there is satisfactory but not especially compelling. While authors should never be judged by the successes of adaptations of their work in other media, it's not surprising The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man were huge cinematic successes (as were The Glass Key and Red Harvest in their stealth adaptations as Miller's Crossing and Yojimbo): Hammett pares down people's interactions to their barest minimum--the Op, especially, thrives on spending as much time thinking about a person as he needs to figure them out (and we're lucky if he bothers to share those thoughts with us)--which gives people adapting the work a lot of room to shade those interactions with nuance and life. But sometimes less isn't actually more: less is just less. That's pretty much where the level of characterization is for The Dain Curse, and the book suffers for it.
Finally: yeah, Hammett doesn't like weird pulps and it shows. For me, reading this was like looking at a particularly vivid shadow on a bright summer day--you can tell what you're looking at, but you're not going to mistake it for the thing itself. The Dain Curse is the shadow of a great book--the hardboiled, tightly plotted murder mystery that simultaneously embraces and upends a genre at the same time--but it is not that book. I don't think it would've been even if I'd been reading it for the first time, and reading it as fast as I could.
April 6, 2013
The last three books I reviewed were a little heavy on the brain so I decided to read something purely for fun. Fun for me is old school noir. The genre is fascinating because the writing in some cases is both masterful and cheesy. The masterpiece of cheese I picked up was The Dain Curse by the granddaddy of hardboiled crime, Dashiell Hammett. The story is about a detective who is called in to solve the case of missing diamonds. It starts off pretty slow and I’m expecting a straightforward detective read. Our guy meets Gabrielle, a beautiful young woman with an addiction for the occult and morphine, and suddenly it’s like this straitlaced book decided to drop a couple hits of acid and fill body bags like Christmas stockings.
The plot gets crazy. New characters and plot twists are fired at you with inhuman speed. Hammett pushes the story to the point of disintegration then pulls it off incredibly every time. The tough guy talk and longwinded confessions by the villains were all there. Everyone had a gun in his book. I think even a dog accidently shot a key witness. Yet with all this madness going about, Hammett keeps a straight face the entire time which makes it hilarious. Mind you this book isn’t a comedy, just like old kung-fu flicks weren’t made to be funny—and yet, there they are. Even the racism is so over the top that I couldn’t help laughing out loud.
“I couldn’t see the hand that was exploring my inside coat-pocket, nor the arm that came down over my shoulder; but they smelled of the kitchen, so I knew they were brown.”
I literally dropped my taco and felt guilty for stealing this wonderful book, especially since I had just received my welfare check.
This book may come off a little bizarre to some of the noir purists, and rightfully so. As for me, I see the early roots of pulp in this blood soaked gem. It’s sort of a hybrid between vintage crime and pulp. Hammett is better known for his work, The Maltese Falcon. I can honestly say I enjoyed this one better.
The plot gets crazy. New characters and plot twists are fired at you with inhuman speed. Hammett pushes the story to the point of disintegration then pulls it off incredibly every time. The tough guy talk and longwinded confessions by the villains were all there. Everyone had a gun in his book. I think even a dog accidently shot a key witness. Yet with all this madness going about, Hammett keeps a straight face the entire time which makes it hilarious. Mind you this book isn’t a comedy, just like old kung-fu flicks weren’t made to be funny—and yet, there they are. Even the racism is so over the top that I couldn’t help laughing out loud.
“I couldn’t see the hand that was exploring my inside coat-pocket, nor the arm that came down over my shoulder; but they smelled of the kitchen, so I knew they were brown.”
I literally dropped my taco and felt guilty for stealing this wonderful book, especially since I had just received my welfare check.
This book may come off a little bizarre to some of the noir purists, and rightfully so. As for me, I see the early roots of pulp in this blood soaked gem. It’s sort of a hybrid between vintage crime and pulp. Hammett is better known for his work, The Maltese Falcon. I can honestly say I enjoyed this one better.
June 18, 2014
Публикуван за пръв път през 1929 г., „Проклятието на Дейн" е представителен за творчеството на писателя трилър, подплатен с напрегнато очакване и интригуващи обрати. Хамет ловко въвлича читателите в разбулването на семейна мистерия, свързана с кражбата на един диамант. Частен детектив от агенция „Континентал" се наема да разплете зловеща паяжина от лъжи, грабежи и убийства, в основата на които лежи предполагаемо проклятие...
Самюъл Дашиъл Хамет (1894-1961) е смятан, наред с Реймънд Чандлър, за създател на черния детективски роман, отличаващ се с „корави" детективи, още по-коравия им речник, циничен поглед към реалността, фатални жени и други компоненти, които водят началото си от романи като „Проклятието на Дейн". Мнозина свързват името му с жанровата класика „Малтийският сокол", а едноименният филм с участието на Хъмфри Богарт оправдава признанието на „Ню Йорк Таймс", че Хамет е „един от най-талантливите автори на мистерии за всички времена".
Самюъл Дашиъл Хамет (1894-1961) е смятан, наред с Реймънд Чандлър, за създател на черния детективски роман, отличаващ се с „корави" детективи, още по-коравия им речник, циничен поглед към реалността, фатални жени и други компоненти, които водят началото си от романи като „Проклятието на Дейн". Мнозина свързват името му с жанровата класика „Малтийският сокол", а едноименният филм с участието на Хъмфри Богарт оправдава признанието на „Ню Йорк Таймс", че Хамет е „един от най-талантливите автори на мистерии за всички времена".
May 16, 2012
I think Dashiell Hammett made this novel into a type of literary impossible bottle. I admire his work, and generally followed the puzzled steps, but at the end just think he went a strata too deep. Don't get me wrong, I DO love Hammett and liked this book a lot. It just isn't in the same class as: Red Harvest, The Thin Man or The Maltese Falcon.
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