having all of the continental op stories in one place was great. You can see hammet's development and the effects of the different editors. I'd read red harvest before, but not as presented here. I think it is even better without the changes made to put it in novel form. I hadn't read Dain curse before. It is really put there, ( spoiler alert) ####### 5 year old taught to murder?!. Still Hammett was such a sparse and tight writer, he can put anything over ( )

He’s fat, in his late thirties, and of middling height. We know little of his past outside of his work. And in not one of the twenty-eight stories and two novels that he narrates does he ever give us his name. He’s just the Continental Op from the Continental Detective Agency.

Hammett was determined to bring some realism to the modern detective tale. He’d worked for the Pinkerton Detective Agency for five years in two stints, before and after serving in the military in World War One. His specialty was shadowing people. The Continental Detective Agency is clearly modelled on Pinkerton’s. It will take any kind of case except divorce work. The Op isn’t a lone genius who briefly visits a crime scene and makes his deductions back at his house and announce the results in his parlor. He works with the local police. He pounds pavement interviewing people, consults company records – which were, in the approximately century old setting of these stories, better than any police force’s, and calls in other members of the agency to shadow people or pursue other lines of investigation. He’ll talk to switchboard operators and doctors and hotel employees and mailmen and all sorts of people in the days before privacy laws were not so prevalent. His stories may be packed with an unrealistic amount of action, but the Continental Ops methods are largely realistic.

He solves crimes. But he’ll also cover up client’s crimes, frame people, manipulate people into murder, let criminals go and not always capture the ones he wants, and deal with a rogue Continental employee.

The Continental Op stories have been frequently reprinted, but this is the first time all the stories and novels have been collected together. Editors Layman and Rivett (Hammett’s granddaughter and executor of his literary estate) present the stories in publication order (most were first printed in the famed Black Mask magazine) and provide plenty of ancillary material. Not only is there an introduction to Hammett and the Continental Op, but the stories are divided by editorial periods which have their own introductions as do the two novels and the one fragment of a Continental Op story included. They also throw in the occasional annotations for slang and historical allusions and some of Hammett’s responses to reader reactions. (Two longer responses cover Hammett’s argument that the uniqueness of fingerprints has not been absolutely proved and his comments on how shadowing is done.)

Hammett briefly studied journalism after his tuberculosis rendered him unable to continue being a detective. He got three pieces published in H. L. Mencken’s Smart Set magazine, and they suggested he redirect his efforts to pulp magazines. Hammett ended up selling some stories to Black Mask which did not, then, specialize in mystery stories. They were published under a pen name. But he eventually dropped that, and “Arson Plus”, the first Continental Op story, was published on October 1, 1923.

The stories published under George W. Sutton were short, and not drenched in violence, and the Continental Op doesn’t even pack a gun in them. They were still interesting and thrilling, and Hammett became one of the magazine’s most popular writers and helped made Black Mask the acknowledged birthplace of “hard-boiled fiction”.

My favorite story of this period was “Zigzags of Treachery” where the investigation of a doctor’s death uncovers fraud and imposture. These stories set the pattern for most of the Continental Op stories. Most are set in San Francisco and have several recurring minor characters who are either police officials or other Continental detectives. Of course, we know less about them than we do the Continental Op.

Philip C. Cody took over as Black Mask editor in 1926. Hammett was one of his favorite writers, and the Continental Op stories often were novelette length, more violent, and the femmes more fatale. Some of my favorite Continental Op stories are from this period. The Op stumbles, while investigating another matter, into the deadly doings at “The House in Turk Street”. The femme fatale in“The Girl with the Silver Eyes” is particularly memorable. “The Golden Horseshoe” has the Continental Op dispensing some highly illegal and satisfying justice. “Corkscrew” deals with what we would now call human trafficking across the Arizona-Mexico border. It feels like a western and, in some ways, prefigures The Cleansing of Poisonville. “Dead Yellow Women” is something like a parody of Yellow Peril stories.

Hammett eventually got disgusted with Cody though. He wanted more money for his work, and Cody owed him money for work he’d already sold. Hammett quit writing in March 1926 and took a job doing advertising work for a San Francisco jeweler. He worked hard and competently, but in July the tubercular Hammett collapsed in a pool of blood and had to give up that job. Now forced to live on just a veteran’s disability pension, he returned to writing.

The new editor at Black Mask was Joseph Shaw known affectionately and respectively by his writers as “Captain Shaw”. Hammett was his favorite writer in the Black Mask stable. Shaw had the idea of taking inspiration from current crime stories, and the Continental Op stories reached an epic crescendo of violence and deceit with “The Big Knock-Over” and its sequel “$106,000 Blood Money”. The Continental Op even went overseas to a fictitious Balkan country in “The King Business” and gets involved in a coup. I also liked “Fly Paper” with its plot of poison.

What’s Hammett’s style like? Well, you know his terse style even if you’ve never read a word of Hammett. You’ve heard it imitated in movies and even seen it in comics. It was so influential it became cliché.

Here’s one of my favorite examples:

’I’ve arranged a death or two in my time, when it was necessary. But this is the first time I’ve ever had the killing fever. It started out right enough. When old Elihu Willsson ran out on me after hiring me to clean town, there was nothing I could do but set the boys against each other and have ‘em wipe themselves out for me. Without Elihu’s backing I couldn’t have got anywhere fooling with courts and legal evidence. I had to do the job the best way I could, which meant stacking so everybody . . . would think everybody else was double-crossing them. That couldn’t lead anywhere but to a lot of killings. How in hell could I help it?

…

’Play with enough murder, and it gets you one of two ways. It makes you sick, or you get to like it.’

…

’What in the name of God did you bring the ice pick in for?’

’To show you how my mind’s running. Yesterday, if I thought about it at all, it was as a good tool to pry off hunks of ice.’ I ran a finger down its half-foot of round steel blade to the needle point. ’Not a bad thing to pin a man to his clothes with. That’s the way I’m getting, on the level. There’s a piece of copper wire lying out in the gutter in front of the house – thin and soft and just long enough to twist around a neck with enough ends to hold good. I had one hell of a time to keep from picking it up and putting it in my pocket, just in case—’

’You’re crazy!’

’I told you. I was going blood-simple.’

That’s actually a somewhat uncharacteristic sample since it’s from the serialized Continental Op novel The Cleansing of Poisonville. Novels gave Hammett the opportunity to extend his gift for dialogue, to give us more characterization beyond clothes and physical description. In that scene, the Op is talking to Dinah Brand, “Poisonville’s Cleopatra” and one of his more memorable characters,

I was particularly keen to read The Cleansing of Poisonville since it became the novel Red Harvest. (Hammett fans seem to prefer the original version. Red Harvest had almost every paragraph changed from its source.) The latter novel is said to have been the inspiration for Akira Kurosawa’s famed movie Yojimbo which inspired A Fistful of Dollars, Last Man Standing, and Omega Doom (and those are just the official and unofficial remakes I’ve seen – there are at least four others I haven’t).

As with the contention Ambrose Bierce’s “The Moonlit Road” served as the inspiration for Kurosawa’s Rashomon, I’ve never seen completely convincing evidence of a chain of access and inspiration for Red Harvest inspiring Yojimbo, but the stories are certainly similar. A lone man comes to town, finds a den of corruption and violence, and manipulates gangsters, politicians, and police into committing a bloodbath on each other. Here the Continental Op is called to Personville, Montana (modelled on the real corruption and violence of Butte, Montana) at the behest of a client who ends up dead before he ever meets him. The Continental Op does indeed end up with a “killing fever” that will see him not reporting to his boss and suspected of murder by his fellow detectives. It is the strongest evidence of Layman’s and Rivett’s contention that, in the Shaw years, the Continental Op stories began to hint at the emotional damage inflicted by his profession.

The Continental Op’s feelings for Dinah Brand are somewhat unclear in The Cleansing of Poisonville (romance and sex are never present between the Op and the women he meets), and they are even more ambiguous for Gabrielle Leggett, the woman at the center of The Dain Curse. As the bodies pile up around her, she is convinced she’s tainted by a family curse. This is a gaudy novel which features, among other things, a religious cult. It feels even more episodic than The Cleansing of Poisonville since Hammett constructed both novels to be almost self-contained stories in the four installments each took up in Black Mask. Hammett may have pronounced The Dain Curse silly and the least of his novels, but I still found it enjoyable, and it pulled me through its story quickly. This serialized version seems identical to the one published as a novel.

By 1930, Hammett was done with the Continental Op. He had already published The Maltese Falcon and was on to the novels that would make him rich and famous.

I was curious to see whether Hammett’s Communist sympathies, which would later get him into trouble and land him in jail, would show up in any of the stories. Not really. There are a couple of stories with I.W.W. members, but they are not sympathetically portrayed. The closest we get is the portrayal of some White Russian exiles in “The Gutting of Couffignal”.

If you’re curious about Hammett, this is not a bad place to start at all. My enthusiasm for reading this book never flagged in its more than 750 pages. ( )

I'm a big fan of the Op, so I'm a big fan of this compilation of every story he has been in! I'd read some of these before, and I've read the two novels, but it was still a treat to reread them and newly read the rest! It was also pretty cool to read the novels in their original, serial form! I only disliked two of the twenty-eight stories, and they are the two set if non San Francisco Bay Area places, "Corkscrew" and "This King Business". "Corkscrew" has the Op as a wild west sheriff, and it just doesn't work. And "This King Business" is set in a foreign country and has a man trying to be king, and blah, blah, blah - boring. But 26 six outta 28 is a 93% success rate, and how can I complain about that kind of entertainment value? Great volume! ( )

The unnamed Continental Detective Agency Operative is a staple of the golden age of pulp mysteries. All but two of twenty eight individual stories as well as two novels composed of connected stories were published in Black Mask magazine between 1920 and 1930. Described as a “busy, middle aged detective” in the story “Arson Plus”, the Continental Op was an every man, lacking the sophistication, ruthlessness and girl magnetism of other fictional detectives of the time. Stories range from the simple, non-violent variety to longer, more complex stories with guns blazing and fists pounding. However it is the turn of phrase that sets these stories apart, such as “Sharp-eyed, sharp-faced, with lips thin as knife-edges…” in “The Big Knock-Over”. This anthology, containing all the Continental Ops writings including an unfinished story, is sectioned by the Black Mask editors for whom Hammett wrote, with separate sections for each novel. Sections include an introduction and some include letters written by the author in response to reader or editor comments.

This is the first anthology to contain all Continental Op writings, including several stories not readily available and, as such, it is invaluable to pulp mystery aficionados and Dashiell Hammett fans. ( )