The Washington Times published my review of Dashiell Hammett's The Big Book of the Continental Op.
Some months ago I visited my
daughter and her Air Force husband in California. We visited San Francisco and
saw Alcatraz, Fisherman’s Wharf, Chinatown and other well-known attractions.
Although I had never been there before, I had a sense of familiarity. This was
Dashiell Hammett’s town. I grew up reading Mr. Hammett’s crime stories and San
Francisco appeared prominently in many of the stories.
The late Dashiell Hammett,
the author of “The Maltese Falcon,” “The Thin Man” and other classic crime
novels, began his writing career punching out short stories for Black Mask
magazine.
Before he wrote about his
more well-known detectives Sam Spade and Nick and Nora Charles, he created a
nameless detective who narrated his early short stories. The detective, also
called an operative, or Op, worked for the Continental Detective Agency. The Op
was a short, fat fellow, unlike Mr. Hammett, who was tall, lean and in his
youth looked like a “blonde Satan,” which is how he described Sam Spade in “The
Maltese Falcon.”
In “The Big Book of the
Continental Op,” fans of crime fiction can read a collection of all of Mr.
Hammett’s Op stories. The book was edited by Richard Layman, the president of
Bruccoli Clark Layman, producers of the “Dictionary of Literary Biography,” and
Julie M. Rivett, Mr. Hammett’s granddaughter, who is a Dashiell Hammett scholar
and spokesperson for the Hammett estate.
“The long awaited volume you
hold in your hands is the first and only collection to assemble every one of
Dashiell Hammett’s pioneering Continental Op adventures — twenty-eight
stand-alone stories, two novels, and Hammett’s only known unfinished
Continental tale.” writes Ms. Rivett in her introduction. “It is truly
definitive. And it has been many decades in the making.
“At the time of this writing,
the first Op story is ninety-four years old and the last one is seventy-nine,
not including ‘Three Dimes,’ an undated draft fragment conserved in Hammett’s
archives, first published in 2016.
“The gritty sleuth Hammett
described as ‘a little man going forward day after day through mud and blood
and death and deceit’ has weathered gunshots, grifters, criminal conspiracies,
class struggles, temptations, neglect, and more. This volume is testament to
his tenacity. He is a survivor, a working-class hero, and a landmark literary
creation.”
As Ms. Rivett notes, Dashiell
Hammett was a Pinkerton detective and the Continental agency was modeled on
Pinkerton. Mr. Hammett worked on cases involving forgeries, bank swindles and
safe burglaries, which Ms. Rivett’s states was a solid factual basis for the
Op’s fictional stories.
... Despite Dashiell Hammett’s
foolish sympathy for the American Communist Party and other character flaws, he
was a patriot who served in the U.S. Army in both world wars. He is buried in
Arlington National Cemetery.
You can read the rest of my
review via the below link:
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/may/13/book-review-the-big-book-of-the-continental-op-by-/
"The contemporary
novelist's job is to take pieces of life and arrange them on paper. And the
more direct their passage from street to paper, the more lifelike they should
be" - Dashiell Hammett (seen in the above photo).
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