Pun Salad

So I got this book for Christmas 2017 from the Salad Daughter. It weighs in at 750 pages or so, and I immediately grasped that was way too much Hammett to read all at once. So I used a software solution: treat it as five separate "books" in my Book Picker script, spacing things out over … well, until now. There are 28 short stories and 2 "serialized novels" in the Big Book, all written for Black Mask magazine in the 1920s. (One story unpublished and unfinished.)

As the title implies, this is pretty much everything Hammett wrote with his "Continental Op" character doing the first-person narration. The Op is never given a name, but he describes himself as middle-aged and fat. He's fond of booze and cigarettes. He works for the Continental Detective Agency on whatever tasks he's assigned. But he occasionally goes above and beyond.

The short stories are, well, uneven. And (let's be kind) not really up to modern tastes. But they are kind of a revealing window into (mostly) San Francisco in the 1920s, and the tough-guy lingo at the time. Occasionally, they veer into weird territory, ("Corkscrew" has the Op going out to Arizona, getting appointed Deputy Sheriff, and messing around with horses and cowboys.) Characters are many, plots are complex, every single one is totally forgettable. (Except I remembered the cowboy bit.)

The serialized novels, written in the later part of the Op's career are better. A four-parter, "The Cleansing of Poisonville" was published (modified) as Red Harvest: the Op is sent into a corrupt town only to find that his client's been murdered. He seems personally offended, and takes it on himself to set the various criminal factions off against one another, and brings down the entire crappy apparatus over the four installments. (See the Wikipedia page for informed speculation on how it influenced modern popular culture.)

The other novel, The Dain Curse, is another four-parter, where the Op takes a liking to young Gabrielle, who he meets in the course of investigating a diamond theft from the laboratory of her father. Many people wind up dead. In the second bit, she's off to a join a religious cult, and the Op checks that out, resulting in more people dead. Finally Gabrielle gets hitched; while off on her honeymoon the Op is summoned by her husband who (you guessed it) is dead by the time the Op shows up. (In addition to many others.) And finally, the OP weans Gabrielle off her nasty morphine addiction, while discovering the sinister driving force behind all the carnage. According to the Wikipedia page, a 1978 TV miniseries based on the book was pretty good.