A Review of Dashiell Hammett’s “The Big Book of the Continental Op”
Hard-Boiled Sleuthing
When I was in journalism school, I minored in film studies. The reason was more a time-management one than anything else. While I was out pounding the pavement as a journalism student, I didn’t have a lot of time for my classes. So, my theory went, “Take film studies, and if you have to miss a class, you can always rent the film being discussed and watched for viewing later when you finally have a chance.” It was a smart move on my part as, again, time was a commodity I had in short supply. However, when I did go to class, I loved it when they played a classic film noir detective story. I loved the moral ambiguity, the femme fatales with shifty allegiances, and the lack of morals held by authority figures. You really didn’t know what was going on.
That’s the one thing about film noir, though. The plots get awfully convoluted. I recall an anecdote about the filming of The Big Sleep, where the filmmakers went to author Raymond Chandler to figure out why someone had done a particular murder. His answer was, seriously, “I have no idea.” The gunplay, the dead bodies … all of it is to pump the plot along whether or not it makes any sense. So when you’re dealing with a hard-boiled detective story, forget being able to be as witty and smart as the private dick. You’re never going to figure it out.
Still, I jumped up at the chance to review The Big Book of the Continental Op. They aren’t kidding by calling this a “big book”: the collection is about 750 pages long, and is jam packed with 28 short stories (many of which are novelettes) and two serial novels all originally published in the 1920s and early ’30s in the Black Mask crime magazine. The author is Dashiell Hammett, who is widely considered to be the father of the hard-boiled detective story, and, by extension, film noir. Hammett is probably best known to modern audiences as the author of the novel that The Maltese Falcon film (well, there were actually three of them made during the ‘30s, but only one famous one) was based on. Before inventing Sam Spade, Hammett had another character that he heavily drew open: a fat, nameless detective who worked for the Continental Detective Agency, sort of modelled after Pinkerton, which Hammett actually worked for for a time.
The Continental Op stories and novels are prototypical hard-boiled sleuthing. The police, by and large, are still to be trusted. The women aren’t really nearly as dangerous. The ambiguity is suitably muted. However, the basic elements of the hard-boiled story are there —the titular character is one tough nut to crack — and it is a pleasure to read this book, not only to see a writer grow and mature (the book is presented largely in chronological order in terms of publication dates), but how a writer also gave in to the demands of his editors. Black Mask had a slight revolving door in terms of its editorial staff, and this book’s editors — Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett, the latter of whom is Hammett’s granddaughter — chart how Hammett tweaked his stories under the hands of the magazine’s new and fairly constantly changing stewardship. As a conservative editor leaves and is replaced by a more liberal one, the stories get more sensational and violent. When that editor leaves and a well-educated and high-standing editor takes his place, the stories become more literary.
All in all, though, the stories all share the same distinguishing features: you can be sure that you’ll get a thorough inspection of a particular person and how they look and dress, but won’t be furnished any real detail about the stories’ mostly San Francisco setting. And, of course, the plots are so twisty with not just double and triple crosses, but quadruple and sextuple crosses (if not more), they are so highly unbelievable that you may groan, “Come on,” as you read them. Yet, the plots are not really the point. The stories in The Big Book of the Continental Op are all about style. And style you get.
The stories and novels, though, may be a tough swallow for modern audiences, to a degree. They are rife with the sort of racism and sexism that may make the squeamish squirm in their seats. The n-word, at least at one point, is used, and people from Asia are also depicted as shifty, to say the least. If you can overlook such problems, the real charm in this collection is the serialized version of the novel Red Harvest or Poisonville (as it is known here), which is different from what was originally published in book form. Getting to it is a lot like wanting to go to Disneyland and Poisonville is all thrills and chills that will keep you chewing your fingernails to the quick. The follow-up novel, The Dain Curse, which closes this collection, is the ride home. It is considered to be the lesser of Hammett’s five published novels, and it shows. I had to wonder how it got published in the first place. It’s a series of inner-connected stories, less a real “novel,” with far too many characters and motives. It’s too bad it closes this collection, as getting through it is a chore.
That said, there’s enough in Poisonville and the preceding short stories, including one unfinished story never before published, to warrant this big book a look. If you read it in the context of when it was written, and are willing to go along for one heck of a ride, these stories — even with their racial and sexist thorns — are firecrackers. You won’t be able to predict the endings, unless, of course, you have the same level of thought and deduction as our nameless hero (who, incidentally, doesn’t get much of a backstory to him), and that will keep you glued to the page. You want to find out who did it, even if that part is so murky and hard to fathom that these highly stylized stories are in no way realistic.
Looking for some great modern classic literature to thumb through? Your best bet would be to lay some coin down here and get lost for months (how long it will take you to read this book) in stories of a wild imagination that birthed a really cool film genre, and gave this writer an excuse to lay off the journalism for at least a couple of hours at a time. This big book is one heck of an adventure, and you’ll be glad that these now lesser-known works of Hammett’s have now come to light.
Dashiell Hammett’s The Big Book of the Continental Op was published by Vintage Crime / Black Lizard on November 28, 2017.
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