The Continental
OP: More Stories from The Big Knockover - Dashiell Hammett
Published by Dell in 1967, this pocket paperback bundled
about half the pulp magazine long stories that appeared in a collection called The Big Knockover. I re-read these
stories in my little free time since I didn’t feel up to reading anything else.
The year-end festivities and the end of a semester are exhausting.
Hammett’s hero works in the San Francisco branch of the
Continental Detective Agency. To make up for not having a name, he has
developed an astute sense of how bad guys think. His core competence is using
devious, often violent, methods to get the job done.
This King Business
(1928). The Op finds himself in a Balkan country where the idealistic son of a
rich guy is bankrolling a revolution for a band of crafty Slavs. Seems that the
insurrectionists have promised to make the son a king if the revolution is
successful. The rousing climax comes out of an action packed series of events
which support the notion that the calculations of criminous types and political
types aren’t all that different, a fairly common belief in the 1920s.
The Gatewood Caper
(1923). A daughter is kidnapped and the desperate father wants her back mainly
because it is a blow to his sell-made man ego that somebody has the audacity to
extort money out of him. “I’ve never been clubbed into doing anything in my
life. And I’m too old to start now.” When the daughter doesn’t return even
after the ransom is paid, the cunning Op smells something fishy. The story
seethes with vindictive feeling and the setting of the Pacific Northwest –
lumbering land – is persuasive.
Dead Yellow Women
(1925). Très awkward title in our more enlightened era so we
make allowances for the era’s prejudices if that is our inclination. Set in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the Op and
a Chinese Tong Boss match wits. In places it feels like a parody of a Yellow
Peril story, especially the elaborate polite language of the Tong Boss. The
description of the maze-like interior of the criminal mastermind’s mansion is a
tour de force. Also, a theme pops up: political idealism is exploited by venal
crooks as in The Gatewood Caper.
Corkscrew
(1925). In this bizarre mixture of western and noir, the Op is a fish out of
water when he assigned to clean up remote dusty Corkscrew, Arizona. This ought
to remind the astute reader of the masterwork Red Harvest, an exercise in violence and horror that rivals Tarantino.
A gunslinger remarks, “A hombre might
guess that you was playing the Circle H. A. R. against Bardell’s crew,
encouraging each side to eat up the other, and save you the trouble.” The Op
replies, “You could be either right or wrong. Do you think that’d be a dumb
play?”
$106,000 Blood
Money (1927). This presents the sequelae to the story The Big Knockover. Like many aftermath stories, it is overall less
satisfying than the original. The best part of the story is how the Op neatly
solves a complicated problem. Again like Red
Harvest, the plot is complicated with many characters and motivations. The
Op slyly manipulates events to tidy conclusion.
The 1967 Dell paperback has an introduction by Lillian
Hellman. It’s interesting but it tells more about her and Dash’s rocky
relationship more than the stories. She makes a provocative point about the
difficulty of living with somebody who is too stoically proud to complain when
they are hurting.
No comments:
Post a Comment