The Big Book of the Continental Op

I prefer Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op, that modest, faceless everyman, to the more well-known Sam Spade. Spade is not a particularly nice guy, on the other hand the Op's first person voice is like that of an old friend's. The Op is a Roaring Twenties lawman who breaks heads and takes names as well as turning a blind eye to Prohibition, as eager to go into a speakeasy as the next man. It's worth mentioning there's a lot more Continental Op material than there is about Spade too, about six times as much. Fully two thirds of Hammett's crime fiction starred our man from the Continental Detective Agency instead of falcon statuettes, glass keys and thin men. Ten stories featuring the Op were omitted from Hammett's superb Crime Stories And Other Writings making it incomplete. THE BIG BOOK OF THE CONTINENTAL OP rights that wrong by containing every Continental Op story the Dasher wrote, including one unfinished one! This is distinguished, authoritative writing too, so gritty it might've been written on sandpaper. The novels Red Harvest & The Dain Curse initially consisted of four Op novelettes apiece. I personally have never seen any of those eight segments published home or abroad in their original standalone form, and I've looked. Those eight stories are included in their original form here, verbatim from the pages of Black Mask, a brand name you can trust. The elusive 'It' & 'Death and Company' round out this complete collection. With the exception of 'This King Business' all 36 stories first appeared in Black Mask, the most feted extinct pulp magazine this side of the equally defunct Weird Tales. The Maltese Falcon also debuted in the Mask's pages before Knopf brought it out in hardcover; they'd already published Harvest & Dain. The fabulous and unobtrusive annotations in THE BIG BOOK OF THE CONTINENTAL OP reveal that Knopf mercilessly edited every paragraph Hammett wrote. Purchasers of this book will not only own Hammett's authentic versions of his two Op novels, but finally have authentic versions of the tales found in The Big Knockover & The Continental Op paperbacks, tinkered with by Lillian Hellman. If you're reading this you probably appreciate the exploits of the Op, a true pioneer of hardboiled American private dicks, but not the first. Carroll John Daly's 'Three Gun Terry' sneaked onto Black Mask's table of contents months ahead of the Op. Terry Mack is Daly's pilot fish for his enormously popular Race Williams character, a homicidal maniac who rationalizes his shooting sprees as private detecting. In his lifetime Daly enjoyed more glory in Black Mask than Hammett, hard as that is to believe. In the long run the Hammett legacy enjoys more success and respect; this is not to say Daly's writing sucks, it often makes for entertaining lightweight reading, but it's all hat and no cattle. The Op's romps in the Mask are steeped in a realism still resonant and relevant. To this day Hammett's influence on mystery novelists remains immense, justifying the mythic proportions of his literary reputation. His strengths as a storyteller and prose stylist as well as his background with Pinkerton's enabled his work to endure. On a side note, Lillian Hellman claimed Hammett didn't work for the agency for as long as he often alluded to. His own publisher Knopf hailed him as better than Hemingway, a conceit, of course, but one I happen to agree with. Give me Hammett's drunken private eyes and femme fatales over Hemingway's drunken sportsmen and forlorn expatriates any day of the week.

Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) is famous for his Sam Spade books, such as “The Maltese Falcon,” his Nick and Nora Charles, in “The Thin Man,” and his Continental Op in “The Dain Curse” and “Red Harvest.” The Continental Op, short for the operative of San Francisco’s office of the Continental detective Agency, is the name that Hammett gave to his private detectives. The stories are told in the first person without giving the name of the investigator. The Agency is run by the “old man” who is “a shell without human feelings whatsoever.” The Op has feelings but is a master of deceit. The first Op tale appeared in the pulp magazine “Black Mask,” and is credited with introducing the “hard-boiled detective genre.” There are 28 standalone short stories as well as another 8 that Hammett linked together to form novels. All 36 are in this volume. Hammett left school when he was 13-years-old. He worked for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency from 1915 to 1922, taking off some time from the Agency to serve as a sergeant in World War I. He published his first story, a short story called “The Barber and His Wife” in 1922 when he left Pinkerton, and his hard-boiled tales which followed, including “The Maltese falcon,” published in 1930, drew upon his experiences at Pinkerton. Hammett is credited for inserting dialogue into his tales which sounded authentic to the time of his books. He wrote his final novel, “The Thin Man,” in 1934, over 25 years before he died. He wrote five novels in total. Many film versions were made of Hammett’s novels such as two of “The Maltese Falcon,” made in 1931 and 1941. The 1931 version starred Ricardo Cortez as Sam Spade, while the 1941 version featured Humphrey Bogart in the role and is credited in making him a star.

This is a terrific collection of Dashiell Hammett stories - all the classics plus lesser-known but still excellent tales. No one else could write lines like this: "I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte." (the opening of "Red Harvest"). I also love the Op when he takes on mob mentality: "I hate mobs, lynchings - they sicken me. No matter how wrong the man is, if a mob is against him, I'm for him. The only thing I ever pray to God for is the chance some day to squat down behind a machine gun with a lynch mob in front of me." (from "This King Business"). Hammett's detective fiction is among the very best. This collection guarantees lots of enjoyable reading. One minor complaint - the compilers of Hammett's work felt obligated to put asterisks next to all the colloquial/semi-obscure phrases and slang of the time, with footnotes at the bottom of most pages to explain what they meant. Educational, but ultimately too distracting (I mostly gave up on checking them because it interfered with the flow of the story).

Texte außerhalb des traditionellen Kanons. Und für den Rest zum Teil relevant abweichender Textstand.

Fantastic to have all the Op stories together under one roof.

This volume is a real treasure trove: it contains all of Dashiell Hammett's "Continental Op" stories. One of the two editors who have brought them together for the first time is Hammett's granddaughter, Julie M. Rivett. I've read some of the stories before in other published collections, but there are a few here that I've not come across before. I love (most of) these stories. I used to think that Raymond Chandler was the best American detective story writer, but I became tired of Chandler's over-long descriptive passages and of his character Philip Marlowe's constant wisecracking. I much prefer Hammett's succinct writing style in these "Op" stories. (Similarly, I like the way that Erle Stanley Gardner gets on with the story in his Perry Mason books.) This big "real" book is great to hold in the hands, but I'm surprised that it hasn't also been produced as a Kindle edition. Oddly enough, there is an Kindle edition available in Italian that contains all the "Op" short stories. That's great for me, because I can read these great stories and practise my Italian at the same time. But I'm glad to have them all in English, too, now. The other thing I like about Hammett is that he was a socialist, as I am. Unfortunately he seems to have been a supporter of the Stalinist regime in Russia, which I consider to have been a bureaucratic state capitalist tyranny (like China today), not socialist or "communist". But that's another story. PS: I've just done a count, and there are only 7 of the 28 short stories that I don't rate highly enough to read again.

Dashiell Hammett needs no introduction; he is the standard against whom all other writers of hardboiled crime fiction are judged. This definitive collection of his Continental OP stories is for archiving in your collection. Highly recommended.

If you are a Dashiell Hammett fan (The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man) you ought to love The Continental Op. This book was worth the price as it contains all 28 stories and 2 Serialized Novels, The Op was given no name by Hammett but I found that, that actually added to the enjoyment of his adventures. Hammett described him as 'a little man going forward day after day through mud and blood and death and deceit'. Long before Nick Charles, Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, The Op was a landmark literary creation, rooted in Hammett's experiences as an operative for Pinkerton's National Dectective Agency. The first time The Op appeared in print was within Black Mask magazine in 1923 so that and the subsequent years form the background of this hard working Gumshoe. So enjoyable.