Hammett, Dashiell

Dashiell Hammett was a former detective for the Pinkerton Detective Agency, founded in 1850, who turned to writing crime novels and founded the "hard-boiled" school of detective fiction.  His first detective was the Continental Op, an operative for the Continental Detective Agency, who uses many names but never reveals his own name.  A short, fat, balding man, the Op is adept at both smooth talking and violence in a world that seemingly requires much more of the latter than of the former.  I once tried to total the body count in Red Harvest and lost track of the number of violent deaths, as I recall, somewhere in the forties.  Upon re-reading it, I lost count again in the twenties, but that's still a lot of bodies.  

Although the hard-boiled school is often conflated with the noir sub-genre of crime fiction, critics point out that the protagonists in noir are the victims or perpetrators within a corrupt system, whereas the hard-boiled detective "may bend or break the law, this is done by a protagonist with meaningful agency in pursuit of justice."   

The Continental Op, a collection of seven short stories, introduces the Op and his world of crime and violence.  Unlike other writers who denigrate the efforts and efficiency of the police, the Op often works with them to resolve cases for the benefit of his agency and clients.  Grade:  A.  

In Blood Money, published in 1927, criminals from all over the country have gathered in San Francisco to knock over a couple of banks in a well organized attack on San Francisco's financial district.  After the attack, however, many of the hoodlums themselves are killed by their own confederates.  As the Op follows the trail of blood and the body count mounts, the plot keeps getting more and more complicated.  Grade:  B.  

The Big Knockover is a collection of short stories, most of which are too short to be novels, but the story from which the collection takes its name became the first part of Blood Money; the second part of that book details the Op's efforts to trace and collar the planner of the operation.  Grade:  B.

In Red Harvest, the Op is sent by his agency to a Western mining town at the request of the reform-minded publisher of the local newspapers, only to find that his client is murdered before he has a chance even to meet the man.  The Op goes to the publisher's elderly father, the corrupt kingpin of the town, who feels control slipping from his grip, and who reluctantly hires the Op to clean up the town, which he proceeds to do by setting rival factions against each other as the body count mounts.  Grade:  A.  

Who could ever give any grade but an A+ to the quintessential hard-boiled detective story, The Maltese Falcon?   The taut, crisply written story follows Sam Spade's quest from the entry of his lovely, lying client to the final revelation of the falcon itself.  I always enjoy reading this book, and I'm sure I will be reading it again someday, maybe after I finish the remaining eight shelves of books (sigh).   Grade:  A+

I've never been that fond of The Thin Man, who, by the way, is NOT detective Nick Charles, but rather his erstwhile client, Clyde Wynant, a crazy inventor of whom it is said he's so thin he has to stand in the same place twice in order to cast a shadow.  Charles, his wife Nora, and their rambunctious Airedale Asta  are back in New York for the holidays when Charles receives word that Clyde wants to hire him.  Between the cocktail parties and speakeasies of Prohibition era New York, Charles puts away an amazing amount of booze while he chases the elusive Clyde all over town, dodging Clyde's lying, vengeful ex-wife Mimi, her gigolo new husband, and Mimi and Clyde's precociously dissipated daughter Dorothy.  Probably not going to read it again.  Grade:  C.   

And I'm DONE with hard-boiled for a while, on to the legal mysteries of Cyril Hare!