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The Complete Continental Op Vol 2 (Red Harvest and The Dain Curse and all the stories)

Dashiell Hammett

The nameless operative.

From the pages of Black Mask magazine came Dashiell Hammett's nameless Continental Op. the archetypal 'fat man' unglamorous, but a tough, and hard-boiled gumshoe with a keen mind, a sharp shooting trigger finger. The tough guy from San Francisco was on the scene before  Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, or Lew Archer,  and was a huge influence on the genre.

Based on Hammett's own experience as a private eye with Pinkerton's, the Op brought in edgy realism to crime fiction, until then largely cosy crime. This series of two volume yellowbacks includes all twenty-eight Continental Op short-story adventures along with Hammett's unfinished 'Three Dimes'; and the novels Red Harvest and The Dain Curse.  A must-have for all crime fiction buffs.

This is the second of a two-volume set that collects The Continental Op series; and culled from the Complete Dashiell Hammett collection available from Chancellor Press in hardcover.

  • Classification : Classic Crime & Adventure/Thrillers
  • Pub Date : JUN 20, 2023
  • Imprint : YELLOWBACK
  • Page Extent : 754
  • Binding : PB
  • ISBN : 9789357312356
  • Price : INR 899
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Dashiell Hammett

Dashiell Hammett, (1894-1961), was an American writer who created the hard-boiled school of detective fiction. Hammett left school at 13 and worked at a variety of low-paying jobs before working eight years as a detective for the Pinkerton agency. He served in World War I, contracted tuberculosis, and spent the immediate postwar years in army hospitals. He began to publish short stories and novelettes in pulp magazines and wrote two novelsRed Harvest and The Dain Curse (both published in 1929)before writing The Maltese Falcon (1930), generally considered his finest work. It introduced Sam Spade, Hammett's fictional detective creation, played by Humphrey Bogart in the film version directed by John Huston (1941), which became a classic of its genre. He also wrote The Glass Key (1931) and The Thin Man (1934), which initiated a motion picture and later a television series built around his detecting couple, Nick and Nora Charles. Nora was based on the playwright Lillian Hellman, with whom he formed a romantic alliance in 1930 that lasted until his death. Her Pentimento (1973) has an account of their life together.

After 1934 Hammett devoted his time to left-wing political activities and to the defense of civil liberties. He served in World War II as an enlisted man. In 1951 he went to jail for six months because he refused to reveal the names of the contributors to the bail bond fund of the Civil Rights Congress, of which he was a trustee.

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