The Big Book of the Continental Op

by Dashiell Hammett, Richard Layman (Editor), Julie M. Rivett (Editor)

Overview

Now for the first time ever in one volume, all twenty-eight stories and two serialized novels starring the Continental Op—one of the greatest characters in storied history of detective fiction. 

Dashiell Hammett is the father of modern hard-boiled detective stories. His legendary works have been lauded for almost one hundred years by fans, and his novel The Maltese Falcon was adapted into a classic film starring Humphrey Bogart. One of Dashiell Hammett's most memorable characters, the Continental Op made his debut in Black Mask magazine on October 1, 1923, narrating the first of twenty-eight stories and two novels that would change forever the face of detective fiction. The Op is a tough, wry, unglamorous gumshoe who has inspired a following that is both global and enduring. He has been published in periodicals, paperback digests, and short story collections, but until now, he has never, in all his ninety-two years, had the whole of his exploits contained in one book. The book features all twenty-eight of the original standalone Continental Op stories, the original serialized versions of Red Harvest and The Dain Curse, and previously unpublished material. This anthology of Continental Op stories is the only complete, one-volume work of its kind.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780525432951
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/28/2017
Series:	Continental Op Series
Pages:	752
Sales rank:	385,331
Product dimensions:	6.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Dashiell Hammett was born in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, and grew up in Baltimore. Hammett left school at the age of fourteen and held a variety of jobs thereafter—messenger boy, newsboy, clerk, operator, and stevedore, finally becoming an operative for Pinkerton’s Detective Agency. He served as a sergeant in the Army in World War I and World War II. In the late 1920s Hammett became the unquestioned master of hard-boiled detective fiction in America. In The Maltese Falcon (1930) he first introduced his famous private eye, Sam Spade. The Thin Man (1934) offered another immortal sleuth, Nick Charles. Red Harvest (1929), The Dain Curse (1929), and The Glass Key (1931) are among his most celebrated novels.

Date of Birth:

May 27, 1894

Date of Death:

January 10, 1961

Place of Birth:

St. Mary, Maryland

Place of Death:

New York

Education:

Baltimore Polytechnic Institute

Read an Excerpt

Foreword
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Big Book of the Continental Op"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Dashiell Hammett.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Editorial Reviews

10/30/2017
Reviewed by Don Herron In San Francisco in the 1920s, Dashiell Hammett carved out his reputation as the father of the hard-boiled American detective story with a wildly entertaining series about a short, fat, nameless operative for the Continental Detective Agency. Throughout 28 short stories and novelettes and two full-length novels, the Op never told readers his name. And they didn’t care. Whenever the “fat shorty” yanked out his roscoe, you knew action—and more than one moment of hysterical humor—would fly. The casework was pulled from memories Hammett had of the job he’d just left, sleuthing across America for Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency. From wandering-daughter jobs and embezzlement to kidnapping and murder, the tough little Frisco gumshoe faced it all.Now, for the first time, the complete adventures appear in one place, drawing on the original text from the pulps. Every previous edition either misses some stories or features exploits cut to shreds by editorial blue pencil. And this hefty volume reprints, for the first time since they appeared in the pages of Black Mask magazine, the original serial versions of the novels Red Harvest and The Dain Curse (when Alfred Knopf did them in hardback in 1929, he asked for lots of changes—Harvest had too many dynamitings).The current editors do intrude with occasional footnotes explaining period slang (really, who doesn’t know a gat is a gun?) and make the glaring misstep of breaking the contents down by the three Black Mask editors (ending with Joseph Shaw, the editor last in line, who is now a legend for nudging the former detective toward novel-length work). Obviously, Hammett’s incandescent talent is the major factor, not the editors. Each editorial “period” has weaker efforts and then its triumphs—the earliest stories in 1923 are feeling their way, but by “Zigzags of Treachery” the work is top-notch. In 1924, “The Girl with Silver Eyes” and “The Whosis Kid” scorched the typewriter keys, but the pulpster still stumbled with “Creeping Siamese.” The final two Continental Op stories published under Shaw, and The Dain Curse, seem to show a writer grown tired. Maybe he was ready to move on—he had enough gas in the tank to create Sam Spade for The Maltese Falcon and conjure up Nick and Nora Charles and Asta for The Thin Man. You don’t need the ponderous and academic to explain the fun away. Few reading experiences equal going through the Ops in order, so knock yourself out. (Dec.)Don Herron has led the Dashiell Hammett Tour in San Francisco for 40 years and is the author of Willeford, a biography.

Publishers Weekly

07/01/2017
Hard-edged, savvy, and one of the great characters devised by hard-boiled detective fiction's key instigator, Hammett, the Continental Op first appeared in Black Mask magazine on October 1, 1923, and eventually cracked cases in 28 stories and two serialized novels. These works are now collected in one volume for the first time ever. In addition, an unfinished story from Hammett's archives is finally seeing the light, with an introduction by the book's editors, Hammett's executor and granddaughter, respectively.

Library Journal

2017-10-10
At long last, Black Lizard collects all 28 of the Op's completed stories, plus the opening chapter of one incomplete tale and the original Black Mask serializations of the novels that were revised and published as Red Harvest and The Dain Curse.Though he's become synonymous with the hard-boiled shamus, the nameless operative for San Francisco's Continental Detective Agency is not so much an anti­­-golden age detective—he made his first appearance in 1923, the same year as his polar opposite, Lord Peter Wimsey, before the gentleman sleuth had frozen into a bundle of clichés—as an anti-pulp detective, rarely carrying a gun in his earliest adventures and self-effacing about his talents and his testosterone. He's also something of an anti-character who lacks not only a name, but many other individual markers that made his offspring Sam Spade such an indelible hero. But what a voice! As early as "It" (1923), the Op already sounds brisk, businesslike, precise, and articulate. In the eight (mostly early) stories not already available in the Library of America's collection of Hammett's crime stories, the Op, hiding some serious deductive chops beneath his mastery of violent action, figures out, among other things, why three corpses would have been sandwiched into a clothes press, which interested party took a shot at a bedridden patriarch, and what a known gangster has to do with the kidnapping of an advertising executive's wife. Most of these tales, like the 20 more familiar ones from "The House in Turk Street" to "The Gutting of Couffignal" to "The Big Knockover," begin with apparently simple cases that rapidly launch the Op into deeper waters that never quite close over his head. Editors Layman and Rivett make a persuasive case for Hammett's willingness to adapt his style to three very different Black Mask editors, George W. Sutton, Philip C. Cody, and Joseph Thompson Shaw, the last of whom set the seal on Hammett's transformation from pulp storyteller to one of America's most influential novelists.Of course the stories are uneven, often overlong and over-explained, and occasionally, like the all-too-aptly titled "This King Business," just plain silly. No matter. Fans of hard-boiled fiction will know the holy grail when they see it.

Kirkus Reviews