Tonally this is not new, but the events here are at times as wild as anything you’ll find in Rim of the Pit (1944) by Hake Talbot or as kaleidoscopic as The Red Right Hand (1945) by Joel Townsley Rogers. Each milieu is distinct, the rolling cast of characters overlapping just enough for this to feel like a cohesive narrative, and a jaded eye is run over topics as diverse as religion (the cult at its core dismissed as “probably as full of quackery as any other”), the escalation of criminal schemes (“Kill yourself into a hole, and the chances are a time comes when you have to kill yourself out”), and the general hopelessness of the people who surround Gabrielle and are as susceptible to superstition as she is (“It was a long story, and he was too excited to make it a clear one”).

I don’t really want to get into the specifics of the plots, you’re better off experiencing Hammett’s breakneck developments as pure as possible. And along for the ride, at the heart of every single one of the befuddling developments, is Hammett’s tough, unsympathetic, unnamed Continental Op - veteran of only two novels and who-knows how many cases (I’m aware that someone does actually know), a protagonist who would go on to be misunderstood and poorly-replicated throughout the length, breadth, and depth of the Hardboiled subgenre. The first three of these vignettes demonstrate the violence and death that seem to shadow her every personal relationship, and the fourth then draws out their common threads to show the eponymous curse of her Dain blood up for the deliberate human design at its core.

Structurally, what we have here is essentially four novellas - belying Hammett’s apprenticeship in the pulps, writing stories in instalments - which all centre on the youthful Gabrielle Dain Leggett. So let’s look to The Dain Curse (1929) to exemplify a lot of the good that the subgenre has to offer. MacDonald, and the Cool & Lam books of Erle Stanley Gardner, but still there lingers an air of distrust whenever I step away from the Venetian vase of the drawing room and into the mean streets. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, both Ross and John D. I mean, I named Jim Thompson one of the four most important male authors in crime fiction, have heaped praise on James M.

Doubtless on account of my predilection for typically British novels of detection, I have somehow fostered the mistaken reputation of one who dislikes the Hardboiled school.

The dain curse dashiell hammett