The Big Book of the Continental Op

Foreword

THROUGH MUD AND BLOOD AND DEATH AND DECEIT

Julie M. Rivett

This long-awaited volume you hold in your hands is the first and only collection to assemble every one of Dashiell Hammett s pioneering Continental Op adventures twentyeight stand-alone stories, two novels, and Hammett s only known unfinished Continental Op tale. It is truly definitive. And it has been many decades in the making. At the time of this writing, the first Op story is ninety-four years old and the last is seventy-nine, not including Three Dimes, an undated draft fragment conserved in Hammett s archives, first published in 2016. The gritty sleuth Hammett described as a little man going forward day after day through mud and blood and death and deceit has weathered gunshots, grifters, criminal conspiracies, class struggles, temptations, neglect, and more. This volume is testament to his tenacity. He is a survivor, a working-class hero, and a landmark literary creation.

The Continental Op stories are rooted in Hammett s experiences as an operative for Pinkerton s National Detective Agency. Although Hammett worked for Pinkerton s for a scant five years before and after his service in the U.S. Army during World War I the job inspired both his writing career and his worldview. Some influences are plain. The Continental Detective Agency, for example, is modeled on Pinkerton s, their Baltimore office located in the Continental Trust Company Building, where Hammett had been hired. Hammett said his cases largely involved forgeries, bank swindles, and safe burglaries, a solid factual basis for the Op s fictional adventures, albeit considerably enlivened. As much happens to one of my detectives in a page and a half as happened to me in six months when I was a real-life detective, Hammett wrote. While his salary was a mere $21 a week (roughly $500 in 2017 dollars), the training was invaluable, even in what Hammett called the easiest thing a sleuth has to do : shadowing. Despite being

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.