Hammett, Dashiell - The Dain Curse (1929)

Having recently read too many modern 500 - page mysteries that are padded out with kinky sex, bloodthirsty insanity, and protagonists crippled by angst, I found it a pleasure to pick up The Dain Curse again (the other four Hammett novels will follow in quick order). 160 pages or so of beautifully contrived workmanship. If you'll allow the analogy, it is like the old mechanical Timex watch I had for twenty years as compared with my new answering machine. The watch that never failed vanished into the hands of a mugger many years ago - one does not sentimentally hang onto something like that when a knife is being held to your throat by a drug - addicted kid who'd kill for a Big Mac hamburger.

The answering machine, bought to replace the one that recently died of old age at the age of five, which is about the life expectancy of modern miracle machinery, is about the size of a paperback book and has one button that does all (meaning it does nothing any reasonable person would expect it to do - the Timex, of course, only needed to be wound, and adjusted when the clocks changed for summer time); I've persuaded it at least to answer messages, but at the expense of having a working telephone that can be used when the machine is on: compromise deal with it now is to disconnect it when I'm home, put it on when I go out, which means unplugging and replugging all the different connection wires each time, now done with ingenious if sloppy operational skill, making sure all those carefully set out wires are covered up to keep the cats from playing with them. Is that business about 'technology' a pointless diversion? No, I don't think so.

The Dain Curse is both thriller and mystery, and hard - boiled of course. The difference between hard - boiled and traditional detection becomes a moot point when dealing with great writers like Hammett and Chandler who purposely denigrated 'cosiness'. You will find the same literary elements and narrative skills in both approaches to mystery writing when they are well done - and quite a lot of overlap when it comes to fair clueing and a reasonable level of erudition. But what I most admire about Hammett is the stripped - down and straightforward narrative, spiced with excellent dialogue of a terse and often witty sort. Yes, the plot might be absurd, as is “Silence of the Lambs” as a modern example, yet works not by overwhelming the attention span by long passages of obfuscation and psychology but by punching and jabbing like Ali in his heydey. The 'rope - a - dope' style of detection.

Within the first hundred pages you get a full murder mystery, solved with improbable but perfect logic by the Continental Op (whether modern police methodology would allow a private eye to walk all over procedure these days the way he did is a matter of societal and cultural changes); then follows the aftermath, two more murder mysteries involving the poor 'cursed' Dain girl, all tied together by the overriding plot involving a superbly rendered villain, with excellent provision of clues. The economy and complexity of this process is inspiring, everything that needs to be said is said or presented, there's no nonsense or unnecessary diversion.

Characterization? Bah! Enough is presented to make the people live, even poor old Leggett, the French escapee from Devil's Island who has made a new career in San Francisco as a research chemist, but is all too soon a murder victim. Gabrielle, the morphine junkie with the elfin, foxlike face, who thinks she is cursed, is a marvellous character. A comment on customs: As we all know, sex, drug addiction, passion, and greed have existed throughout human history. That they are not presented graphically in this book is a matter of the editorial policy of the time - any adult reader can fill in between the lines. What is more interesting for people with an interest in such things is the 'periodicity', for example, the Op having to take a ferry from San Francisco to Berkeley because the Bay Bridge hadn't been built then (let alone BART). Prohibition was in full swing and the casual flouting of the law taken for granted. This adds appeal in the way the Philo Vance books do for New York.

Then of course there is always the behavior of the cops, and also what would be considered blatant racism these days - Civil Libertarians would have a fit now. I know some NYC cops, and their attitudes are really no different from what they would have been in the 1920s; it's just the procedures and the way of expressing opinions that have changed. Appearance: The Continental Op is the anonymous precursor to Pronzini's Nameless Detective. But little things leak out. Did you know, for example, that he was only five - feet - six tall, but weighed in at 190 lbs.? Somehow one's first impression is that he's the Incredible Hulk, the way he comes across (but doesn't behave, always being very polite), but he is actually a generic version of George Smiley or Father Brown. Lorre, not Bogart.

This was intentional on Hammett's part, I think, before Sam Spade. He was just trying to represent a 'real' detective of the Pinkerton sort, not Sherlock. I have never met a private detective, but in reality they probably resemble bank clerks. Seedy, but not excessively so, plodding but not jerks by any means. Inconspicuous, but capable of displaying power when needed. This would fit the times - likely nowadays a PI would more resemble a computer nerd with goggle glasses and a dirty T - shirt. (Apart from the boss of the agency, of course, who would dress like a professional basketball coach to impress the customers.)

Wyatt James

The Dain Curse (1928) consists of four linked mystery tales, each with its own solution. The first two tales in Dain are livelier than the last two, in my judgment, but the whole book is terribly weak and second rate. The stories are mysteries, but the solutions of the first two tales come from left field and are not deducible from any clues or plot material at the beginnings of the tales; they are not "fair play", and cannot be classified a "puzzle plots" in any sense of the term. The second story, Part II of the novel, shows Hammett working in the incipient weird menace tradition in the pulps.

Mike Grost

See also: http://thecorpsestepsout.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/dain-curse.html