Imprint
- Orion
- The Murder Room
Fiction, Crime & mystery, Classic crime
'Not just the first of the tough school of crime-writing but the best.' - The Times.
Miss Gabriel Dain Leggett is young and wealthy, with a penchant for morphine and religious cults. She also has an unfortunate effect on the people around her. They die - violently.
Is she the victim of a family curse? The short, squat, utterly unsentimental Continental Op, the best private detective around, has his doubts and finds himself confronting something infinitely more dangerous.
This is the Continental Op's most bizarre case and a tautly crafted masterpiece of suspense.
Praise for The Dain Curse
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The Continental Op is the first fully hard-boiled hero in American letters. - The New Yorker
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Hammett's prose was clean and entirely unique. His characters were as sharply and economically defined as any in American fiction. - New York Times
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Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley... [he] gave murder back to the people who commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse. - Raymond Chandler
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Dashiell Hammett is a master of the detective novel, yes, but also one hell of a writer. - Boston Globe
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Great crime fiction started with Hammett. - James Ellroy
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Hammett was breaking new ground in every book he wrote. - George Pelecanos
Dashiell Hammett
Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) was born in Maryland, left school at 14 and had several jobs - messenger boy, newsboy, clerk, timekeeper, yardman, machine operator and stevedore - until he became an operative for the Pinkerton Detective Agency. His experiences as a private detective laid the foundations for his writing career. His work includes The Maltese Falcon, Red Harvest, The Glass Key, The Thin Man and some eighty short stories, mostly published in Black Mask magazine.
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