Lucas Blogs About The Dain Curse

Wow, they're right, day-for-night shooting is really obvious.

So, what's this book's deal?

Dashiell Hammett's The Dain Curse is a pulpy detective novel (originally serialized) about his Continental Op character (who you may recognize from Red Harvest, the inspiration for Kurosawa's Yōjimbō, which Leone remade as A Fistful of Dollars). The Op is a short, stout, middle-aged man who works, unsurprisingly, at the Continental Detective Agency. He's been hired by an insurance company to investigate a robbery at the home of a Mr. Leggett, a chemist whose work on removing impurities from glass has drawn the attention of a local jeweler who wants to see if the process might remove flaws from gemstones. And it just gets more convoluted from there. No surprise in a detective story really. There are actually three separate cases in this novel but as time goes on we get drawn into an elaborate plot involving jailbreaks, assumed identities, hallucinations, a cult, a small town on the California coast, and, of course, a dubious cure for heroin addiction.

That's kind of a lot.

It is kind of a lot. I'll be frank, I've now read all of Hammett's novels and this one's the weakest. Part of it is the fact that I don't much care for the Op who is both the protagonist and narrator.

What's wrong with the Op?

Well, he's a pretty well-formed character, but he rubs me the wrong way.  Partly it's because there's too much access to his thoughts and opinions. Hammett's strongest novels, The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key are both in the third person limited so you're removed from the protagonist's perspective. It's almost like watching the action on a screen, you have to infer the main character's thoughts and motivations from their actions.

And you get too much insight into the deductive process when you're in the detective's head?

Not quite, Hammett tends to write the Op as if he were the silent third-person observer, but the plot unfolding around him so so bonkers that you'd think he'd have a bit more of a reaction. And this might seem similar to The Thin Man — narrated by Nick Charles, — but the point in The Thin Man is the contrast between the grisly murder and Nick's past as a PI and the charming society life he leads with Nora. Here, the Op is just some schlub detective to whom an elaborate mystery happens.

I guess I get it.

Also, the original serialization hurts the novel's cohesion, given that parts one and two are relatively complete mystery stories (albeit stories where the conclusion feels a bit off) connected only by sharing some of the same characters. Which isn't necessarily bad, but when the whole thing comes together at the end the revelation isn't really that satisfying. I mean, it's a better explanation than the temporary solutions presented in the first two parts.

Any other complaints you want to get out of the way?

Sure, the book's depiction of the only two black characters is pretty racist. Minnie, the Leggett's housekeeper, isn't involved in the theft but is helping their daughter, Alice, get heroin. Meanwhile, her boyfriend is an abusive layabout and a gambler. And sure, everyone in the novel is a pretty terrible person, but Hammett's depictions here are stereotypical and two-dimensional. Oh, and speaking of Alice, her heroin addiction means that even though she's pretty central to the novel's plot, she doesn't actually have any agency for most of it. So, yeah, the way that Hammett depicts women and minorities in the book feels dated to the modern reader.

Is there anything you liked about the book?

Well, Hammett's prose remains admirably lean and readable, and there is some gallows humor to be mined from Fitzsephans, a writer who's a mutal acquaintance of the Op and the Leggett family. Also, the plot is so ridiculous that I'm sure Hammett wanted the reader to find it a little funny. But overall, The Dain Curse just doesn't work.

Wow, an outright unrecommendation.

I know, and you used to make fun of me for being wishy-washy.

The Dain Curse by Dashiell Hammett, Vintage Crime trade paperback edition, July 1989 (originally published in 1928), 231 pages, pairs well with bourbon and a diminished faith in the goodness of humanity

Links:

If you'd like to learn more about Dashiell Hammett, you can apparently go to the University of South Carolina Library, whose Irvin Department of Special Collections and Rare Books houses both Hammett's family papers and Richard Layman's research materials on Hammett. I don't know how accessible these things are at the moment. You could also, you know, just google him.