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,