‘You’ve got a flighty mind. That’s no good in this business. You don’t catch murderers by amusing yourself with interesting thoughts. You’ve got to sit down to all the facts you can get and turn them over and over till they click.’
(The Dain Curse page 320)
In retrospect, Hammett’s first novel, Red Harvest, seems like a delirious fantasy: an entire town populated only by rival gangs of gangsters and their molls and armies, set at loggerheads and wiping each other out in a mounting frenzy of violence. More parable than fiction. The red in the harvest is a harvest of blood; almost everyone dies, maybe it should have been titled The Slaughterhouse.
The Dain Curse starts out much more restrained and sober, more like a traditional crime story: research scientist Leggett has borrowed some diamonds from a merchant because he thinks he might be able to improve the look and appearance of sub-standard stones. One night they are stolen. The Continental Detective Agency is asked to investigate by the insurance company and our friend, the Continental Op, is assigned the case. We find him rooting through grass outside the burgled house, then interviewing various witnesses and suspects. Routine detective work. Only slowly does The Dain Curse, also, like Red Harvest, unravel into a murder fest…
A back story
Early on we discover that Leggett the scientist is not at all who he pretends to be. He appears to commit suicide and leaves a long suicide note, an improbably detailed account of his improbably colourful life of crime in remote foreign lands. This is reminiscent of the way the Sherlock Holmes novels rely on long backstories in India (The Sign of Four, 1890) or among the Mormons (Study In Scarlet, 1887) or as John Buchan will rely on a long-past vow to drive the plot of the final Richard Hannay adventure, The Island of Sheep (1936).
Then again, as the Continental Op probes it, he discovers that maybe the suicide note is not all it seems…
A partner
It’s just so convenient in stories like this to give the protagonist a partner – someone to deploy on missions when the hero can’t do everything himself, to act as dummy or decoy in dangerous situations – but above all, someone to discuss the case with while it’s in mid-stream, to bandy theories around with. And then, finally, someone to mull over the loose ends with when it’s all over, and who can – at a pinch – make sense of it all for the reader.
Dr Watson is the archetpye of the partner because he fulfils all these roles so well. Hammett’s detective, the Continental Op, was able to confide in Dinah Brand in Red Harvest, until, that is, he woke up holding the domestic ice pick which was embedded in her dead chest. Oops.
In this novel, the Op conveniently runs into his old mucker, the novelist Owen Fitzstephan, who helps out with a few minor errands but whose real purpose is the epilogue chapter at the end of each of the three parts which the book is divided into – chapters where the two guys sit and piece together what happened and why, for the reader’s edification. Until Fitzstephan himself becomes part of the story…
Three parts
The text is divided into three parts, each one dealing with a cluster of deaths and the rather far-fetched explanations which are concocted to account for them:
The Dains
A few bodies turn up even before Leggett is found dead with a note. In an extended revelation scene the Op moves through several theories of who did what to arrive at a sort of truth, that the current Mrs Leggett is one of two Dain sisters who, back in Paris, before the War, were in love with Maurice Pierre de Mayenne. He married the other sister, already pregnant with the daughter Gabrielle. The current Mrs elaborately arranges for the little girl to shoot dead her mother; Leggett takes the rap and goes to Devil’s Island until he manages to escape and works his way to California and a new identity; the current Mrs brings up Gabrielle, tracks Mr L down, surprises him by arriving on his doorstep then, when Mrs L kills not one but 2 private dicks she’s hired to track him down but were now blackmailing her, she a) kills them both b) persuades Mr L to shoot himself (!). At which point she makes a break for the stairs, is tackled by the Op and Gabrielle’s thick hunky boyfriend Collinson, and in the scuffle, guess what, the gun goes off and she is dead. Among the many facts and fictions thrown around during this mayhem, Mrs Leggatt née Lucy Dain, says there is a Curse on all the Dain family; which now amounts to young Gabrielle.
The Temple
Ten days later the Op is called off another job by the family lawyer who is uneasy that Gabrielle has insisted on going to stay at the San Fran headquarters of a religious sect. The Op is installed there, with the sect owners’ agreement, but that night all hell breaks loose. The Op is drugged by dope fed into his room by secret pipes, encounters a weird physical illusion, bumps into Gabrielle almost naked holding a blood-stained ornamental knife (see illustration, below) saying ‘I killed him’, finds the family doctor stabbed to death by said knife on the religion’s ‘altar’, returns to find Collinson and Gabrielle gone, goes into the servant girl’s room and is overcome with fumes again, then attacked, then nearly knifed, then clubbed, then rushes back down to the altar to find the doctor gone and the lady of the house & cult (Mrs Haldorn) tied up on the altar and her husband, Joseph, having chosen that night of all nights to go beyond the cult they’d cooked up with theatrical robes, hypnotism and dope fed into the followers’ rooms, purely to make money, but on this night he’s finally flipped, thinks he genuinely is God, and is about to sacrifice her on the altar; the Op has to shoot him six times and then stab him through the throat to kill him. Then the Op and Owen the novelist have another session piecing it all together.
Quesada
The Op is called off another case (again) by an urgent cable from Eric Collinson who has hurriedly married Gabrielle and spirited her off to a secluded cottage in Quesada, rural California. He finds Eric’s body fallen off a clifftop path. A lot then happens. there are car chases and car smashes. The sheriff’s wife is discovered to be unfaithful to him with another police official, tells our guys her husband did it, but is then discovered murdered, we go out in a small boat round hidden coves round the coast where a bad guy is discovered who has kidnapped Gabrielle but is shot down before he can reveal who put him up to it…
A small bomb goes off in the Op’s apartment, injuring him, the crim who brought it, and mangling to a pulp his friend the novelist. The main thrust of this section is the Op helps Gabrielle go cold turkey to get over her morphine addiction, and manages to protect her from potential killers, including Mrs Haldorn from the cult, the Mexican maid with the knife, the crooked lawyer who tried it on with her once, and Fink, the helpmeet at the cult who made and placed the bomb. Quite a few more people get killed before the Op/narrator explains it in a detailed 7 or 8 page finale, packed with detailed explanations of everyone’s outlandish motivations and wildly improbable schemes, which caused so much death and, in the end, changed so little. Gabrielle walks clean and free – there is a Happy Ending.
Four short stories
In fact, as with Red Harvest, this ‘novel’ started life as four connected stories in the ‘pulp’ magazine, Black Mask.
- Black Lives’ (November 1928)
- ‘The Hollow Temple’ (December 1928)
- Black Honeymoon’ (January 1929)
- ‘Black Riddle’ (February 1929)
Separate short stories, or a conscious novel published in the serial method which dates back to Dickens and beyond?
The Continental Op
Usually our heroes are tall, dark and handsome. It is notable that the protagonist of these stories is described as short and stocky:
- ‘He was a man past forty, I should say, rather short and broad – somewhat of your build… ‘ …’ (p.197)
- five foot six (p.223)
- ‘a middle-aged fat man’ (p.284)
Compare and contrast with the tall, dark, handsome strangers Sam Spade ‘quite six feet tall’, Philip Marlowe ‘slightly over six feet’, Sherlock Holmes ‘rather over six feet’ etc etc.
Fast
As I noticed in Greenmantle (1916), almost as soon as the motor car had been invented it was getting stolen, hijacked, and used in high-speed pursuits. In other words, right from the start of its existence the car has helped us act out our unconscious desires for speed and flight and brainless excitement.
He had a Chrysler roadster parked around the corner. We got into it and began bucking traffic and traffic signals towards Pacific Avenue. (p.222)
This ride ends, as any traffic policeman might have predicted, in a bad crash where all the car’s occupants are injured. In this respect, The Dain Curse is a bit more realistic than Red Harvest in which there are innumerable car chases and high-speed shootouts.
Underworld slang
Similarly, now I come to look for it, there is less underworld slang and thieves’ argot in Hammett than you might expect.
- dinge = black person
- dark meat = black person
- rats and mice = rhyming slang for dice
- the nut = earnings, income
- a gallon of the white = alcohol
- chive = knife
- heap = car
Style
In this novel the prose is less crunched and abbreviated than in Harvest, maybe because that one was set in a rather comic-book way among hard-talking gangsters, and this one is set among the more civilised professional classes starting with Dr Leggett the scientist, then taking in the upper-class devotees of the Temple and including the Op’s pal, the novelist: all very literate and civilised types. Less slang, less street patois.
Hammett takes a while to do detailed, rather laborious descriptions of characters. Chandler, Greene or Deighton would have nailed the following character in a few lines. Hammett is surprisingly verbose.
[Edgar Leggett] was a dark-skinned erect man in his middle forties, muscularly slender and of medium height. He would have been handsome if his brown face hadn’t been so deeply marked with sharp, hard lines across the forehead and from nostrils down across mouth-corners. Dark hair, worn rather long, curled above and around the broad, grooved forehead. Red-brown eyes were abnormally bright behind horn-rimmed spectacles. His nose was long, thin, and high-bridged. His lips were thin, sharp, nimble, over a small, bony chin. His black and white clothes were well made and cared for. (p.196)
There are occasional outbursts of jazzy prose, some smart-alec sentences, but not many. There are only a dozen or 15 sentences like that out of a 200-page novel. Nowhere near the stylistic jazz and sparkle of Raymond Chandler.
We went outside and asked all the people we could find all the questions we could think of. (p.327)
I piled up what facts I had, put some guesses on them, and took a jump from the top of the heap into space. (p.353)
Go-getter
The Op is sardonic about the pushy District Attorney in Querada, describing him as ‘very conscious of being a go-getter’ (p.306). I was interested to see the Online Dictionary dating this term to 1920-25, making it very new when Hammett used it; though the Etymological Dictionary dates it further back, to 1910.
Author’s message
‘Nobody thinks clearly, no matter what they pretend. Thinking’s a dizzy business, a matter of catching as many of those foggy glimpses as you can and fitting them together the best you can. That’s why people hang on so tight to their beliefs and opinions; because, compared to the haphazard way in which they’re arrived at, even the goofiest opinion seems wonderfully clear, sane and self-evident. And if you let it get away from you, then you’ve got to dive back into that foggy muddle to wrangle yourself out another to take its place’ (p.331)
Credit
The Dain Curse by Dashiell Hammett was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1929. All references are to the Picador Four Great Novels 1982 paperback edition.
Related links
Hammett’s five novels
- Red Harvest (February 1929) The unnamed operative of the Continental Detective Agency uncovers a web of corruption in Personville. There’s a lot of violence, shoot-outs on almost every page, plus the individual murders.
- The Dain Curse (July 1929) The Continental Op is dragged into three episodes involving members of the Dain family: first the French ex-con posing as Dr Leggett is murdered and his wife shot; then the daughter Gabrielle involved in murders at a weird cult; then the husband who has loved her all along is killed and, while the Op is detoxing the morphine addict, the truth of the long sorry saga is revealed.
- The Maltese Falcon (1930)
- The Glass Key (1931)
- The Thin Man (1934)
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