The Dain Curse by Dashiell Hammett, father of the modern crime novel, is not only an action-packed tale of misdeeds and murder, but a study of 1920s American culture and society. Within the novel’s pages, here is a sampling of what a reader will encounter:
First-Person Hard Boiled Narrator
The unnamed Continental Op detective tells the tale in crisp, exacting language as he describes the people and places and situations he encounters. For example, here is an account of his first-time meeting a scientist by the name of Edgar Leggett, “His voice was unexpectedly harsh, rasping, though he manner was friendly enough. He 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 the nostrils down across mouth-corners. Dark hair, worth 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 cloths were well made and cared for.” I quote the detective’s entire study to underscore how careful and laser-sharp observation is required at each step and phase in his solving this complex, convoluted case.
Presto Tempo
Like picking up clues as you read and solving the mystery before reaching the end? Good luck with this one – events are packed so tight and happen so fast, it is like trying to identify each note while listening to a Paganini Caprice. Fortunately, for the mystery-challenged, people like myself, the backstory is given as the end of each of the three parts, along with the Continental Op’s take on the case.
Femme Fatale
What is compelling noir without a femme fatale? This novel features a doozy – Gabrielle. There is something about this slender, large-eyed twenty-year-old that fascinates men and pull them to her like a powerful, deadly magnet. Is it her drug-induced craziness, or her intense personality, made more intense by a family curse, or, then again, her attractive face and exceptionally white, smooth skin? Or, perhaps more likely, a combination of all of these plus that undefinable feminine something.
Novelist Owen Fitzstephan
Hammett probably had lots of fun including a fiction writer in this book, a writer described by the detective as, “A man who pretended to be lazier than he was, would rather talk that do anything else, and had a lot of what seemed to be accurate information and original ideas on any subject that happened to come up, as long as it was a little out of the ordinary.” What kind of ideas does Owen Fitzstephan have on subjects out of the ordinary? I wouldn’t want to give too much away, so I’ll just say we come to see which one of these two – the Continental Op or the talented novelist – has more compassion and a greater grasp of human nature.
America the Violent
Guns are as common as candy – an entire society of people thinking their problems are best solved by shooting others or shooting themselves. Doesn’t matter, law or outlaw, man or woman, young or old, so many people quick to point a gun and pull the trigger. There aren’t as many corpses for the morgue as Hammett's Red Harvest but there are enough to count on more than one hand.
California Fruits and Nuts
By 1928 when Hammett wrote this novel, America was generations removed from a land of traditional believers in traditional religions. Matter of fact, many people relocated to California to escape the ways and beliefs of their parents - so many alternatives; so many sects and cults, so many ways to express yourself in faith and belief and alternate lifestyles. The Continental Op detective has to deal with a California cult calling itself "Temple of the Holy Grail." Here is what he says about the cult and the cult’s leaders: “They brought their cult to California because everybody does, and picked San Francisco because it held less competition than Los Angeles. They didn’t want a mob of converts: they wanted them few but wealthy.” Again, novel as study in the sociology and psychology of gun-crazed America.
American author Dashiell Hammett, 1894 - 1961
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