The Return of the Continental Op

Encyclopedia.com has this to say about the author, Dashiell Hammett: “Dashiell Hammett rose to fame as the leading exponent of the so-called "hard-boiled" school of crime, writing during a relatively brief period from 1922 to 1934. In just four years Hammett stamped his individual style on the American crime story, mostly in the Black Mask popular magazine, creating the figure of the private eye who moved through an urban landscape of corruption and violence, dispensing his own idiosyncratic brand of justice as he saw fit largely unimpeded by law enforcement agencies.”

And here is the introduction to this book by Ellery Queen:

THIS is the third book of Dashiell Hammett short stories to be detected, collected, and selected by your Editors. It is the last of a series that was planned from the beginning as a trilogy.

The first volume was called The Adventures of Sam Spade and Other Stories. It contained the only three Sam Spade shorts written to date, supplemented by four miscellaneous tales of crime and detection, all 24-carat Hammett.

The second volume was titled The Continental Op. It contained four stories about the fat, nameless agency operative who is a sort of older brother of the great Sam Spade — just as tough and rough as the protagonist of The Maltese Falcon, just as hard and brutal and efficient — in a phrase, Dashiell Hammett’s second wild man from Frisco.

And here is The Return of the Continental Op — five more adventures in manhunting (and womanhunting) at the side of one of the most authentic agency dicks ever projected into words of one and two syllables.

The five stories in this book deserve special introductory comment. The first two — The Whosis Kid and The Gutting of Couffignal — have no relationship either in plot or characters (excepting the presence in each of the Continental Op’s brain and brawn); yet they are, and always will be, bracketed together in the memory of those who admire Hammett’s work. The reason for this strange coupling can be found in Dashiell Hammett’s own Introduction to the Modern Library edition of The Maltese Falcon. Hammett, trying to recall how The Maltese Falcon came to be written and why it took the shape it did, remembered that in a short story called The Whosis Kid he had failed to make the most of a situation he liked, and that in another short story called The Gutting of Couffignal he had been equally unfortunate with an equally promising denouement; Hammett thought he might have better luck if he tried again, combining these two “failures” with the theme of the Maltese bird and the peculiar rental agreement between Charles V and the Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem. (Indeed Hammett did have better luck! He merely produced one of the ten best detective novels of our time.)

With this provocative case-history in the background, your Editors felt it their inescapable duty to bring you the two “forgotten” short stories that played so creative a part in the conception and development of The Maltese Falcon. In The Whosis Kid the title-character, as you will see, serves as the model, or prototype, for the baby-faced killer in The Maltese Falcon — the boy Wilmer Cook; and in The Gutting of Couffignal the climactic scene between the Continental Op and Princess Zhukovski foreshadows the similar but more shocking climactic scene between Sam Spade and Brigid O’Shaughnessy. Aside from these relatively minor self-plagiarisms, The Whosis Kid and The Gutting are completely different from The Maltese Falcon. Hammett considered the two short stories failures; we can only say that we envy you your first reading of two of Hammett’s most powerful yarns.

The third story in this book — Death and Company — was rated by the late Carolyn Wells as one of the twenty best detective short stories published in 1930-1931.

The fourth story — One Hour — shows how expertly Hammett can blend the two all-inclusive forms of the genre: in less than 6,000 words Hammett packs a full measure of explosive action (the “sensational” approach) and a quantum sufficit of pure detection (the “intellectual” technique).

The final story — The Tenth Clue — is memorable for, among other things, the scene in San Francisco Bay in which the Continental Op fights for his life while the fog hangs low and thick, and the fog-horns, moaning ahead of him, behind him, all around him, sound like a Greek chorus participating in and interpreting the impending tragedy.

And there you are — five more Continental Op exploits — “good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over.”

It is your Editors’ sincere opinion (and prediction) that many years from now collectors of the detective story (true Americana) will eagerly seek first editions of this Hammett trilogy. Although the printings have been large, the format is fragile compared with cloth-bound books; these books will be read, and read again, and no paper wrappers can outlive the normal wear and tear of many re-readings. If you have bright, fresh copies — or as collectors say, if your copies are in immaculate condition — put them away in protective covers; a decade or two hence some fanatical connoisseur will be knocking on your door, on the bibliographic trail of Hammett paperback firsts.

But it is not the collecting value of these books that marks their real significance. These three slim volumes of Hammett’s short stories represent one of the most important contributions to present-day crime writing — modern classics in the field of the detective short story.