Forgotten Books: The Creeping Siamese by Dashiell Hammett (1950)

Yep, I'm still on a Hammett binge, and still have several more books to yap about.

This one appeared in both digest and paperback in 1950.

The title story, which appeared in the March 1926 Black Mask without the "The" in front of it, is one of three tales featuring our short stocky hero, the Continental Op. In context of the story, the title makes more sense without the "The." As is, you might think someone is about to fall victim to a sneaky kitty-cat. Actually, the Siamese of the title are believed to be merciless knife-artists from Siam.

By the time Hammett wrote "Creeping Siamese" he already had twenty Op stories under his belt, so he was well in the groove. This is a fine little tale, with the added interest that it foreshadows still another scene from The Maltese Falcon. The story opens with a man entering the Continental Detective Agency office and dropping dead on the floor. In the course of the investigation, the Op is told that the dead man was recently in possession of a mysterious package, and that other mysterious characters were trying to take it away from him. The package is described as being about the size of a loaf of bread, but quite heavy for it's size. It's wrapped in brown paper, with an inner wrapping of canvas, and tied with a silk cord. Can you say dingus?

"The Man Who Killed Dan Odams," from Black Mask of January 15, 1924, is a shortie, and just about the closest Hammett ever came to writing a western. There's a jail and a marshal and a ranch of sorts, and our protagonist rides a horse. The only thing that prevents it being a western is a couple of mentions of automobiles.

"The Nails in Mr. Cayterer" (from Black Mask January 1926)  is another "lost" story that's been out of print since this appearance in 1950. Too bad, because it's a good story. This one introduces Robin Thin, the poet son (and sort-of partner) of a private investigator. Why is it out of print? Beats me. A second Robin Thin story, unpublished during Hammett's lifetime, debuted in EQMM in 1961, and now resides in the 1999 collection Nightmare Town.

"The Joke on Eloise Morey," from Brief Stories of June 1923, is the briefest story in the book, and relies on a single twist. It's a nice twist, though, and a nice little joke on Eloise.

"Tom, Dick, or Harry," from Black Mask October 1925 is pisser. Hammett went to great lengths to avoid cliches, and titled this story "Mike, Alec or Rufus," in a deliberate effort to get the benefit of the Tom, Dick or Harry idea without actually saying it. Then Frederic Dannay cane along and ruined it for him. I'll bet Hammett was pissed too. This is a minor Op tale, but still a good read if you can wipe the phony title from your brain.

The longest story in the book, and arguably the best, is "The King Business," an Op adventure that did not appear in Black Mask. Instead, it first appeared in Mystery Stories in January 1928, at the same time the Red Harvest novelettes were running in Mask. I have no inside dope on this, but wouldn't be surprised if Joe Shaw rejected it, feeling it delved too deep into European politics and strayed too far from the mean streets his readers were used to. Still, it's a fine story, with the Op up to his neck in revolutionaries, counterrevolutionaries and opportunists, with an idealist or two thrown in for flavor. The fictional kingdom of Muravia is a brutal place, and the Op gets a front row seat at a long and brutal whipping. EQMM commemorated the scene on their cover when they reprinted the story in 1949.

More amazing Forgotten Books at Sweet Freedom. More Hammett, most likely, coming next week.

Forgotten Books: Nightmare Town by Dashiell Hammett (1948, 1950)

The four-story collection Nightmare Town first appeared in digest in 1948, with stories edited by Frederic Dannay, and was repackaged in this nice Dell Mapback in 1950. As a bonus, the Mapback included seven original illustrations, shown below. Bill Lyles, in a Paperback Quarterly article, attributed the art to Lester Elliott, and Bill should know.

If the novelette “Nightmare Town,” originally from Argosy All-Story Weekly in 1924, had been written by Lester Dent, Walter Gibson or Norvell Page, I’d probably think it was a crackerjack story. But at Hammett’s hands, the tale seems unworthy of its author.

Without giving too much away, I can say that the plot involves crime on a grand scale - a scale so grand that it requires heaping helpings of suspension of disbelief, and cries out for purple prose. And that’s the problem, because Hammett’s prose is anything but purple, and when he tells me something’s happening, I tend to believe him.

Not this time.

The good news, though, is that “Nightmare Town” was his first crack at tackling a large scale crime, and can be viewed as a test run for the more successful stories to follow. I’m talking here about “The Gutting of Couffignal,” in which an entire town is looted, “This King Business,” in which a corrupt European nation is up for grabs, “The Big Knockover,” where a hundred of the nation’s elite crooks converge on San Francisco to rob two banks at once, and Red Harvest, where the Continental Op blows the lid off a crime-infested city.

Our hero here is Steve Threefall, who blunders into the strange town of Izzard on a drunken bet, takes interest in a nubile young woman, and is soon up to his neck in strange characters and sudden violence. Luckily, he carries a weighted ebony walking stick and knows how to use it. The stick is described as having a roughness that polishing cannot disguise - which must have confused the Dell artist, because he seems to have turned it into a club.

Steve Threefall kicks butt with his "walking stick."

Unlike the Op, Steve allows himself to fall for the dame.

Hammett’s prose is a pleasure to read, as always, and there’s plenty of action in the finale, but something is just . . . off. I have no evidence that he tried and failed to sell this to Black Mask before submitting it to Argosy All-Story, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

Next up is “The Scorched Face,” from Black Mask May 1925, in which the Continental Op is on the trail of two runaway rich girls. This one is a nice mix of realistic detective work with gratuitous sex and violence. Hammett was quickly learning his trade.

The artist didn't get the memo that the Op is supposed to be short and broad.

Still not broad, but maybe shorter.

“Albert Pastor at Home” is a short-short (little more than flash fiction) that first appeared in Esquire in 1933. It’s a great little tale, though, full of humor and tough talk. And it’s unusual for Hammett, because it’s told in first-person present tense.

Meet Albert Pastor (alias Lefty), a genial disbarred heavyweight
who beats people up for money (or for free).

This collection saved the best for last, as the Continental Op rides into the Wild West in “Corkscrew,” from Black Mask September 1925. Hammett had fun with this one and didn’t care who knew it. Corkscrew, like Izzard the Nightmare Town, and like the yet-to-come Poisonville of Red Harvest, is a corrupt town, and the Op decides to clean it up whether his clients like it or not. Hammett was following the example of many western films of the time (and later), in which six-gun toting, bronc-busting cowpokes co-exist with city-slickers driving automobiles. It's a hoot.

Never thought I'd see the Op in a cowboy hat.

This tussle began thusly:

The ex-pug looked me up and down and spit on the ground at my feet. 

"Ain't you a swell mornin' glory?" he snarled. I got a great mind to smack you down!"

"Go ahead," I invited him. "I don't mind skinning a knuckle on you."

These days, “Nightmare Town” is the lead story in the 1999 collection Nightmare Town. It also appears in Crime Stories and Other Writings (2001), along with “The Scorched Face.” For “Corkscrew,” you’ll have to look in The Big Knockover, which also includes the Dannay-edited version of “The Scorched Face.”

More Forgotten Books at pattinase!

Forgotten (and FREE) Stories: Lost Adventures of The CONTINENTAL OP

When I reviewed The Return of the Continental Op a couple of weeks ago (that's HERE), I noted that one of the stories, "Death & Company" (from the November 1930 Black Mask), had been out of print since 1947. At the time, I had it in my brain that this was the only Op tale so neglected. I was wrong.

Hammett scholar Robb McAllister kindly reminded me that the story "It" (from Black Mask of November 1, 1923) has been out of print since 1951. That story last appeared, under the title "The Black Hat That Wasn't There" in the digest collection Woman in the Dark.

That any Hammett stories are unavailable today is a travesty, and that Op stories are out of print is a crime. So I've scanned the digest versions of both tales, and I'm happy to share. Email me at delewis1@hotmail.com, and I'll shoot them back at you.

And do not fail to check this week's line-up of Forgotten Books - at pattinase.

Forgotten Books: Hammett Homicides (1946, 1948)

Hammett Homicides, edited by "Ellery Queen," appeared in digest in 1946 and Dell Mapback in 1948.

The stars of this collection are the two related novelettes “The House on Turk Street” and “The Girl with the Silver Eyes.” Originally from Black Mask in April and June 1924, this was the first time the two stories appeared together, and they’ve been together ever since.

Both stories are good examples of the Op in transition. He’s still behaving like a realistic agency detective, but his language is growing more colorful. He’s still a long way from the peak of his narrative style in Red Harvest, but he’s on the move.

In “The House on Turk Street” a kindly old couple agree to answer questions to aid his investigation. But they’re not at all what they seem, and the Op finds himself in a house full of thieves, each more dangerous than the next - and each looking for every opportunity to double-cross the others. One of the gang is a deadly dame who escapes to bedevil him again in the next story . . .

. . . “The Girl with the Silver Eyes.”  The deadly dame, known as Elvira in the first story, now uses the handle Jeanne Delano, but neither is her real name. She was Hammett’s first prototype for the character who eventually became Brigid O’Shaunessy in The Maltese Falcon. She relies on her beauty to bamboozle men, and she’s so good it almost works even on the Op.

Next up is “Night Shots,” a manor house mystery from February 1, 1924. The Op solves a clever plot, and the characters are quirky, but his language is pretty bland. Hammett made a major stylistic leap between this and “Silver Eyes,” just four months later.

The fourth, and last, Op story in the book is “The Main Death,” a puzzle story from June 1927. Publication-wise, it falls between “$106,000 Blood Money” and the first installment of Red Harvest, but stylistically it’s more akin to “Night Shots.” My guess is that this was written in 1923 or ‘24. It’s main claim to fame is that features a character named Bruno Gungen who bears several qualities later seen in Caspar Gutman.

“Two Sharp Knives” is an oddity - a first-person detective story in which the narrator is not the Op - he’s a small town police chief named Scott Anderson. This one appeared in Collier’s in January 1934, and it’s a nice little tale, though not among Hammett’s best.

“Ruffian’s Wife,” from the October 1925 issue of Sunset, was the biggest surprise for me. This is fine, sophisticated storytelling - and great prose too - though the entire story is in the third person point-of-view of the title character. I hadn’t read this in just about forever, and forgot how good it was.

So where do these tales reside today?  “The House in Turk Street,” “The Girl with the Silver Eyes” and "The Main Death" are in both The Continental Op (1974) and Crime Stories & Other Writings (2001). The Crime Stories versions follow the Black Mask text, while the others, like those in Hammett Homicides, were altered by Frederick Dannay. “Night Shots,” “Two Sharp Knives” and “Ruffian’s Wife” appear in Nightmare Town (1999).

Links to more Forgotten Books appear on pattinase.

Forgotten Books: The Return of the Continental Op (1945) by Dashiell Hammett

I've been rereading ALL of the Continental Op (short for Continental operative) stories, and as I mentioned earlier this month in a review of the first paperback collection, The Continental Op (that's HERE), that amounts to 28 stories (some of which are long novelettes) and two novels.

That's a LOT of writing, accounting for a good two-thirds of Hammett's total output.

This collection, published as a Jonathan Press digest in 1945 and Dell Mapback in 1947, contains two novelettes and three stories, all of which originally appeared in Black Mask.

The earliest story, "The Tenth Clew," (respelled here as "The Tenth Clue"), was first published in January 1924. It belongs to what I call the Op's "invisible" stage. The prose is straightforward and spare. It's not lacking in style, but it displays none of the distinct personality that emerges in later stories. Hammett's goal here was to lay out a puzzle for the Op to solve using the sort of investigative methods and agency resources Hammett himself used while working for the Pinkertons.

I have to believe that "Death and Company," which did not appear in Black Mask until 1930, was written around the same time. Like "The Tenth Clew," it's an enjoyable tale with a clever finish, but the Op is pretty much a ghost.

But in "One Hour," a short piece published only three months after "The Tenth Clew," the Op starts feeling his oats. Not only does he get more playful with his language, but he's plunged into a situation where he has to rely on his fists - and his gun - along with his brain.

The main attractions of this collection are the two novelettes, "The Whosis Kid" (from March 1925) and "The Gutting of Couffignal" (December 1925), where both the language and the action gets more wild and woolly. Black Mask readers asked for more action, and Hammett delivered.

In "The Whosis Kid," the Op gets tied up with a gang of backstabbing thieves whose antics anticipate those of Caspar Gutman, Joel Cairo and their cohorts in The Maltese Falcon. And in "The Gutting of Couffignal," the scene of the crime is entire town, where a criminal gang goes looting on a grand scale.

These days, you won't find these stories in any one collection. Crime Stories and Other Writings your best source for "The Whosis Kid," "The Gutting of Couffignal" and "The Tenth Clew," because that book restores the original Black Mask text. "One Hour" appears in the 1999 collection Nightmare Town.

Meanwhile, near as I can tell, "Death and Company" has not been reprinted anywhere since the Dell Mapback appeared in 1947. That's not only a damn shame, it's a disgrace. If any of you hardcore Op fans would like to read it, write me and email you scans.

More Forgotten Books at pattinase!

Forgotten Books: The Continental Op (1945, 1946) by Dashiell Hammett

The Continental Op has been used as the title of several collections, but the one we're talking about here is the original, published in digest in 1945 and paperback in 1946. This collection was one of many edited and compiled by Frederick Dannay (half of the Ellery Queen team) and Don Herron's frequent guest-blogger Terry Zobeck has demonstrated that Dannay altered the text of many of the stories.

The four tales in this book, however, appear to have largely escaped Dannay's heavy hand. The 2001 collection Hammett: Crime Stories & Other Writings contains the original Black Mask versions of all four stories, and while I didn't compare each tale word-for-word, I did some spot checks and failed to find any changes other than punctuation or spelling.

One of the most interesting aspects of the Continental Op series is the way it displays Hammett's growth as a writer. All 28 stories (and at least one of the two novels) are good, but the quality of Hammett's prose changes dramatically from the Op's first appearance in 1923 to the first installment of the Op masterpiece Red Harvest in 1927. 

In the beginning, Hammett's Op was practically an invisible man. He displayed no personality, and his matter-of-fact prose was designed to educate the reader on realistic investigative practices. But bit by bit, story by story, the Op's character begins to emerge.

Two of the stories in this collection, "Zigzags of Treachery" and "Death on Pine Street" (originally titled "Women, Politics and Murder"), were first published in 1924 and are transitional tales. The Op indulges himself with a wisecrack now and then, and we see Hammett stretching his writing muscles. A third story, "The Farewell Murder," did not appear in Black Mask until 1930, but was clearly written far earlier - most likely in 1923.

The beginning of the "The Farewell Murder" may have been inspired by an old vampire movie. It opens with a chauffeur driving the Op up a dark and winding road to the client's home. On the way they see a body in the road, which scares the heebie-jeebies out of the driver. When the Op goes to investigate, the chauffeur vanishes into the woods. The rest of the story involves men who did each other dirt in Egypt and have now brought their blood feud to the States. The Op uncovers a clever scheme by one of the feuders. 

"Zigzags of Treachery" is a peculiar combination of old and new. The first few pages are a monologue by the attorney/client involving some old time melodrama. The middle of the story displays some realistic detective work with only occasional bits of flavor. And the end is a monologue by the chief crook, explaining his part in the scheme. This time it's the Op who delivers the clever finish.

"Death on Pine Street" begins with a familiar problem - the murder of a philandering husband, but displays hints of the Op's wit, humor and capacity for violence. In the end he socks a guy purely for payback. And yeah, it's another clever ending.

But the highlight of the collection is "Fly Paper." This story appeared in Black Mask in 1929, after both Red Harvest and The Dain Curse, and shows the Op at his best. Every line of the narration is tight, tough and packed with wit. The story peers under the lid of the seamy underworld, into a complex plot that ends with a wild manhunt and shootout. Little wonder Lillian Hellman selected it for inclusion in The Big Knockover (where she subjected it to further, and more drastic, changes in punctuation).

These four stories are well worth your time, and can be found in other collections. What you won't find elsewhere is the introduction by "Ellery Queen." And that, too, is worth your time. So here it is:

More Op stuff coming soon. More Forgotten Books right now at pattinase. 

Forgotten Books: The Score by Richard Stark (with a little help from Hammett)

Not long ago, when I reread the complete adventures of the Continental Op, I thought one of the cooler stories was "The Gutting of Couffignal," which originally appeared in Black Mask back in December, 1925.

In Hammett's story, a gang of thugs plan to plan to rob an entire island, and if not for the Op, they would have pulled it off. 39 years later, Donald Westlake turned the island into a canyon, made his character Parker the leader of the thugs and replayed the tale from the point-of-view of the bad guys. And this time, there was no Op standing in their way.

All of that made for a great set-up, and the job goes smoother than expected - until it all goes to hell, and the Hammett mold is broken. The Score is the fifth in the Parker series, and at least as good as any of those that came before. And the legacy of "The Gutting of Couffignal" still lives on. 44 years after Westlake borrowed the idea, Robert B. Parker used it for Spenser in Rough Weather. I guess a truly good story just never gets old.

The Score also marked the first appearance of Westlake/Stark's quirky actor/thug Alan Grofield, who went on to appear in more Parker novels and four books of his own. 

Forgotten any books? Remember them every Friday at pattinase.

Forgotten Books: Don Herron's Dashiell Hammett Tour guide

Until I met Don Herron, I thought maybe my old copy of the 1982 Dashiell Hammett Tour guide (above, with gray cover) was a rare first edition. Well… while it is a collector’s item, with a genuine circa-1982 Herron autograph, I now know it was the second of several incarnations of the guide, and if I did have a copy of the first, I’d really have something to crow about.

That first guide book (the red one) appeared in 1979, in an edition of only 313 copies, and is now mighty ding dang hard to come by. How much is it worth? Nobody knows, because apparently nobody who has one is willing to part with it.

My 1982 edition is 95 pages with wide margins and big type, with a lot of space devoted to maps and photographs. It’s great stuff, but looks pretty lean next to the book it has evolved into. The current edition, subtitled the Thirtieth Anniversary Guidebook, is 214 pages of small type, with lots more photos, maps and info, and is infused with the insight Don has gleaned from his thirty-plus years of marching up and down the mean streets in the footsteps of old Dash.

Even if you never plan to visit San Francisco, if you’re a Hammett fan (and if you’re not, you should be), you should own this book. It offers a look at Hammett and his world that you just can’t get from a biography or critical study of his work. And through the wonders of Amazon, it can be yours for somewhere between $9.99 and $15.56. It's HERE. What are you waiting for?

Coming soon: Guidebook-like pics of my own Hammett tour and my encounter with Don Herron himself! 

Forgotten Books is a weekly feature (and and extremely cool one) of pattinase.

Overlooked Films: The Thin Man TV series (1958-59)

While digging through boxes in my storage unit the other day, I came across tapes of a few old episodes of The Thin Man TV series. I remember recording these ten or so years ago, when TNT occasionally showed one in the middle of the night. Well, being in a Hammett frame of mind, I naturally hauled them home for another look-see.

After watching three episodes, all from early in the first season, I was ready to write them off as terrible. As Nick, Peter Lawford displayed all the humor and charm of a clothes dummy. He seemed to be sleep-walking through the part, delivering his lines in a dull monotone and never cracking a smile. Phyllis Kirk (whom I remember best as TV's first Lois Lane - Oops, my mistake. See comments.) seemed to be at least trying to display a personality, but she too fell flat. The only comic relief came from the antics of Asta, by far the best actor of the three.

But I had several more episodes, so I tried one more. And struck gold. (Well, maybe not gold, but at least silver.) The episode is called “The Cat Kicker,” and came from late in the second - and final - season, in 1959.

Somehow, Lawford and Kirk have grown personalities. They smile, they tell jokes, they make faces at each other, and Lawford ever does some William Powell-like physical gags. It’s as if the director forced them to watch one of the Powell-Loy Thin Man movies and said, “Now, do that!”

Lawford and Kirk are nowhere near as good as Powell and Loy, of course, but in this episode they’re trying hard, and for the first time I could actually think of them as Nick and Nora. It didn’t hurt that Don Rickles was one of the guest stars, playing a cabbie, but there was enough comedy without him. And I don’t remember Asta appearing at all.

As for the story, no cats are kicked. Rickles the cabbie delivers a babe wearing nothing but a nightgown and fur coat to the Charles’ apartment because she’s lost her memory, and he thinks Nick can help her (or at least pay the cab fee). She, naturally, gets flirty with Nick, and Nora gets jealous. A sub-plot, which of course dovetails with the amnesiac plot, involves Nick and Nora auctioning off a day of their services for charity.

So. I now know the entire series didn’t suck, and I’ll be watching the rest of my episodes hoping for another gem. What I want to know now is - why isn’t this series available on DVD? It ran for 72 episodes, and even at it’s worst, it’s good as some of the dreck now being reissued.

More Overlooked Films at SWEET FREEDOM.

A fan visits the Thin Man set.

Overlooked Films: Satan Met a Lady (The Maltese Falcon?) (1936)

While in San Francisco last week (more on that anon) my wife and I watched the classic version of The Maltese Falcon (1941), followed the next night by Satan Met a Lady (1936). Yikes! I’d seen this turkey before, but forgotten how flat out silly it is.

To lay the groundwork . . . Warner Brothers had purchased the screen rights to the Hammett novel and released the first (relatively faithful) film version back in 1931, with Ricardo Cortez as Spade. The film bombed. But by 1936, following the film version of The Thin Man, Hammett’s star was flying high, and they decided to exploit it. Trailers for Satain Met a Lady touted it as being from “Dashiell Hammett, author of The Thin Man.”

Because only five years had passed, they must have figured it was too soon for a remake of the Falcon, so they turned the story inside out and upside down and tried to disguise it as something different. And in that they succeeded. It’s different as hell.

First, as you already know, the title was changed. Then the falcon became the Horn of Roland. And the characters got new names, and - in some cases - new genders and sexual preferences.

Sam Spade morphed into a goofus named Ted Shane, portrayed like a maniac off his meds by Warren William. Bette Davis, who got top billing, is actually only a bug-eyed bit player in the ersatz Bridget O’Shaughnessy role. Arthur Treacher, as “the tall Englishman,” fills in for Joel Cairo. Instead of Wilmer the gunsel we get a pudgy dork in a beret. And the Casper Gutman substitute is a woman.

Warren William, who behaved like a reasonably sane human being in the first Perry Mason movies, seems to have completely lost it here, launching into giggling fits or roaring like King Kong with no provocation. Many scenes are so goofy they leave you wondering What the hell was that?, but the worst was the all-important history lesson laying out the origin and importance of the Horn of Roland. The tale is tossed off between gags as Shane and the Englishman cavort around his apartment playing ring-toss with a lampshade.

Sounds pretty bad, doesn’t it? Actually, the film does have its moments, like whenever the Effie character (here known as Miss Murgatroyd and played by Marie Wilson) is on stage. Yeah, she’s goofy too - in a Lucille Ball sort of way - but I like better her in the role than the real Effie in the Bogart version. And the dialogue, while almost entirely Hammett-free, is sometimes snappy.

So. What possessed Warner Brothers to turn the Falcon into a slapstick farce? I have a theory. In 1936, Hammett’s fame among movie-goers was based mostly on the movie version of The Thin Man that had hit it big two years earlier. To them, Hammett meant Nick and Nora characters who were always clowning around. So that’s what the studio tried to give them, twisting The Maltese Falcon into their version of The Thin Man. To me, that’s the only way this movie makes sense. What do you think?

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Warren William as Ted Shane

Shane and the bug-eyed Lady

Marie Wilson as Miss Murgatroyd (Effie)

Arthur Treacher as Travers (Joel Cairo)

Maynard Holmes as Kenneth (Wilmer)

Alison Skipworth (left) as Madame Barabbas (The Fat Lady)

Forgotten Books: Blood Money by Dashiell Hammett

My wife and I are planning another trip to San Francisco. Last time, a few years back, we saw and did most of the famous stuff, so this time we plan to get a little more up close and personal. And for me, that means walking in the footsteps of Dashiell Hammett.

So I picked up the latest edition of Don Herron’s Hammett Tour guidebook (and a very fine one it is) and started re-reading The Complete Works. I began with the Continental Op stories, because they’re my favorites, and have been reading them in order of publication.

The first few Op tales are well-written, and groundbreaking in that they present a realistic look at the work of a big agency detective, just the sort of work (minus the strikebreaking) that Hammett did for the Pinkertons.

Given his druthers, I suspect Hammett would have continued in that vein, turning out stories that would have been more appropriate in True Detective than in Black Mask. Thankfully, Black Mask’s readers wouldn’t let him. Being fans of such wildly unrealistic private dicks as Carroll John Daly’s Race Williams, they were a bloodthirsty bunch, demanding ever more action.

To keep the readers (and editor Cap Shaw) happy, Hammett was forced to take his Op beyond reality to the edge of Hardboiled Fantasyland. Whether that was a good or bad thing depends on your perspective. My take is - it was perfect.

The Op remained a real detective, and a real man, but he was thrust into ever more violent - and entertaining - situations, until reaching his absolute peak in my favorite Hammett novel, Red Harvest. I’ll be re-reading that book soon, and chances are it will still be my fave, but last week I got reacquainted with the book that could have been Hammett’s first novel, and it’s a damn strong contender. For the poetry of its violence, it has never been excelled.

Blood Money began life as two 1927 Black Mask novelettes, “The Big Knockover” and “$106,000 Blood Money.” At one point, Afred A. Knopf wanted to published them as a novel. Hammett refused, but in 1943, Lawrence E. Spivak, the company that had been churning out his pulp stories in digest format, did the deed under the title $106,000 Blood Money. In short order, Tower Books did a hardcover edition as Blood Money and Dell followed suit with a mapback. Spivak did another digest version, this time called The Big Knockover, and Dell reissued the Blood Money mapback, so the “novel” was actually published five times. Though I have all five, I chose to read the Tower hardcover for the ultimate experience.

Part 1, originally “The Big Knocker” is a trip to Fantasyland, with a hundred or more mobsters coming from across the country to converge on San Francisco and rob two banks at once. When the mastermind and his core supporters escape, the Op stays on their trail, and delivers their just deserts in Part 2, originally“$106,000 Blood Money.”  Part 2 is more grounded in reality, but is every bit as entertaining. Hammett’s prose had been steadily improving, and by this point it was flat-out amazing. Even though I just finished the book, I already want to read it again.

Since 1966, when Random House issued their version of The Big Knockover, a 13-story hardcover collection edited by Lillian Hellman, the two tales have appeared as separate novelettes. Too bad. Together, they're every bit as novelesque as the two official Op novels, Red Harvest and The Dain Curse. Currently, the Blood Money saga appears as a small part of the 2001 collection Crime Stories and Other Writings. It deserves better.

This week’s amazing selection of Forgotten Books is linked for your convenience at SPINETINGLER.

Hammett Mapback: The Return of the Continental Op (1947)

Hammett Mapbacks: Dead Yellow Women (1949)

I've run this one before, but shucks, I like looking at it.