Even though the prose is pared to its basics. And none of them are particularly honest. They may speak about emotions and thoughts, but their speech is to provoke, entice, manipulate, threaten, to accomplish things. Hammett doesn’t tell you how characters feel or think or what their motivations are. The scenes feel like they were shot with a 50mm lens. I read somewhere, but I can’t, for the life of me, find the quote to credit it, that “Hammett did what Hemingway was said to have done.” The Maltese Falcon is where you can see it. The Dain Curse is the weakest of Hammett’s books, but it’s over 90 years old, and the story it tells and the world it describes still feel alive. It will make you think of Children of God, Jim Jones and The People’s Temple, Rajneesh, Scientology, Nxivm. It has its own special temple in the California hills. It offers much, it sucks away all its members’ money.

The young woman at the center of the story is addicted to opioids. Much of it could have been “torn from the headlines” in the 80’s or 90’s or even today. Part of what’s so striking about the book is its modernity. The Op still has to report to his superiors. The agency is still a business that must make money. The detective is still the Continental Op. In a sense, he’s not there as a person, he’s there as an operative, so Hammett doesn’t give him a name, he calls him the Continental Op. He’s part of a major corporation, the Continental Detective Agency. He acts a lot like the lone heroes our fictional detectives have routinely become. I didn’t think anything of what he had done to the city’s name. … A few years later I went to Personville and learned better.” “I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. That’s what makes Hammett’s five crime novels the five best works to measure ourselves against.

He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.”

he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all.

He had style, but his audience didn’t know it, because it was in a language not supposed to be capable of such refinements. ….

He put these people down on paper as they are, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes.

with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare, and tropical fish.

Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons ….

The dain curse dashiell hammett