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The Big Book of the Continental Op

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Foreword THROUGH MUD AND BLOOD AND DEATH AND DECEIT Julie M. Rivett This long-awaited volume you hold in your hands is the first and only collection to assemble every one of Dashiell Hammett's pioneering Continental Op adventures-twentyeight stand-alone stories, two novels, and Hammett's only known unfinished Continental Op tale. It is truly definitive. And it has been many decades in the making. At the time of this writing, the first Op story is ninety-four years old and the last is seventy-nine, not including Three Dimes, an undated draft fragment conserved in Hammett's archives, first published in 2016. The gritty sleuth Hammett described as a little man going forward day after day through mud and blood and death and deceit has weathered gunshots, grifters, criminal conspiracies, class struggles, temptations, neglect, and more. This volume is testament to his tenacity. He is a survivor, a working-class hero, and a landmark literary creation. The Continental Op stories are rooted in Hammett's experiences as an operative for Pinkerton's National Detective Agency. Although Hammett worked for Pinkerton's for a scant five years-before and after his service in the U.S. Army during World War I-the job inspired both his writing career and his worldview. Some influences are plain. The Continental Detective Agency, for example, is modeled on Pinkerton's, their Baltimore office located in the Continental Trust Company Building, where Hammett had been hired. Hammett said his cases largely involved forgeries, bank swindles, and safe burglaries, a solid factual basis for the Op's fictional adventures, albeit considerably enlivened. As much happens to one of my detectives in a page and a half as happened to me in six months when I was a real-life detective, Hammett wrote. While his salary was a mere $21 a week (roughly $500 in 2017 dollars), the training was invaluable, even in what Hammett called the easiest thing a sleuth has to do: shadowing. Despite being more than six feet tall, Hammett was reportedly an excellent shadow man, knowing to hang back, keep his cool, and catalog all available clues. Faces were only one aspect of the descriptive package. Close observation of tricks of carriage, ways of wearing clothes, general outline, individual mannerisms-all as seen from the rear-are much more important to the shadow than faces, Hammett wrote in a letter to Black Mask magazine in 1924. It's easy to imagine the Op's vivid narratives as extended versions of what his reports to the Continental would have been: physical detail in wry tone, succinct, but with enough specifics to allow colleagues to identify shared quarry and continue the chase. Hammett's case reports for Pinkerton's are lost to history (or fire), but it's safe to say that his experience as a shadow man was stellar preparation for his new class of scrupulously observed crime fiction. Hammett identified the assistant manager of Pinkerton's Baltimore office, James Wright, as his mentor and a model for the Op. The claim bears truth in its implication, if not in actual fact. James Wright was a pseudonym that had been shared among Pinkerton agents for decades. Hammett's sly suggestion-that the Op is an anonymous amalgamation-holds with his later remarks on the origins of the character. The 'op' I use, explained Hammett, is the typical sort of private detective that exists in our country today. I've worked with half a dozen men who might be he with few changes. Though he may be 'different' in fiction, he is almost pure 'type' in life. Part of that type is defined by a code of honor intrinsic to the detectives' profession, which Hammett absorbed and integrated into his own life and worldview. According to the code, detectives maintain anonymity and resist publicity, sequestering themselves within a veil of secrecy. Their lives are safer that way. Detectives strive for objectivity, refusing emotional entanglements with co