Each Monday, we will post a new review of a Mystery book. If you love to read a good “whodunit”, don’t forget to check back here each Monday.
The Dain Curse by Dashiell Hammett
The Dain Curse
Written by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)
The Dain Curse stars The Nameless Detective who investigates for the Continental Op PI agency. Set in San Francisco in the late 1920s, The Dain Curse starts in a standard way but gets wacky fast. The Nameless Detective investigates a diamond theft from the house of scientist Edgar Leggett. Ho-hum. But out of the blue Legget ends up dead. Revealed are family secrets, which make the miserable California families of Ross Macdonald seem like “Leave it to Beaver.”
Hammett presents the rest of the novel in three distinct episodes. Reading the installments reminds us that they first appeared in the pulp magazine Black Mask over four issues prior to the publication of the novel. The serial origin works against the story hanging together in one piece. The action seems disjointed and occurs in too many different places. New characters keep popping up. The dialogue is more talky than curt and clipped as noir should be.
Although Hammett himself thought the melodramatic action was too much and thought the novel weak, for my money, the main attraction is its sheer over the top-ness. Even after the depraved family secrets of the first chapter, the action gets wilder and crazier. Hammett’s peculiar San Francisco brings to mind bizarre high jinks in Chester Himes’ Harlem.
Two more redeeming points. In a passage we don’t expect in mystery, Hammett briefly uses the stream of consciousness technique. He uses the noir theme of the tension between perception and reality (pretty is as wicked does) and the difficulty of getting a bead on reality due to limitations of our knowledge, feeling, and intuition. He explored those themes more effectively in his next novel, The Maltese Falcon.
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