Writeology

Read: The Continental Op, Dashiell Hammett

Last year, I spent some quality time with Raymond Chandler—well, his books anyway, otherwise that’d be creepy—so this year I decided to take a step back to one of his inspirations. The stories in this collection all focus on the nameless narrator, an op for the Continental Detective Agency. Despite the fact that many of the tales are cut from the same cloth (the op finds himself embroiled in some sort of crime, manages to figure out what nobody else can, and usually takes the perp in), it’s Hammett’s spare prose that makes it a joy to read. My favorite of the bunch is the final story, “The Farewell Murder” (little surprise, as it was one of Hammett’s last of the Op short stories), which had some odd echoes of The Magus. Overall, I found his writing less artful than Chandler’s, but more distilled to the essence of the hard-boiled crime genre.