THE BIG BOOK OF THE CONTINENTAL OP

Name: THE BIG BOOK OF THE CONTINENTAL OP
Author: Dashiell Hammett
ISBN: 978-0-525-43295-1

by Dashiell Hammett ; edited by Richard Layman & Julie M. Rivett ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 5, 2017

Of course the stories are uneven, often overlong and over-explained, and occasionally, like the all-too-aptly titled “This...

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At long last, Black Lizard collects all 28 of the Op’s completed stories, plus the opening chapter of one incomplete tale and the original Black Mask serializations of the novels that were revised and published as Red Harvest and The Dain Curse.

Though he’s become synonymous with the hard-boiled shamus, the nameless operative for San Francisco’s Continental Detective Agency is not so much an anti–golden age detective—he made his first appearance in 1923, the same year as his polar opposite, Lord Peter Wimsey, before the gentleman sleuth had frozen into a bundle of clichés—as an anti–pulp detective, rarely carrying a gun in his earliest adventures and self-effacing about his talents and his testosterone. He’s also something of an anti-character who lacks not only a name, but many other individual markers that made his offspring Sam Spade such an indelible hero. But what a voice! As early as “It” (1923), the Op already sounds brisk, businesslike, precise, and articulate. In the eight (mostly early) stories not already available in the Library of America’s collection of Hammett’s crime stories, the Op, hiding some serious deductive chops beneath his mastery of violent action, figures out, among other things, why three corpses would have been sandwiched into a clothes press, which interested party took a shot at a bedridden patriarch, and what a known gangster has to do with the kidnapping of an advertising executive’s wife. Most of these tales, like the 20 more familiar ones from “The House in Turk Street” to “The Gutting of Couffignal” to “The Big Knockover,” begin with apparently simple cases that rapidly launch the Op into deeper waters that never quite close over his head. Editors Layman and Rivett make a persuasive case for Hammett’s willingness to adapt his style to three very different Black Mask editors, George W. Sutton, Philip C. Cody, and Joseph Thompson Shaw, the last of whom set the seal on Hammett’s transformation from pulp storyteller to one of America’s most influential novelists.

Of course the stories are uneven, often overlong and over-explained, and occasionally, like the all-too-aptly titled “This King Business,” just plain silly. No matter. Fans of hard-boiled fiction will know the holy grail when they see it.

Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-525-43295-1

Page Count: 752

Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard

Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017

Categories:

MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | DETECTIVES & PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS | GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE

- BOOK REVIEW
RETURN OF THE THIN MAN
by Dashiell Hammett ; edited by Richard Layman ; Julie M. Rivett

- BOOK REVIEW
DASHIELL HAMMETT
by Dashiell Hammett & edited by Steven Marcus

- BOOK REVIEW
SELECTED LETTERS OF DASHIELL HAMMETT
by Dashiell Hammett & edited by Richard Layman with Julie M. Rivett

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

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Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

Pub Date: March 17, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
COLD, COLD BONES
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BONE CODE
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
TWO NIGHTS
by Kathy Reichs

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THE WINNER

by David Baldacci ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 2, 1997

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Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)