Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
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2026 May 13 • Wednesday

Dashiell Hammett's The Dain Curse is generally regarded as to be lesser Hammett. I finally got around to reading it and it wasn't clear to me why that should be, until I got to the very end.

This is a Continental Op story and, like Red Harvest, it's a novel that can be neatly divided into separate but connected stories. Red Harvest was originally separate stories that were sewn into a novel for the hardcover trade, I believe. The Dain Curse had a similar evolution.

The Op is sent to investigate the theft of some diamonds from the home of the Leggett family. It's pretty clear to him right away that this isn't an honest robbery but most readers at the time might not have realized that until the Op says so himself.

Hammett seems to have had a keen awareness and critical eye for his peers in the pulps—and for the often undiscriminating tastes of their readers.

His story "The Creeping Siamese" is practically a prank on the typical pulp reader, showing how ridiculous and yet how easily accepted the narrative conventions were.

The Dain Curse also reads like a run through the newsstand favorites of the day, combining requisite sex and action with private detective and police procedural storytelling and the Op's witty and ironic understatements.

Hammett even shows that he could outdo many a Weird Tales writer if he wanted to:
Not more than three feet away, there in the black room, a pale bright thing like a body, but not like flesh, stood writhing before me.

It was tall, yet not so tall as it seemed, because it didn't stand on the floor, but hovered with its feet a foot or more above the floor. Its feet—it had feet, but I don't know what their shape was. They had no shape, just as the thing's legs and torso, arms and hands, head and face, had no shape, no fixed form. They writhed, swelling and contracting, stretching and shrinking, not greatly, but without pause. An arm drifted into the body, was swallowed by the body, came out again as if poured out. The nose stretched down over the gaping shapeless mouth, shrank back up into the face till it was flush with the pulpy cheeks, grew out again. Eyes spread until they were one gigantic eye that blotted out the whole upper face, diminished until there was no eye, and opened in their places again. The legs were now one leg like a twisting, living pedestal, and then three, and then two. No feature or member ever stopped twisting, quivering, writhing long enough for its average outline, its proper shape, to be seen. The thing was a thing like a man who floated above the floor, with a horrible grimacing greenish face and pale flesh that was not flesh, that was visible in the dark, and that was as fluid and unresting and as transparent as tidal water.

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This is a startling scene to find in a Continental Op story, but it does seem like Hammett is having fun with different genres here.

And the book is great, zipping along through different schemes and plots with all sorts of exciting things popping up.

The reason I suspect it isn't anyone's favorite is because at the very end there's a huge exposition dump in which the Op has to explain everything that happened and why.

It's a lot of pages and it's fairly tedious. But it's great up until then!

The first line is "It was a diamond all right, shining in the grass half a dozen feet from the blue brick walk".