Fri 18 Sep 2009
A 1001 MIDNIGHTS review: DASHIELL HAMMETT – The Dain Curse.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Pulp Fiction , Reviews[7] Comments
by Bill Pronzini:
DASHIELL HAMMETT – The Dain Curse. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1928. Originally published as the following stories from Black Mask magazine: “Black Lives” (November 1928), “The Hollow Temple” (December 1928), “Black Honeymoon” (January 1929), “Black Riddle” (February 1929). Reprinted many times since, in both hardcover and paperback, including Permabook M-4198, 1961 (shown). TV movie [4-episode mini-series]: 1978; with James Coburn as “Hamilton Nash”.
The Dain Curse is one of two novel-length works featuring the Continental Op. It was originally written for Black Mask as four separate novelettes; taken together, the four interconnected “cases” comprise a kind of criminous family saga in which Hammett all but decimates the “Black Dains” of San Francisco.
The novel begins with the Op, who has been hired by an insurance company to look into a diamond robbery at the home of Edgar Leggett (real name Dain), finding one of the missing stones:
Just a few of the more than thirty characters he subsequently encounters: Leggett/Dain, a scientist working at home on a process for coloring diamonds; his daughter, Gabrielle, who feels she has bad blood and is cursed and whose drug addiction is a focal point of the story line; the family’s mulatto maid, Minnie Hershey; Gabrielle’s doctor, Riese; her fiance, Eric Collinson (a puckish Hammett tribute to the pseudonym under which his first Black Mask stories were published); Joseph Haldorn and his wife, Aaronia, who run a religious cult called the Temple of the Holy Grail; writer Owen Fitzstephan; and a couple of other private detectives investigating Leggett/Dain’s shady past.
The plot has numerous twists and turns, multiple climaxes, and plenty of atmospheric elements (the scenes enacted at the Temple of the Holy Grail, for instance).
On the whole, however, it is overlong and decidedly melodramatic. As critic John Bartlow Martin wrote in Harper’s Magazine:
“In this single Hammett novel the detective shot and stabbed one man to death, helped shoot another dead, was himself attacked with dagger, gun, chloroform and bomb, fought off a ghostly manifestation barehanded, wrestled with five women, cured a girl of narcotic addiction — and … was obliged to deal with one seduction, eight murders, a jewel burglary, and a family curse.”
The Dain Curse is more cleanly plotted and credible than the first Op novel, Red Harvest (1927), in which more than thirty people die, including no fewer than a dozen of the main characters. But its flaws prove that it is the novelette, not the novel, to which the Continental Op was best suited and in which his finest cases are chronicled.
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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
September 18th, 2009 at 8:53 pm
I can only think of a handful of titles that seemed to be inspired by The Dain Curse — to some extent Latimer’s Solomon’s Vineyard or even Spillane’s The Body Lovers, John D. MacDonald’s The Green Ripper, Ross Macdonald’s Moving Target where it sometimes seems every writer in the hard boiled genre has done their version of Red Harvest at least once (or in Cleve Adams case several times); including Ross Macdonald’s Blue City, Spillane’s The Long Wait, Adams Private Detective, Ard’s Hell is a City, Halliday’s Murder Wears a Mummer’s Mask, even to some extent Leslie Charteris The Saint in New York.
And of course while The Dain Curse was filmed once for television, Red Harvest ‘inspired’ everyone from Akira Kurosawa, to Sergio Leone, to Walter Hill.
Still, while I agree with the review, both Red Harvest and The Dain Curse are splendid examples of the energy and power of the pulps — perhaps not complete successes as novels, but examples of a sort of savagery, energy, and drive that often marked the best of the pulp milieu. Bloody, crude, and unlikely as they could be there are times they satisfy in ways more polished works — even by some of the pulp masters — do not.
Sometimes you are in the mood to see a fine exhibition of the manly art of self defense, and sometimes you want a brawl. The pulps understood that, and gave us some grand brawls while preparing us for the art that grew in their wake.
September 18th, 2009 at 9:46 pm
Hey David, I read and enjoyed all those Cleve F. Adams books long ago and am just beginning to get reacquainted. Which three would you say were inspired by Red Harvest?
September 19th, 2009 at 12:03 am
Dave
Private Detective and Contraband are practically the same book. As are Sabotage and The Crooking Finger. Adams made no bones about this, even admitting it in a 1942 article in The Writer he was guilty of using other peoples plots over and over, while claiming his real interest was in character.
I like Adams, so I’m not knocking him. His tough black Irish private eye Rex McBride deserves to be rediscovered. True he did make that crack about this country needing it’s own Gestapo, but if you read the books you soon discover Adams is following Hammett in showing McBride as a flawed individual, rather than the knightly hero Philip Marlowe and others represented.
The line isn’t a reflection of Adams politics so much as the kind of remark someone like McBride might actually make. It’s rare for any writer to present their series character with warts and all, which is what Adams tried with the McBride books.
That said, he lifted plots and more from Hammett and Chandler, though to give him credit he never pretended he didn’t nor made any bones about doing it.
September 19th, 2009 at 9:22 pm
Thanks! I have some great Detective Fiction Weekly covers for Adams stories, and will start sticking them up soon on Davy Crockett’s Almanack.
October 6th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
nice article but i disagree about influence, i see elements from The Dain Curse in movies like Chinatown and HolywoodLand not to mention every tec show on TV since, well, forever.
and i don’t mind the rough edges and episodic structure at all, in fact i love The Dain Curse all the more for its decided strangeness.
June 28th, 2011 at 8:33 pm
[…] note flaws in The Dain Curse. A quarter-century ago, in his entry on the novel in 1001 Midnights, Bill Pronzini observed that The Dain Curse was “overlong and decidedly melodramatic.” Indeed it […]
September 8th, 2020 at 10:37 am
[…] in the view of the author himself, and by a fairly wide margin among most critics who celebrate his literary achievement overall. Yet the book, which Hammett churned out […]