Sat 4 Nov 2017
Book Noted: DASHIELL HAMMETT – The Big Book of the Continental Op.
Posted by Steve under Books Noted , Pulp Fiction[11] Comments
DASHIELL HAMMETT – The Big Book of the Continental Op. RICHARD LAYMAN & JULIE RIVETT, Editors. Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, softcover, 28 November 2017. 752 pages.
“Now for the first time ever in one volume, all twenty-eight stories and two serialized novels starring the Continental Op — one of the greatest characters in storied history of detective fiction.”
What else do you need to know? I’ve been waiting for this book for almost 60 years. And now here it is, at last, all but three stories appearing first in Black Mask magazine, and all reprinted as they first appeared.
November 4th, 2017 at 9:54 pm
More than enough info. All the Op in one place. I’m in.
November 5th, 2017 at 7:32 am
It’s about time!
November 5th, 2017 at 7:35 am
IMHO The Continental Op tales are Hammett’s main achievement. Along with a few non-series tales he wrote, such as “Nightmare Town”.
November 5th, 2017 at 4:11 pm
The best feature is these are Hammett’s original words, but next is the foreword where the editors reveal the publishing history of the Op and Hammett’s dislike for his early writing.
November 6th, 2017 at 12:10 pm
Nice. Is it retypeset? Would rather have a facsimile version so no more questions about that. I wonder how good the text is be? Hope someone will post feedback on that eventually.
November 6th, 2017 at 2:23 pm
Rob, one of the reason I read ebooks is so I can adjust the typeset – size, space, even color of the text and background. So I am no help there.
As for quality of writing, Hammett gets better as he gets older and more experienced so it is nice to see how he progressed. My interest in Hammett is less his prose (boy he uses a lot of slang that has you looking for a definition) and more for his characters. Even at the beginning he was a master at characters.
November 6th, 2017 at 2:36 pm
Rob, The text has been completely reformatted, which to tell you the truth, I prefer. In the foreword they (the editors) note the fact that that they made “silent corrections” in the text, fixing spelling mistakes, typographical errors and so on. I guess we’ll have to trust them on that. My biggest problem with the book is that it’s so big and bulky, it’s hard to read in bed.
November 6th, 2017 at 9:03 pm
Which may be another good reason to go the ebook way but I’m an old dog, I guess.
November 6th, 2017 at 9:14 pm
The foreword is interesting. The editors are really hard on Lillian Hellman and seem very concerned about preserving Hammett’s words.
This is a major improvement over earlier attempts in ebooks to release Hammett’s original work. Both the short story collection of Sam Spade and The Thin Man may have the words but the e-formatting is so bad they are nearly unreadable.
There are ways to check. Find a short story we know was edited and compare the words and sentences. Long ago when the original version of The Thin Man was release on ebook I compared the end of one chapter and found it had the original version.
Reviews should help. This has been an ebook for months if not longer.
November 6th, 2017 at 11:10 pm
Michael, I saw that Mysterious Press put out several volumes of Op stories in ebook form last year. Are these what you’re referring to, or was there an ebook version of all the stories?
November 7th, 2017 at 3:25 pm
The volumes were released first and then the complete all op stories book was put out on Kindle. I bought the full collection for Kindle July 30, 2016.
Didn’t Mysterious Press return to publishing a few years ago as an ebook only publisher then recently return to print? I know I am on their email list and unhappy with their abandonment of Ross Thomas series.