DASHIELL HAMMETT – The Big Knockover [edited by Lillian Hellman]. Random House, hardcover, 1966.

   Nine adventures of the anonymous Continental Op, plus an unfinished portion of a novel titled “Tulip.” The Op was [among the first] hard-boiled detectives in fiction, so the effectiveness of the writing may have become diluted by the appearance of all those who followed. The confused younger generation of characters in the stories this collection contains has a great role in the stories, as well as the usual underworld population at the time.

Rating: *****

— September 1968.

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Note: I reviewed the stories separately, and these will be posted here on this blog individually over the next few days and weeks ahead. Also, in my original review of the collection itself, I referred to the Continental Op as the first hard-boiled fictional detective. The actual very first may  have been Carroll John Daly’s Terry Mack, or if not him, then certainly the same writer’s Race Williams, neither of whom I may have heard of at the time I wrote this review.