The Dain Curse by Dashiell Hammett

Hammett, Dashiell. The Dain Curse.

The bearer of the Dain Curse described herself as being in a fog, grasping for something solid to hold on to, but finding that everything fades just as it comes within reach. Her morphine addiction might have had something to do with that.

The Continental Op, Hammett’s nameless protagonist, argues that everyone is that way. Everybody is grasping in the fog, piecing together wisps of reality from what they can pick out. He makes a similar argument earlier in the book when he avoids the truth he’d like to find and settles for a story that explains the few things he knows.

I felt like I was in a fog as I read the book. Hammett seemed to wrap up an interesting little pulp mystery, but two-thirds of the book was ahead of me. Every new clue unraveled the ties I’d made. The explanations I’d accepted no longer fit. I was reeling, as dizzy as the drug addled and insane characters in the book.



Even so, I anticipated the identity of the criminal before it was revealed. I didn’t do this through the careful accumulation of clues or rigorous reasoning. I came to me by intuition and some sense of the story’s structure. I suspected this is how the Continental Op must have worked it out, too. He stumbled upon what must have been and tied it all together with a neat explanation afterward.

Dashiell Hammett also wrote
Red Harvest
The Thin Man

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
The Hunter adapted by Darwyn Cook
Will Eisner's The Spirit by Darwyn Cook