Disillusioned, but Steady and Reliable

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been slowly but enthusiastically re-reading all of Dashiell Hammett’s many short stories starring the unnamed Continental Op, collected in a hefty 2017 paperback release titled The Big Book of the Continental Op, edited by Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett. So I was pleased to happen across Susanna Lee’s new piece, “How Dashiell Hammett's Contintental Op Became a Depression-Era Icon,” in CrimeReads. Lee is the author of a new study of crime fiction, Detectives in the Shadows: A Hard-Boiled History (Johns Hopkins University Press). Her article explores the assorted reasons why Americans of the 1930s related to Hammett’s middle-aged and methodical manhunter. She writes, in part:

The Continental Op was not good-looking, nor did he dress well. What he did provide the public was a model of cool survivalism. He meets people and society on their own terms, solves the crime, collects his check, and shows up again the next day. He sets himself apart with words, elevating an entire class of muckers—Big Ship residents, miners, criminals, drunks, and get-over artists—to a sort of lyricism. In a language that was not supposed to “be capable of such refinements,” he demonstrates that there are things more important than elegance. Therein lay the stark poetry of the unrefined. Where [Race] Williams said “my ethics are my own,” the Op could demonstrate without saying it that his point of view was his own. In this sense the Op was in line with an American tradition of frontier narrators that began with James Fenimore Cooper. His particular brand of plain speaking read like a revindication of the poetry of the unsophisticated. …

The Op was a good neighbor because unlike the wealthy who wore expensive clothes in the midst of others’ misfortune, he himself was never exempt from discomfort. The Depression brought with it a great deal of physical hardship, and the Op novels illustrated it. This went over well in the worst economic downturn in American history. The Op’s salient quality is not in living the dream or in doing what every reader would love to do but rather in the opposite—retaining his perspective while he does what the public doesn’t want to do but is forced to do.

You can read all of Lee’s excellent essay here.