Volume 22, Number 1 · February 6, 1975
The Hammett Case
By Roger Sale
The Continental Op
by Dashiell Hammett, selected and with an introduction by Steven Marcus
Random House, 287 pp., $7.95
In the early Fifties, when I first read Dashiell Hammett, he seemed to fit perfectly an image my friends and I had then of a writer who had made being a writer into a romantic occupation. He had lived in 'the real world,' he had suffered years of obscurity and poverty as he learned to write a clean, honest prose, he had written books that were out of print and hard to find, he had gone to Hollywood and drunk too much and stopped writing, he had chosen to go to jail rather than talk at a communist conspiracy trial, he had some undetailed beautiful relation with Lillian Hellman. Compared to that, Fitzgerald and Hemingway were too gaudy, available for anyone's romancing.
Review, 2954 words
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