{"id":2098,"date":"2004-06-21T15:08:25","date_gmt":"2004-06-21T19:08:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2004\/06\/21\/2098.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:46:07","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:46:07","slug":"book-report-the-continental-op","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2004\/06\/21\/book-report-the-continental-op\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: The Continental Op"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your Humble Blogger recently recommended “The House on Turk Street” and “The Girl with the Silver Eyes” to an acquaintance, and then realized I haven’t re-read them for years. So, out came my copy of The Continental Op<\/I><\/a>, and that was a good thing.\n

A couple of questions came up, though. First of all, in “Turk Street”, the Op makes a comment about Tai adhering to ‘racial form’. The Op predicts, correctly, that the Quarres were doomed, when they relaxed after taking one gun from Tai: “The Chinese are a thorough people; if one of them carries a gun at all, he usually carries two or three or more.” This struck me, of course, as racist, and I certainly think that Mr. Hammett and the Op are a bit racist. On the other hand, if the Op had referred to ‘cultural form’, and said something like ‘the Chinese culture encourages thoroughness, and if a product of that culture carries a gun at all, ta usually carries two or three or more’, I may have thought it silly, but not racist. And I think that’s what Mr. Hammett meant, here; he doesn’t distinguish between some pseudo-scientific idea of race and some pseudo-sociological idea of culture. He just says that the Chinese are thorough. So I don’t know. He also, by the way, clearly implies that the idea is true generally, but not always specifically. He’s willing to gamble on it, but he’s not altogether certain.\n

The second thing is that at the end of “The Girl with the Silver Eyes”, the Girl says “the vilest epithet of which the English language is capable”. Any guesses? The story was published in Black Mask<\/I> in 1924, and I’d say, very likely, Mr. Hammett meant a word beginning with an f. These things change as the culture changes, of course; when I was a kid, in the 1970s, the vilest epithet began with a c, and later it was probably a compound beginning with an m. I have no idea what it is now. I’m inclined to take the cheap shot and say ‘Ashcroft’, of course. I rather like that the story ends on that somewhat ambiguous note, but on the other hand, it’s bugged me for years. I have no doubt about what the gunsel says in The Maltese Falcon<\/i>, though. It’s fun to see Hammett work around and with the restrictions on speech and action; I suspect writing the Op stories without profanity was something like writing the novel without verbs.\n

Of course, being hard-boiled isn’t about cursing; it’s not about the fancy rhythms of the language, or the similes. It’s that most of us are three-minute eggs, and some are two-minute eggs; the slightest tap and we open up and spill out whatever’s inside, secrets and blood and love. The Op has spent a lot longer in hot water, and as a result he’s toughened up, and bruises more easily than he opens. He’s seen a lot of people die, and killed a lot of people, too. He’s aware that he’s lost a lot by it, and is even aware that he isn’t quite human, anymore, but that’s the way of his job. When it does get to him (towards the end of Red Harvest<\/I> for example), it’s really scary.\n

Anyway, that’s why I like Dashiell Hammett’s stuff better than Raymond Chandler’s. For Mr. Chandler, the boiling never quite hardens the egg; he keeps saying that “dead men are heavier than broken hearts,” which is all poetic and stuff, but wouldn’t get much change out of the Op.\n

                           ,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Your Humble Blogger recently recommended \u201cThe House on Turk Street\u201d and \u201cThe Girl with the Silver Eyes\u201d to an acquaintance, and then realized I haven\u2019t re-read them for years. So, out came my copy of The Continental Op, and that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2098"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2098\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17048,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2098\/revisions\/17048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}