Arson Plus and Other Stories by Dashiell Hammett

Published digitally by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road on June 14, 2016

This volume collects three of Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op stories, originally published in Black Mask during the early 1920s. It also includes a couple of introductions, apparently taken from The Continental Op: The Complete Case Files, one of which details the history of the Continental Op stories.

Since prices change frequently, I generally don’t take them into account when reviewing books. I will say that there are only three stories in this collection, and that readers might want to ask whether they would get more value for their money by purchasing The Complete Case Files or some other collection that includes more stories.

The three stories aren’t bad, but they are not up to the level of Hammett’s later work. Many later stories in the series were better. I’ve always been a bigger fan of Hammett’s novels, which are justly praised by fans of noir.

The stories:

In “Arson Plus,” the Continental Op helps the police solve a murder. A man dies in a fire. Suspects include housekeepers and a niece, but the solution is trickier than it first appears. This is the best story of the three.

In “Crooked Souls,” the Continental Op is hired after a wealthy man’s daughter is kidnapped. The plot is familiar, but it might have been fresh when the story was first published.

“Slippery Fingers” turns on finding the suspect who left bloody fingerprints on a gun. The story seemed to me to turn on an unlikely premise, but I’m hardly an expert on the state of fingerprint technology in 1923.

RECOMMENDED