The Dain Curse eBook

A diamond glinting in the grass outside the Leggetts' front door gives the first clue to a burglary, and sets our narrator on the trail of a shadowy mastermind whose plans always seem one step ahead. But whether he's having to deal with explosions, cults, car chases, or even the titular Dain family curse, our hard-boiled private detective remains calm and collected while inching closer to the truth.

The unnamed narrator of The Dain Curse (known these days by the nickname of the Continental Op) is a detective who found his genesis among the pages of Black Mask magazine in 1923. This publication, from 1929, is a collection of four previously serialized interlinked short stories, and followed Red Harvest in a busy year for Dashiell Hammett.

Perfect for readers who crave authentic hard-boiled detective fiction and classic noir atmosphere, this masterpiece from the creator of Sam Spade delivers relentless suspense and razor-sharp prose. Hammett's legendary Continental Op navigates a labyrinth of deception with trademark cool, making this essential reading for anyone who appreciates the golden age of American crime fiction at its absolute finest.

The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)