Steve's Reviews> The Continental Op: The Complete Case Files

The complete Continental Op stories (aside from the novel Red Harvest). Though I've read some of these stories before, and some more than once, this was a great trip through them all, in chronological order. You can see how Hammett's skill progressed over the time, and the character of the Op changed (a little). Some of the stories, especially the early ones, are a bit clumsy, and the solutions seem to come out of left field; that doesn't matter much, because it's not necessarily the whodunnit that you read these stories for.

What I enjoyed, a lot, was the picture of San Francisco in the 1920's. Hammett is pretty precise in is locations, and you really get a feel for the city at the time. Hammett's language, too, is always engaging, with lots of slang that was new to me. He's also very good with character.

A couple times he uses some tropes from later works; one character walks into a room and drops dead, as happened in The Maltese Falcon, and there's also the death of a partner, again, as in the Maltese Falcon.

If you've read some of the op stories, this Kindle book is great. It's 1100+ pages that is very easy to carry around; I'll probably keep it on my Kindle for some time, and dip back into these stories.