"The Continental Op" by Dashiell Hammett

This was an enjoyable collection of short stories featuring Hammett's never-named detective, or operative, who works for the Continental Detective Agency.  Hammett himself was a Pinkerton Agent, and I have always assumed that he based the way the Continental folks work on how the Pinkertons worked, which is a lot of fun.  Cuz the Pinkertons kind of fascinate me.  

Anyway, I didn't particularly love any of the seven stories in this, but I had a great time reading them.  My favorites were:

• "The Golden Horseshoe," in which the Op sets out to find a runaway husband and uncovers a pretty sinister extortion plot.
  
  
• "The House in Turk Street," in which the Op starts looking for one guy and ends up in the middle of a big mystery concerning a totally different guy.
  
  
• "The Whosis Kid," in which the Op follows a hunch and cracks open a gang of thieves.
  
  
• "The Farewell Murder," in which the Op gets hired to prevent a murder, and does, but not the murder he was hired to prevent.

I found it interesting that the Op tended to follow hunches and let events play out around him, not taking an active role until toward the end of the story most of the time.  It was almost like he was as much an observer as the readers, which is a unique way to handle a detective story, especially a hardboiled one.

I also liked that you get to see the Op working with other Continental operatives as part of an organization.  It's really different from the usual lone private investigator so many hardboiled mysteries feature.

Particularly Good Bits:

It would have taken good shooting to plug me at that instant.  I was bouncing around in my seat like a pellet of quicksilver in a nervous man's palm ("The Golden Horseshoe," p. 84)

According to the best dramatic rules, these folks should have made sarcastic speeches to me before they left, but they didn't.  They passed me without even a farewell look ("The House on Turk Street," p. 107).

I'm at that middle point around forty where a man puts other feminine qualities -- amiability, for one -- above beauty on his list ("The Whosis Kid," p. 205).

"Always in a hurry when we're quitting for the day," Begg said, his freckles climbing up his face to make room for his grin ("The Main Death," p. 241).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-13 for some bad language, quite a bit of violence, and veiled innuendo here and there.

This is the 16th book I've read from my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2022.