ONE HOUR, by Dashiell Hammett
INTRODUCTION
Of the many hardboiled detctives, Dashiell Hammett’s The Continental Op is one of the best. He is a private investigator employed at the Continental Detective Agency’s San Francisco office. All of the stories are told in the first person, and his name is never given.
Years of witnessing human cruelty, misery, and ruin—as well as being instrumental in sending hundreds of people to jail, or to the gallows—have jaded the Op, and he is losing his humanity. His greatest fear is becoming like his boss, “The Old Man,” whom he describes as “a shell, without any human feelings whatsoever.”
Indeed, in the novel The Dain Curse (a fix-up novel built around four short stories), a character remarks to the Op that she sees him as “[a] monster. A nice one, an
