“Lily and I were true sisters, inseparable, hating one another poisonously.”

Recently, in the course of my explorations of old mysteries on YouTube, I watched once again the 1978 CBS TV miniseries adaptation of Dashiell Hammet’s The Dain Curse, starring James Coburn. The dramatization kept to the plot in broad terms, but made a lot of cuts, most of which, it must be admitted, improved the story. For some reason they moved the setting from California to New York state (contrary to the usual custom of that California-based industry). The plot was streamlined in various ways. The casting of Coburn, a famously lean man, as the “Continental Op” (a fat character who is never named in any of his stories), a case of literal streamlining, was justified through turning him into a fictional version of the author himself (who had indeed been a Pinkerton detective), calling him “Hamilton Nash.”

I had watched the original broadcast on TV, and having watched it again now I was curious to re-read the book. It’s not Hammet’s best work, in my opinion.

The story begins with the Continental Op visiting the San Francisco home of Dr. Edgar Leggett, who is involved in chemical experiments involving diamonds. Some of the diamonds he keeps in his laboratory have apparently been stolen in a break-in. The Op finds Leggett’s story fishy, and before long breaks it down into a messy scheme involving false identities and blackmail. At the end of this episode of the story, the Leggetts’ daughter, Gabrielle (who is a morphine addict) has been orphaned, and is left with the conviction that she is a victim of “the Dain Curse” (Dain is her mother’s name) and doomed to cause the death of any person who gets close to her.

But there are two further sections in the book. In the second, the Op is hired to locate Gabrielle and finds her in the temple of a fashionable San Francisco cult, where he barely manages to save her from murder, after which her fiancé whisks her off to a quick wedding and honeymoon in a southern California seaside town. In the third, there is yet another murder, and Gabrielle once again comes under suspicion. After clearing her, the Op takes it on himself to wean her off her drug addiction.

The origins of The Dain Curse as a serial story in Black Mask Magazine are very evident, and don’t always help with readability in a consolidated narrative. Each episode (it was originally a four-parter) involves its own dramatic arc, and each ends with a “solution,” though the actual culprit is kept secret until the very end of the book. Hammett was never in Raymond Chandler’s class as a prose stylist, and the writing here is rarely memorable. The plot of The Dain Curse involves a lot of repetition, and doesn’t reach the levels Hammett achieved in The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, or even in Red Harvest (which is believed, by the way, to have inspired the Samurai film Yojimbo, and by extension A Fistful of Dollars and a score of other copycats).

But it’s worth reading. I must say though that (in my opinion) the cuts the writers made in the TV version were well taken and effective.