The Dain Curse by Dashiell Hammett (Heathen Edition)

The Dain Curse

Spine #32
Author
Dashiell Hammett
Translator
First Edition
July 19, 1929
Heathen Edition
July 2025
Refreshed
Pages
250
Heathen Genera
Arriving Soon-ish, Wise Guys, eh?
Paperback ISBN
978-1-948316-32-3
Hardcover ISBN
978-1-963228-32-8

“She was simply a woman who wanted what she wanted and was willing to go to any length to get it. You won’t find the key to her in any complicated derangements. She was simple as an animal, with an animal’s simple ignorance of right and wrong, dislike for being thwarted, and spitefulness when trapped.”

Fitzstephan drank beer and asked:

“You’d reduce the Dain curse, then, to a primitive strain in the blood?”

“To less than that, to words in an angry woman’s mouth.”

“It’s fellows like you that take all the color out of life.” He sighed behind cigarette smoke. “Doesn’t Gabrielle’s being made the tool of her mother’s murder convince you of the necessity—at least the poetic necessity—of the curse?”

“Not even if she was the tool, and that’s something I wouldn’t bet on.

Samuel Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961) was an American author widely recognized as the trailblazer of hard-boiled detective fiction with his unsentimental, breakneck storytelling chock-full of fast-paced, slangy dialogue and abrupt, explosive violence. Following hot on the heels of his 1929 debut novel Red Harvest, Hammett published his sophomore shoot-’em-up The Dain Curse that same year, wherein his Continental Op is on the bizarre case of a diamond heist that stinks of an inside job and whose prime suspect is Gabrielle Dain-Leggett: a young, wealthy socialite with a taste for morphine and religious cults, believed to be suffering from the curse of the mad Dains, and who has a tragic effect on everyone around her — they die violently.

"You can journey far before you will find more murders within one cover than in The Dain Curse by Dashiell Hammett . . . And yet, it is quite impossible to lay the book down until the last man has been shot."
Witchita Daily Times
Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett (Heathen Edition)

Red Harvest

Wise Guys, eh?