DAIN CURSE, THE（ISBN=） 英文原版

　　Everything about the Leggett diamond heist indicated to the
Continental Op that it was an inside job. From the stray diamond
found in the yard to the eyewitness accounts of a “strange man”
casing the house, everything was just too pat. Gabrielle
Dain-Leggett has enough secrets to fill a closet, and when she
disappears shortly after the robbery, she becomes the Op’s prime
suspect. But her father, Edgar Leggett, keeps some strange company
himself and has a dark side the moon would envy. Before he can
solve the riddle of the diamond theft, the Continental Op must
first solve the mystery of this strange family.

　　One of the Continental Op’s most bizarre cases, as he is faced
with Miss Gabrielle Dain Leggett, who has an unfortunate effect on
the people around her – they have a habit of dying violently.

　　Dashiell Samuel Hammett was born in St. Mary’s County. He grew
up in Philadelphia and Baltimore. Hammett left school at the age of
fourteen and held several kinds of jobs thereafter—messenger boy,
newsboy, clerk, operator, and stevedore, finally becoming an
operative for Pinkerton’s Detective Agency. Sleuthing suited young
Hammett, but World War I intervened, interrupting his work and
injuring his health. When Sergeant Hammett was discharged from the
last of several hospitals, he resumed detective work. He soon
turned to writing, and in the late 1920s Hammett became the
unquestioned master of detective-story fiction in America. In The
Maltese Falcon (1930) he first introduced his famous private eye,
Sam Spade. The Thin Man (1932) offered another immortal sleuth,
Nick Charles. Red Harvest (1929), The Dain Curse (1929), and The
Glass Key (1931) are among his most successful novels. During World
War II, Hammett again served as sergeant in the Army, this time for
more than two years, most of which he spent in the Aleutians.
Hammett’s later life was marked in part by ill health, alcoholism,
a period of imprisonment related to his alleged membership in the
Communist Party, and by his long-time companion, the author Lillian
Hellman, with whom he had a very volatile relationship. His attempt
at autobiographical fiction survives in the story “Tulip,” which is
contained in the posthumous collection The Big Knockover (1966,
edited by Lillian Hellman). Another volume of his stories, The
Continental Op (1974, edited by Stephen Marcus), introduced the
final Hammett character: the “Op,” a nameless detective (or
“operative”) who displays little of his personality, making him a
classic tough guy in the hard-boiled mold—a bit like Hammett
himself.