The Continental Op

The Continental Op is the unnamed operative narrator of Dashiell Hammett's short stories and two novels — a fat, middle-aged, thoroughly professional private detective working for the Continental Detective Agency's San Francisco office, who approaches his work with the detached competence of a craftsman rather than the moral romanticism of the hardboiled hero that Philip Marlowe would later represent. Hammett began the Op stories in 1923, drawing on his own experience as a Pinkerton detective.

The Op is one of American crime fiction's most influential creations — the first major American hardboiled detective, whose refusal of sentimentality and whose professional ethics (never taking a case for personal reasons, never sleeping with clients) established conventions that Chandler and others built upon and complicated. His namelessness is deliberate: he is defined by his function rather than his biography.

The two Op novels — Red Harvest (1929) and The Dain Curse (1929) — show the character at his most sustained. Red Harvest in particular, in which the Op essentially engineers a gang war that destroys a corrupt mining town, is one of American crime fiction's most morally complex works — a story that is deeply uncomfortable about what its protagonist actually does.

Begin with Red Harvest (1929) or the collected short stories.