Before there was Sam Spade , before there was Nick Charles, there was the unnamed operative in the Continental Detective Agency: the Continental Op . It was the Continental Op that, through a series of twenty-eight stories and two novels written in the mid to late 1920s, established Dashiel Hammett’s reputation as one of the finest crime writers of the century.

The Continental Op is of below-average height and above-average weight, but is willing and able to mix it up with whatever ruffians he encounters on his assignments. Those assignments often look benign at first, but turn sinister in a hurry. Although based in San Francisco, the Op’s assignments take him all over California (“The Golden Horseshoe,” “The Gutting of Couffignal”), to Arizona (“Corkscrew”), and even to the Balkans (“This King Business”). Where the Op excels is at listening to a client, witness, or perpetrator, and identifying the inconsistencies and holes in their statements—inconsistencies and holes that readers rarely notice until the Op points them out.

The Continental Op stories, with two exceptions, originally appeared in Black Mask , the pulp magazine started in 1920 that also launched the careers of Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner, and other legendary crime writers.