The Dain Curse (Heathen Edition)

<p><strong>Samuel Dashiell Hammett</strong> (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 <strong><em>Red Harvest</em></strong> Hammett published his sophomore shoot-'em-up <strong><em>The Dain Curse</em></strong> that same year wherein his Continental Op is on the bizarre case of a San Francisco 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 <em>violently</em>.</p>