Dashiell Hammett was one of the pioneers of “hard-boiled” detective fiction and is now considered one of the greatest mystery writers of all time, so this collection rightly includes an example of his work. Hammett led a colorful life, having worked as a Pinkerton agent and later serving a prison sentence for running a Communist front group, and he made considerable contributions not only to literature but to comic strips and film.
“One Hour” stars the Continental Op, one of his recurring characters, a detective working for the fiction Continental Detective Agency. “One Hour” contains a complicated murder mystery, but its gimmick, as suggested by the title, is that the Op solves it in only one hour’s time, mostly by stumbling upon the solution and then engaging in a lengthy battle as he corners the evildoers. Goodstone apparently selected it to showcase the directness and brevity of Hammett’s narration.
The story finds the Op asked to solve a murder committed with a stolen car. Despite the terse description and brief time span, the story is a bit hard to follow as grasping both the mystery itself and its solution requires the reader to keep careful track of certain spatial relationships between streets and buildings. However, its centerpiece is neither the mystery nor its solution but the fistfight at the climax, which fills a full page and a half of a six-page story.
Much as I enjoyed reading this, I can’t help but ask if it’s the best example of Hammett’s work. It’s an early story, published in Black Mask in 1924, and its gimmick makes it feel anticlimactic since the Op solves the mystery with such little legwork, hitting on the answer while still doing the preliminary, routine questioning of witnesses and suspects.
