The Dain Curse by Dashiell Hammett

Book Details

The Dain Curse (1929) – A destructive fate pursues Gabrielle Leggett wherever she goes; it annihilates her home, penetrates into the new thought temple where she takes refuge, brings her wedding-trip to a tragic end, and drives her to the verge of insanity.

Following the girl’s amazing career by devious and unprecedented ways of his own, the Continental Op succeeds in vanquishing the curse that hangs over Gabrielle’s head and corners what is perhaps one of the most remarkable criminals in fiction.

Black Lives (1928)
The Dain Curse
A six chapter novelette.

The Hollow Temple (1928)
A further incident in the “black life” of Gabrielle Leggett.
A seven chapter novelette.

Black Honeymoon (1929)
The third adventure of the Continental Detective in The Dain Curse
A six chapter novelette.

Black Riddle (1929)
The Continental detective solves the mystery of the “Dain Curse”
A six chapter novelette.

This edition of The Dain Curse comes from the original stories as printed in Black Mask magazine in the November and December, 1928 and the January and February, 1929 issues. The first hardcover edition was printed in 1929.

In his obituary in  The New York Times,  Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961) was described as “the dean of the… ‘hard-boiled’ school of detective fiction.”

Hammett is remembered for writing some of the seminal novels of crime fiction: Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Glass Key, The Thin Man, and The Maltese Falcon.

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Excerpt: The Dain Curse

Black Lives

The Dain Curse

IT WAS A DIAMOND, all right, sparkling in the grass half a dozen feet from the blue brick walk. It was small—not more than a quarter of a carat—and unmounted. I put it in my pocket and began examining the lawn as thoroughly as I could without going at it on hands and knees.

I had covered a couple of square yards of sod when the Leggetts’ front door opened. A woman stepped out on the broad stone top step and looked down at me with good-natured curiosity.

She was a woman of about my age—forty— with darkish blonde hair, a pleasant, plump face, and dimpled pink cheeks. She had on a lavender-flowered white house dress.

I called off my search for the time and went up to her, asking:

“Is Mr. Leggett in?”

“Yes.” Her voice was as pleasant and placid as her face. She smiled from me to the lawn. “You’re another detective, aren’t you?”

I admitted it. She led me up to a green, orange and chocolate room on the second floor, put me in a brocaded chair, and told me she would call her husband from his laboratory.

While I waited for him I looked around the room, deciding that the dull orange rug under my feet was probably both genuinely Oriental and genuinely ancient, that the carved walnut furniture hadn’t been ground out by machinery, and that the Japanese prints on the walls hadn’t been selected by a puritan.

Edgar Leggett came in, saying:

“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, but I was at a point at which I couldn’t stop. Have you learned something?”

His voice was unexpectedly harsh, metallic, though friendly enough. He was a dark-skinned, erect man of forty-five or so, medium in height, muscularly slender. He would have been handsome if his brown face hadn’t been so deeply marked with lines of pain or of bitterness— sharp, hard lines across his forehead, from his nostrils down across his mouth-corners. Dark hair, worn rather long, curled above and around his broad grooved forehead. Red-brown eyes of abnormal brightness looked out through horn-rimmed spectacles. His nose was long, thin and high-bridged. His lips were thin, sharp and nimble over a small but bony chin. Black and white clothes, carefully made, carefully pressed and laundered, carefully worn, finished the picture.

He was as unusual, and as striking, in appearance as his wife—who had followed him into the room—was wholesomely normal.

“Not yet,” I answered his question. “I’m not a police detective—Continental Agency, for the insurance company, and I’ve just started.”

“The insurance company?” he repeated, surprised.

“Yes—North American Surety. Did—”

“Surely,” he said quickly, smiling, stopping my words with a flourish of one of his hands. It was a long, thin, dark hand with over-developed finger-tips, ugly as most highly trained hands are. “Surely, they would have been insured. I hadn’t thought of that. The diamonds did not belong to me, you know. They were Halstead & Beauchamp’s.”

“I didn’t know that. The insurance company gave us no details. You had them from Halstead & Beauchamp on approval?”

“No. I was using them for experimental purposes. Last year I devised a method by which color could be introduced into glass after its manufacture. Halstead became interested in the possibility of the same method being adapted to precious stones, especially in improving the color of off-shade diamonds, removing yellowish and brownish tints, emphasizing blues. He asked me to attempt it, and supplied me with the stones on which to work. These are the diamonds the burglar got.”

“How long had you had them, and how many were there?”

“Five weeks, I think, and there were eight of them, none especially valuable. The largest weighed only a trifle more than half a carat, the smallest only a quarter, and all but two were of poor color.”

“Then you hadn’t succeeded?”

“Not yet,” he admitted readily. “This was a much more delicate matter than staining glass, and on more obdurate material. I had, frankly, made not the slightest progress.”

“Where were the diamonds kept?”

“They were locked up last night, though quite often I had left them lying out in the open, considering them as subjects for my experiments rather than as valuables. But last night they were locked in a cabinet drawer in the laboratory. I put them there several days ago, after my last unsuccessful experiment.”

“Who knew about your experiments?”

“Anyone, everyone—there was no necessity for secrecy.”

“Now, about the burglary?” I said.

“We heard nothing last night. This morning we found our front door open, the cabinet drawer forced, and the diamonds gone. The police found marks on the kitchen door, and say he came in that way and left by the front door.”

“The front door was ajar when I came downstairs this morning, at half-past seven,” said Mrs. Leggett. She was sitting beside her husband, her hands folded in her lap. “I went upstairs again and awakened Edgar, and we searched the house and found the diamonds gone.”

“What else was taken?”

“Nothing else seems to have been touched.”

“How about your servants?”

“We’ve only one,” she said, “Minnie Hershey, a negress. She doesn’t sleep here, and I’m sure she had nothing to do with it. She has been with us for two years, and I’m sure of her honesty.”

I said I’d like to talk to Minnie, and Mrs. Leggett called her in. The servant was a small, wiry mulatto of twenty-something, with the straight black hair and the brown features of an Indian. She was very polite and very insistent that she had nothing to do with the theft of the diamonds, and had known nothing about it until she arrived at the house at eight-thirty this morning. She gave me her home address, a Geary Street number.

“The police questioned her this morning,” Mrs. Leggett told me after the girl had gone out. “They don’t think she had anything to do with it. They think it was the man I saw—the one Gabrielle saw three nights ago.”

I asked for more details.

“When I opened the bedroom windows last night, about midnight, just before going to bed, I saw a man standing up on the corner. I can’t say, even now, that there was anything very suspicious-looking about him. He was simply standing there as if waiting for someone, and, though he was looking down this way, there was nothing about him to make me think he might have been watching this house or any other. He was a man past forty, I should say, rather short and broad, somewhat of your build. But he had a bristly brown mustache and was pale. And he wore a brown soft hat and a brown—or dark— overcoat.”

“Somebody else had seen him three nights before?” I asked.

“Yes, Gabrielle, my daughter. Coming home late one night, he passed her a pavement or two up the street. She was in an automobile and he was walking. She thought she had seen him come from our steps, but she wasn’t sure, and she thought nothing more of it until after the burglary.”

“Is she home now? I’d like to talk to her.” Mrs. Leggett went out to get her. I asked Leggett:

“Were the diamonds loose?”

“They were unset, of course, and in small manila envelopes— Halstead & Beauchamp’s— each in its own, with a number and the weight of the stone written on it in pencil. The envelopes were taken, too.”

Mrs. Leggett returned with her daughter, a girl of twenty or less, in a sleeveless white silk dress; a girl of medium height who looked slenderer than she really was. I stood up to be introduced to her and then asked her about the man she had seen coming from the house the other night.

“I’m not positive that he came from the house,” she replied, “or from the lawn.” Her manner was a bit petulant, as if being questioned was distasteful. “I thought he might have, but I only saw him walking up the street.”

“This was Saturday night?”

“Yes—that is, Sunday morning.”

“What time?” I asked, studying her as we talked. Her hair was as curly as, and no longer than, her father’s, but of a much lighter brown. Of her features, only her green-brown eyes were large, forehead, mouth and teeth were unusually small. There was a barely noticeable hollowness at cheeks and eyes. She had a pointed chin and extremely white, smooth skin. Her expression was sullen: I couldn’t tell whether it was habitual or simply in resentment of my prying.

“Three o’clock or after,” she said impatiently.

“Were you alone?”

“Hardly. Eric Collinson brought me home.”

I asked her where I could find Eric Collinson. She frowned, hesitated, and said that he was employed by Spear, Hoover & Camp, stock brokers, that she had a putrid headache, and that she hoped I would excuse her now as she knew I couldn’t have any more questions to ask.

Without waiting for my answer, she turned and went out of the room. Her ears, I noticed, were without lobes and peculiarly pointed at the tops.

Excerpt From: Dashiell Hammett. “The Dain Curse.”