If Red Harvest was a little rough around the edges, Dashiell Hammett's The Dain Curse, his second novel, shows the full flowering of his talent. The shift reminds me a little of the transition from John Dos Passos's Streets of Night, a good enough novel published in 1923, and Manhattan Transfer, the masterpiece of two years later. Hammett is completely in control of his material and form, which is evident in the fact that, as complicated as the mystery is, the reader is able to follow it easily. That wasn't the case in his first novel, at least for me. The Dain Curse is a multigenerational saga of murder and deceit broken into three "books," each self-contained but linked to the others. It's a bravura piece of plotting and style.
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