It also gives a snapshot of aspects of Californian life at the time of writing – the late 1920s. I opened them, struck up and down inside it with stiff crooked fingers, trying to gouge it open and I could see it being torn apart, could see it flowing together after my clawing fingers had passed but all I could feel was its dampness. Through the thing’s transparent flesh I could see my hands clenched in the center of its damp body. I forgave a lot of the book’s weaknesses for my enjoyment of that piece of writing. Plus, in the middle of it there is a passage of very effective horror writing, as the CO battles an evil apparition that may be real or may be the product of hallucination, or is possibly a combination of both. This is largely due to the snappy, hardboiled style of the writing and the relentless pace, which doesn’t give the reader much time to ponder the basic absurdity of the storyline.

Oddly, despite the fact that the plot is nonsensical, episodic, and barely hangs together, I still found the book entertaining. It’s up to the CO to solve whatever it is that’s going on, and amazingly, he does. Gabrielle, who seems to be thought of by some as a femme fatale but seems to me way too pathetic to be such a thing, is at the centre of all the mysterious happenings and comes to believe she is cursed. Suffice it to say, the thing soon turns bloody, with more corpses than you could shake a stick at, supposing you would want to do such a thing. The plot is entirely incomprehensible so that’s as much of a summary as I’ll give. Leggett has a wife and a weird, strange-looking but oddly attractive daughter, Gabrielle. The CO soon decides that there’s been some kind of inside job, and that there’s more to the case than a simple burglary. When Edgar Leggett’s home is broken into and some not particularly valuable diamonds go missing, his insurance company send along their operative to investigate – enter the Continental Op, the only name we are given for the first-person narrator.

Dashiell hammett's the curse