SOURCE: "Continental Op," in Newsweek, Vol. XVIII, No. 4, July 25, 1966, p. 93.

In the following review of The Big Knockover, the critic discusses characterization in the Continental Op stories.

Like his literary contemporaries—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Nathanael West—Dashiell Hammett was a kaleidoscope of the contradictions of the American character, contradictions that were marshaled into great writing only rarely even by the greatest of that generation. Hemingway had his stoic Hemingway heroes, Fitzgerald his ravaged idealists and Hammett had his detectives, the super-professional private cops who turned the human quest into a manhunt and bulldozed their way through desperation with (literally) a gun in one fist and a blackjack in the other.

The hero of all but one of these stories, which have been put together in hard covers for the first time [in a collection entitled The Big Knockover] by Hammett's great friend of 30 years, playwright Lillian Hellman, is...