SOURCE: "The Hammett Case," in New York Review of Books, Vol. XXII, No. 1, February 6, 1975, pp. 20-2.

Sale is an American educator and the author of several books, including Discussions of the Novel (1960) and Literary Inheritance (1984). The following review provides a response to Steven Marcus's introduction to The Continental Op (see excerpt dated 1974), debating Marcus's assertions about the "fiction-making" activities of the Continental Op. Sale also finds the stories in the collection to be inferior examples of Hammett's talent.

In the early Fifties, when I first read Dashiell Hammett, he seemed to fit perfectly an image my friends and I had then of a writer who had made being a writer into a romantic occupation. He had lived in "the real world," he had suffered years of obscurity and poverty as he learned to write a clean, honest prose, he had written books that were out of print and...