Okay. This is getting ridiculous.
John D. Squires has come across yet another newspaper serialization of a Continental Op story, this time from 1947. You may recall he recently uncovered a 1956 newspaper run for Hammett’s “The Tenth Clew,” prompting me to speculate that perhaps Hammett used that sort of reprint as supplemental income when he was blacklisted during the McCarthy era.
Hammett was not yet blacklisted in 1947, though, so who knows, maybe he had his Op stories recycling through one newspaper after another for years. I actually pulled Richard Layman’s Dashiell Hammett: A Descriptive Bibliography from 1979 off the shelf to check for any mentions of this sort of later reprint. Nothing. Of course, in those years Layman couldn’t sit at home at the computer like JDS and surf through one digital archive after another. Who knows how many Op stories saw reprint, in how many different newspapers?
The latest discovery is the opening of “Installment Four” of the excellent 1925 Op yarn “Dead Yellow Women” in the Ottawa Citizen — how many more? How many more?
