And today Evan Lewis tosses up yet another newsprint appearance for the Op yarn “The Girl with the Silver Eyes,” Pittsburgh, December 1936.
Plus some ads from Allentown blurbing an October 1938 reprint for this primo Op adventure in that paper.
I recall some guys making a point of how Carroll John Daly with his Race Williams PI stories kept turning them out through the 30s while Hammett — off to Hollywood, books coming out — had disappeared from the pulp detective scene — and by extension, the public mind. (Of course, as soon as the Bogie The Maltese Falcon came out in 1941, Hammett became the most influential hardboiled detective writer of all time, if there was still any question about it.)
But you know how these guys think. It’s story for story with them. One story in a pulp, then another and another, more important than bestselling books and a few classic movies.
Yet if it’s story for story, I’m wondering if with all these newspaper reprints whether Hammett may not have grabbed more eyes than someone like Daly. At this moment, we still don’t know how many of the Op series got reprinted (again, and again), but it’s beginning to seem like a floodtide.
