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work from home. The wife and children, Haley recorded, lived in an apartment on Sacramento, near Hyde. By April’s exam, he explained he was a little worse, although with no blood spitting, and that his rotten teeth bothered him tremendously. 7
    During this time, he had nevertheless written something extraordinary for Cap Shaw, a novella called The Big Knockover . He was also now reviewing mysteries for the Saturday Review of Literature , a platform he relished, raising himself and his realist school of detective fiction even as he pointed out the weak stew served by others. His focus had switched back almost entirely to writing. In the January 1927 Black Mask , Shaw announced Hammett’s coming return in the next issue: “Dashiell Hammett has called back the Continental detective from his long retirement and is setting him to work anew.”
    When it began running in excerpts in February 1927, The Big Knockover featured a brazen, over-the-top double holdup of San Francisco banks, one of which may have been modeled on the Old Mint building. You can feel Hammett stretching out at last, achieving the full, striding voice of his longer works. “I found Paddy the Mex in Jean Larrouy’s dive,” it begins,

    Paddy—an amiable con man who looked like the King of Spain—showed me his big white teeth in a smile, pushed achair out for me with one foot, and told the girl who shared his table:
    â€œNellie, meet the biggest-hearted dick in San Francisco. This little fat guy will do anything for anybody, if only he can send ’em over for life in the end.”

    The Big Knockover has many elements: spare, slangy prose; the Op’s serving as guide to scruffy locales up and down San Francisco; and poetic lists of criminal names, proof of Hammett’s strong grounding in Pinkerton studies. It also features a criminal operation seemingly far larger than the Op or the police force of his wide-open town can handle.
    The Op is skeptical when he first hears of the audacious bank “caper” from a stuttering newsie, but his source is gunned down moments later by a young Armenian boy who saunters off “hands in pockets, softly whistling Broken-Hearted Sue .” Intrigued by a traffic jam he sees on Market Street the next day, the Op walks over toward the Financial District and the Seaman’s Bank. As he gets closer, he hears “roaring, rattling, explosive noises” and sees a man trying to set his dislocated jaw back in place. Finally, he reaches the block between Bush and Pine Streets, where “Hell was on a holiday.” Where the Seaman’s National and Golden Gate Trust Company buildings face each other, a double looting is going on, involving a robbery gang of perhaps a hundred and fifty crooks. “For the next six hours,” says the Op, “I was busier than a flea on a fat woman.”
    Inspiring his own epic heist, Hammett had certainly read a national news story about a bold posse of gunmen making a raid on the Denver Federal Reserve Bank in December 1922.Firing their way in during business hours, they got away with two hundred thousand dollars, the record daylight take at the time, shooting up the streetscape as they sped off under fire from overwhelmed upstairs guards, one of whom died of his wounds. As he fired from the running board of the getaway car, one of the robbers was hit but was pulled inside it as the gang sped off. 8
    What follows in The Big Knockover is a detecting adventure as it had never been done. In a room on Fillmore Street, the Op catalogues the notable dead crooks he recognizes on the floor, from the Dis-and-Dat Kid, “who had crushed out of Leavenworth only two months before”; to Snohomish Whitey, “supposed to have died a hero in France in 1919”; to “L.A. Slim, from Denver, sockless and underwearless as usual, with a thousand dollar bill sewed in each shoulder of his coat”; to Bull McGonickle, “still pale