Today, May 26, marks the birth of two of the most important writers of the 20th Century, Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) and Harlan Ellison (1934-2018).

Hammett, of course, was one of the founders of the hardboiled school of detective writing. Ellison was primarily a short fiction writer, but he will long be remembered as the author of the classic Star Trek TOS episode “The City on the Edge of Forever”. If you ever get a chance to hear a performance of his original script, do. It’s different than the filmed version in some key respects.

I’ve always like Hammett’s stories of the Continental Op, an unnamed operative of the Continental Detective Agency. The stories were based in part on Hammett’s time was a detective for the Pinkerton agency. For this post, I read “Fly Paper”. The Op is dispatched to deliver a large sum of money to the wayward daughter of a client. The daughter has run off with a gangster but now she wants to come home and needs some money to do so.

But before the Op can deliver the money, the girl turns up dead. She’s been poisoned by arsenic taken from fly paper.

The question is who poisoned her and why. I liked the way Hammett set this one up. Not only are there a couple of instances of gun play, but the solution to the mystery is quite logical and grows out of the story organically. I don’t recall having read this one before, and I think I would have based on the ending. “Fly Paper” is available in The Big Book of the Continental Op.

In observance of Harlan Ellison’s birthday, I read “Blind Bird, Blind Bird, Go Away From Me!”. This story is only available in Love Ain’t Nothing but Sex Misspelled. I’m reading the electronic version of the Open Road Media edition. The various editions of this book have different contents, something that one should expect in a Harlan Ellison collection.

This particular story doesn’t have any fantastical elements. It’s the tale a soldier who has a traumatic fear of the dark. From that perspective it is an effective horror story, at least at times. The soldier, an NCO, is cut off from the rest of his unit and has to make his way back to his side of the lines after being caught in an ambush in order to get help for his men. As a piece of psychological horror, it’s quite effective.

Those are the two stories I chose to read by Hammett and Harlan today. I’d not read either before, and the time invested was worth it.