Who took a shot at the nasty old businessman, Talbert Exon, while he was in bed at home recovering from pneumonia? The Op gets the assignment from his employer, the Continental Detective Agency, and travels to Knownburg in San Joaquim County to find out. For awhile he's stumped! "Black Mask" introduced it this way: "Mr. Hammett's nameless detective is lured into a sweet little domestic mess with an outside mystery; as usual, he walks into a lot of excitement, not all of which comes from the muzzle of a gun." Librarian's note #1: this entry is for the story, "Night Shots." Entries for collections of short stories, and each of the other individual stories, can be found elsewhere on Goodreads. There are a total of 28 short stories plus one incomplete; they can all be found by searching Goodreads for: "a Continental Op Short Story." Librarian's note #2: there are also two Continental Op novels, "Red Harvest" (also known as "The Cleansing of Poisonville), and "The Dain Curse."
Author
Also wrote as Peter Collinson, Daghull Hammett, Samuel Dashiell, Mary Jane Hammett Dashiell Hammett, an American, wrote highly acclaimed detective fiction, including The Maltese Falcon (1930) and The Thin Man (1934). Samuel Dashiell Hammett authored hardboiled novels and short stories. He created Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon), Nick and Nora Charles (The Thin Man), and the Continental Op (Red Harvest and The Dain Curse) among the enduring characters. In addition to the significant influence his novels and stories had on film, Hammett "is now widely regarded as one of the finest mystery writers of all time" and was called, in his obituary in the New York Times, "the dean of the... 'hard-boiled' school of detective fiction." See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashiell...
