One of the greatest unsolved mysteries in the history of mystery TV is: Why has there never been a Continental Op TV series? The unnamed Op is the most prolific detective created by the Father of Hardboiled Fiction, Dashiell Hammett. In the 1920s and early ’30s, the San Francisco-based member of the Pinkerton’s-style agency starred in 28 short stories and the first two of Hammett’s five novels.
At first blush, the answer is because Hammett and the Op aren’t British, they are American. The Brits know how to do detective TV, with famous series featuring Agatha Christie’s Poirot and Marple (twice), and of course Sherlock Holmes. (American TV also tackles Holmes so ubiquitously that there’s a current one few people have heard of: “Watson,” where the doctor solves medical mysteries.)
Other hardboiled detectives have gotten their time on the small screen, including Chandler’s Marlowe and Spillane’s Hammer.
“Fly Paper” (1995)
Season 2, episode 5 of “Fallen Angels” (Showtime)
Director: Tim Hunter
Writers: Donald E. Westlake, William Horberg (teleplay); Dashiell Hammett (short story)
Stars: Christopher Lloyd, Laura San Giacomo, Peter Berg
Oh, to be a fly on the wall
Yet the Continental Op has only appeared by name (or lack thereof) in one half-hour episode: “Fly Paper,” an installment of Showtime’s anthology “Fallen Angels” from 1995. (It can be found on YouTube.) He’s played by a lanky, 50-something Christopher Lloyd (“Back to the Future”). Lloyd does a fine job of sliding into a show shamelessly – and somewhat appealingly — slathered with noir style. But in my head I imagined the Op being 40-ish and built like a rectangular block. More like Arnold Vosloo, who plays colleague MacMan.
Writers Donald E. Westlake and William Horberg take a hands-off approach to the adaptation, letting Hammett’s words from the 1929 short story sing, both in narration and Lloyd’s dialog. Also featuring Michael Rooker as the baddie, Laura San Giacomo as a woman in the middle of things and Darren McGavin as The Old Man, the episode finds most scenes springing off the page.
The one weird scene also struck me as weird in the source material: Several Continental agents (who are not working on this case) play Horde of Bad Cops to the Op’s Good Cop to scare a suspect into spilling the beans.
The man with no name … except when he has one
Overall, “Fly Paper” is a good story, though, and I could’ve gone for 27 more half-hours like it, along with three-hour specials adapting “Red Harvest” and “The Dain Curse.”
The 1978 three-part miniseries adaptation of “The Dain Curse” should be mentioned here, although I’ll review it in full in a later post. Again, the Op isn’t precisely as I pictured, but do prefer James Coburn to Lloyd in the role. The fact that he’s named Hamilton Nash seems hoary when you hear about it, but it didn’t bother me amid the story.
Over the course of a series, it would probably bother me more if there were instances where he’d naturally give his name and the writers had to awkwardly dodge it. On the page, with the first-person narration, it’s easier to avoid it. Coburn doing the complete Op catalog would’ve been a blast.
All over movies and TV, but not in name
You have to stretch further to find the Op on the big screen. “Roadhouse Nights” (1930) started as an adaptation of “Red Harvest” (1929) but morphed into something else — but Hammett got paid for it and his name stayed attached.
Movies inspired by “Red Harvest” – where the Op single-handedly cleans up a corrupt mining town – include “Yojimbo” (1961), “A Fistful of Dollars” (1964), “Django” (1966), “The Warrior and the Sorceress” (1984), “Miller’s Crossing” (1990), “Omega Doom” (1996) and “Last Man Standing” (1996). In the latter, Bruce Willis plays the unnamed man – and I could definitely see him as the Op.
Nick Kolakowski, in a 2020 Crime Reads essay, perfectly describes “Red Harvest” as “the Schrödinger’s cat of noir adaptations: often made — and yet never made.” That could apply to the Continental Op on TV, too. There’s some of the Op in every hardboiled detective show.
“Veronica Mars’” Keith Mars, played by Enrico Colantoni, strikes me as a cuddlier version of Hammett’s sleuth – like if the Op had one thing (a daughter, in Keith’s case) that came before work. But in appearance, Colantoni of the Aughts is a dead-ringer for my mind’s-eye vision of the Op.
More than 100 years after the Op pounded the pages of the pulps, we find ourselves in an age of I.P. (intellectual property), where almost every idea is an old one. Because the Op is a template, we’ve gotten a century of the Op’s influence while only getting the Op proper one-and-a-half times – via Lloyd and Coburn. Maybe not having a name truly does keep him in the shadows, but it remains a mystery why no TV studio attempts to cash in on the I.P. of the O.G. Op.
Sleuthing Sunday reviews the works of Agatha Christie, along with other new and old classics of the mystery genre.