The Op investigates a complicated web involving robbery, murder, cults, psychosis, and drug addiction enmeshing Gabrielle Leggett, who believes she is the inheritor of a curse on her mother's family.
Adapted as a TV mini-series in 1978, with James Coburn in the lead role.
The Dain Curse provides examples of:
- An Arm and a Leg: Owen Fitzstephan gets caught basically at ground zero of a homemade bomb, barely surviving.
- Addled Addict: Gabrielle Leggett, but downplayed. The Op notes the amount of morphine she consumes is actually not especially high as such things go, but it surely can't help her face the mayhem and gaslighting (see below) she gets. Ironically, it also dulls her reactions to the violence somewhat, so once she's off the stuff her traumatic memories are very light.
- Call-Back: A rather mean one from the Op's fellow op Mickey Linehan, after listening to him try to reassure Gabrielle Leggett:"Tch, tch, tch, as Mr. Rolly says." He shook his grinning face at me. "I ought to tell her what happened to that poor girl up in Poisonville that got so she thought she could trust you."
- Gaslighting: Sheesh, Gabrielle gets it from her stepmother and from Owen Fitzstephan. She also arguably gets it from Joseph and Aaronia Haldorn, but that's just standard operating procedure for their cult.
- Noble Demon: Gabrielle's opinion of the Op boils down to this.
- Red Right Hand: Gabrielle believes her pointed ears and small facial features are signs of evil.
- Scam Religion: The Haldorns run something called The Temple of the Holy Grail, using drugs and special effects to impress their worshippers. Unfortunately, Joseph, whose grasp on reality was more fragile than first thought, starts believing that he really is an incarnation of the divine. Attempted Human Sacrifice follows.
- Smug Snake: Owen Fitzstephan, and how. Probably best summed up when he and the Op are discussing a murder that implicates a town marshall, and the Op notes that it makes no sense in light of the previous crimes being investigated that involve Gabrielle Leggett:"That," Owen Fitzstephen said, "is characteristic of you. You're stumped, bewildered, flabbergasted. Do you admit you've met your master, have run into a criminal too wily for you? Not you. He's outwitted you: therefore he's an idiot or a lunatic. Now really. Of course there's a certain unexpected modesty to that attitude."
- Uncanny Valley: Invoked. Hammett gives a pretty good description of the phenomenon almost 50 years before it was named:[regarding Aaronia Haldorn] "There was warmth and there was beauty in her olive-skinned face, but except for the eyes, it was warmth and beauty that didn't seem to have anything to do with reality. It was as if her face were not a face, but a mask that she had worn until it had almost become a face. Even her mouth, which was a mouth to talk about, looked not so much like flesh as like a too perfect imitation of flesh, softer and redder and maybe warmer than genuine flesh, but not genuine flesh."
- You Are Better Than You Think You Are: The Op actually spends a fair bit of a chapter essentially telling Gabrielle Leggett this when she's starting to be especially convinced that she's cursed, rotten and evil. His fellow op Mickey Linehan does razz him a bit about it (see Call-Back above).
- You're Insane!: Played with. After the Op confronts Owen Fitzstephan with a breakdown of his crimes, Fitzstephan notes that he will more than likely get off with an insanity plea (and, in fact, he does, along with the fact that his severe injuries don't make him much of a danger to anyone anymore). When the Op agrees, this really pisses Fitzstephan off:This sudden hatred of me— for it amounted to that— had grown, I supposed, out of his knowing I thought him insane. He wanted the rest of the world, or at least the dozen who would represent the world on his jury, to think he had been crazy— and did make them think so—but he didn’t want me to agree with them.
As a sane man who, by pretending to be a lunatic, had done as he pleased and escaped punishment, he had a joke— if you wanted to call it that— on the world. But if he was a lunatic who was ignorant of his craziness, though he was pretending to be a lunatic, then the joke— if you wanted to call it that— was on him.
The TV adaptation provides examples of:
- Adaptation Name Change: The detective agency the Op works for is the Dickerson Agency instead of the Continental.
- Named by the Adaptation: The Op is given the name "Hamilton Nash", a play on the name of his creator.
