Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 5, No. 19, November 1944

Obviously, it was your Editor’s duty to unearth “The Gutting of Couffignal” and find out what Mr. Hammett was talking about. Disguised as a literary detective, your Editor followed up an ingenious clue and nailed “The Gutting” in its hideout. On reading the story, the mystery was solved. Mr. Hammett’s allusion refers to the climactic scene between The Continental Op and Princess Zhukovski which in conception bears a strong resemblance to the climactic scene between Sam Spade and Brigid O’Shaughnessy at the end of THE MALTESE FALCON. Otherwise the two stories are completely different.

Aside from this interesting historical point, “The Gutting” is an excellent example of Hammett’s startling powers — a tremendously effective thriller in which The Continental Op operates at the top of his form. It is a privilege to reprint this “forgotten” Hammett, now destined to become an anthological favorite.

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Wedge-shaped Couffignal is not a large island, and not far from the mainland, to which it is linked by a wooden bridge. Its western shore is a high, straight cliff that jumps abruptly up out of San Pablo Bay. From the top of this cliff the island slopes eastward, down to a smooth pebble beach that runs into the water again, where there are piers and a clubhouse and moored pleasure boats.

Couffignal’s main street, paralleling the beach, has the usual bank, hotel, moving-picture theater, and stores. But it differs from most main streets of its size in that it is more carefully arranged and preserved. There are trees and hedges and strips of lawn on it, and no glaring signs. The buildings seem to belong beside one another, as if they had been designed by the same architect, and in the stores you will find goods of a quality to match the best city stores.

The intersecting streets — running between rows of neat cottages near the foot of the slope — become winding hedged roads as they climb toward the cliff. The higher these roads get, the farther apart and larger are the houses they lead to. The occupants of these higher houses are the owners and rulers of the island. Most of them are well-fed old gentlemen who, the profits they took from the world with both hands in their younger days now stowed away at safe percentages, have bought into the island colony so they may spend what is left of their lives nursing their livers and improving their golf among their kind. They admit to the island only as many storekeepers, working-people, and similar riffraff as are needed to keep them comfortably served.

That is Couffignal.

It was some time after midnight. I was sitting in a second-story room in Couffignal’s largest house, surrounded by wedding presents whose value would add up to something between fifty and a hundred thousand dollars.

Of all the work that comes to a private detective (except divorce work, which the Continental Detective Agency doesn’t handle) I like weddings as little as any. Usually I manage to avoid them, but this time I hadn’t been able to. Dick Foley, who had been slated for the job, had been handed a black eye by an unfriendly pickpocket the day before. That let Dick out and me in. I had come up to Couffignal — a two-hour ride from San Francisco by ferry and auto stage — that morning, and would return the next.

This had been neither better nor worse than the usual wedding detail. The ceremony had been performed in a little stone church down the hill. Then the house had begun to fill with reception guests. They had kept it filled to overflowing until some time after the bride and groom had sneaked off to their eastern train.