Even the Continental Op, Dashiell Hammett's famous and often imitated detective, eats breakfast occasionally, getting over the previous night's bootleg whiskey or dubious women. At a crucial point in Red Harvest, he even mixes his booze with laudanum, which reminds us we are reading a story from the 1920s. In this book, the Op spends quite a lot of time with such a woman, an associate of the mobsters. He needs her because she has information about the crime wave that he's investigating. In one scene, he describes her behavior:

Her eyes were shiny because they were wet. She jabbed a handkerchief into them as we got out of the car.

'My God, I'm hungry,' she said, dragging me across the sidewalk. 'Will you buy me a ton of chow mein?'

She didn't eat a ton of it, but she did pretty well, putting away a piled-up dish of her own and half of mine. (Red Harvest, p. 75)

He spends the evening with her, trying to get information:

She decided she was hungry again. That reminded me that I was. It took half an hour or more to get waffles, ham and coffee off the stove. It took some more time to get them into our stomachs and to smoke some cigarettes over extra cups of coffee. (Red Harvest, p. 85)

Not long after their last meal together, she is murdered by one of the many criminals in the story. And the next morning, he says simply: "I ate breakfast alone." (p. 167).

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