The hunter and the hunted in Hammetts tales are two aspects of the same personality The private eye and his prey understand each other and are in a strange way comfortable with each other The private eye has a foot in each camp From the point of view of the criminal he is a bit too straight and from that of the law a bit too seedy He is at once a crook and a competitor The mission of the private eye is sometimes tempered by his sense of complicity and sometimes his punitive zeal is intensified by his anxiety about this ambiguity