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Red Harvest
Hammett's Red Harvest is probably the most devastatingly brutal good novel you'll ever read. It's not like slasher movies -- all blood and gore and no content. It's a book about brutal people, both gangsters and politicians, who will do anything to keep their hands on the power that they've managed to get hold of. The Continental Op, Hamett's anonymous detective, finds that the only way to clean up Personville is to join the fray, and though his conscience bothers him, he fights fire with fire and matches the scummy crooks machiavellian move to machiavellian move. What makes the book tick is precisely the bleak, realistic, nihilism of its main characters, who remind one so much of real politicians and crooks, but without any of the spin-doctor sheen that covers their tracks in the media. Red Harvest is a book I read every couple of years to marvel again at fantastic writing and the no-nonsense view of humanity's common, unadorned, ugliness.
Red Harvest
The Continental Op is, as far as I'm concerned, the most interesting of Dashell Hammett's characters. He's a middle aged fat man employed by a national detective agency similar to Pinkerton (which Hammett worked for before turning to writing). As such, he's nominally bound to rules which he generally follows, but breaks in this particular case.His client is murdered before he meets him, and hired by the client's father to find the murderer, finds himself in a totally corrupt community basically run by the mob. Though he easily finds the murderer, he stays on in the father's hire to clean up the town, spurred on by the actions of one of the corrupt law authorities.The story is engrossing, and the implications are even more so. The corruption is so deep that it affects even the main character. The theme common to most Contintinental Op stories is here: Everybody lies and the only way to get at the truth is to create your own lie.Every tough crime story needs its love interest, and this one is very believable in that you can see why she is drawn to this middle aged fat man and why he can find her acceptable. You also realize why he's withholding his feelings both from himself and from the reader.While not Hammett's most read novel, it's definitely expertly crafted and one quite rewarding to read.
Red Harvest
Not just a detective story. This is a true work of literary genius. The Continental Op's crusade to clean-up Poisonville is an exploration of ethics and morals in America. Hammett's lean, edgy style is as modern today as it must have seemed in 1929. A must read after reading all other Op stories, as well as a treat for the "reading ears" of anyone searching for inteligent prose.
Red Harvest
RED HARVEST arose from a series of short stories Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) wrote between about 1923 and 1927 that featured "the Continental Op," specifically an operative for the The Continental Detective Agency, San Francisco office.Hammett has to jump through a lot of narrative hoops to consolidate these short stories into the novels RED HARVEST and the slightly later THE DAIN CURSE, and the result is often excessively convoluted; readers often have to turn back several pages to figure out who has done what. Even so, both novels continue to crackle today, and in creating them Hammett not only essentially created the American P.I. novel, he also developed a uniquely sparse, often brutal, yet often poetic style. To say that both accomplishments have cast a long shadow indeed would be a profound literary understatement.RED HARVEST finds the nameless detective summoned by newspaper publisher Donald Willson to Personville, a mining town crammed to overflowing with corruption of every variety imaginable--and before the Op can meet with his client Willson is gunned down in highly suspicious circumstances on Hurricane Street, not far from the home of notorious good-time girl Dinah Brand. It happens that Willson's father Elihu Willson, who founded the city, is now a captive to its corruption in more ways than one, and after the Op settles the question of who killed Douglas, the Op blackmails the old man into allowing him to clean up the town.The Op seldom plays by law-and-order rules, and his solution to the problem is both clever and direct: he creates a series of situations that sets the various crime bosses at odds. Before you know they are gunning each other down in the streets, leaving both the Op and Dinah Brand to do some mighty frisky hopping in an effort to stay clear. But can they, when there are so few easy ways out?A mixture of alcoholism and politics cut Hammett's career short; his short stories aside, he produced only five novels, and critics are quick to point out that THE MALTESE FALCON is his finest work. I would agree with that, but while RED HARVEST may be less smoothly written, it has the unexpected energy of a great talent's first major work, and that more than makes up for the occasional rough edge in technique. Strongly recommended.GFT, Amazon Reviewer
Red Harvest
Dashiel Hammett, author of such classics as THE MALTESE FALCON and THE THIN MAN, certainly deserves credit as one of the originators of the noir genre. Unfortunately RED HARVEST doesn't live up to this reputation.RED HARVEST starts with the Continental Op arriving in the mining town of Personville (sometimes called Poisonville). He has been hired by the editor of the local paper, who turns up dead. This editor is also the son of mining magnate Elihu Willsson, who had called in a collection of hooligans to break a strike. What he had not foreseen was the inevitability the criminals would take over the town.Originally I had the idea the "red" in the title had something to do with the socialist workers movement or the Wobblies, a logical assumption since Hammett was a communist, but Hammett settles for the obvious, the red meaning murder after murder as the Continental Op turns the criminals against each other.A blurb on the back of the book lauds Hammett for "sharply and economically defined" characters. They're sharply defined all right, so sharply defined that they all run together. Pete the Finn, Lew Yard, Max Thaler and Noonan, the chief of police, could be the same character. At the beginning of the novel, the Continental Op learns the history of conflict from Bill Quint, an I.W.W. organizer from Chicago, but that's pretty much the last we hear from him.About the only interesting character in the whole book is the femme fatale, Dinah Brand, but her sole motivation seems to be money.Hammett also has problems with resolution of conflict. When painted into a corner, he simply kills off another character.Even the Continental Op is pretty much a cipher. He doesn't seem to have much of a background, other than that he's somewhat afraid of the Old Man, who runs the Continental Detective Agency. We know he smokes and drinks too much and even takes cocaine, but other than that he doesn't live up to his cool name. Unfortunately all of this reads like a bad comic book. Even Hammett would have a good laugh at what the New York Times said about RED HARVEST, I would assume in 1929 when it was published: "RED HARVEST is more than a superb crime novel: it is a classic exploration of corruption and violence in the American grain." I'll give him two stars for noir dialogue, but the rest of it is pretty much dreck.
Red Harvest
While this novel may have an important place in the history of crime fiction it is simply an awful read. The plot is convoluted and the violence is over the top. If you were going to read only one Dashiell Hammett novel please make it The Maltese Falcon which I have read over and over.