Red Harvest

Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald -- my three personal gods of hardboiled crime literature. While I've read Chandler over and over, and am still working my way through Macdonald's greater output, I haven't revisited Hammett in a very long time. I'd almost forgotten what a rough elegance he brought to the tough language of hardboiled fiction. RED HARVEST is one of his most cherished novels by crime-story aficionados, though it's not nearly as well known to the general public as his more famous MALTESE FALCON and THIN MAN novels. The story of an anonymous private dick who comes to Montana town known as "Poisonville," gets caught up in a murder, and winds up taking on all comers in a rodeo of wrongdoers is ostensibly the show more source material for several well-known films. (Akira Kurosawa's YOJIMBO is, according to many opinions, an unacknowledged rip-off of RED HARVEST, though I see only the barest of similarity in plot and almost none in tone. But YOJIMBO is definitely the inspiration for A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS and LAST MAN STANDING, and thus RED HARVEST is seen by some as the progenitor of those films, too.)

At any rate, RED HARVEST stands on its own as a superb, dark, bloody, and raw detective story, though mystery and detection are much less prominent parts of the stew than they are in the FALCON and THIN MAN stories. Nobody wrote wordplay like Hammett. Chandler's was more poetic, even in its knuckle-hardness. Chandler may have been the Fitzgerald of hardboiled. If so, Hammett was the Hemingway. show less

I've always been the dissenting opinion on this one. Yeah, it was influential, but since Hammett himself was copying John Carroll Daly's new hardboiled style, maybe we should give him a bit of the credit. Cynical and definitely hardboiled, Hammett’s Red Harvest is missing the one ingredient which might have made it work for me — Raymond Chandler. Compare this to Raymond Chandler’s first novel, The Big Sleep. Both novels have elements cannibalized from their respective pulp stories, both have bodies dropping left and right, and both are terribly convoluted. Yet Red Harvest comes off as simply a dark and unpleasant tale of corruption and violence, while The Big Sleep is wildly entertaining, almost dream-like. There is nowhere to lay show more the blame except at Hammett’s doorstep.

Chandler could turn a simple phrase into visual magic. Hammett often took a circuitous route, as though in love with his own literary voice. In Red Harvest we get all kinds of lengthy descriptive detours which bogs down any narrative pace whatsoever. And by narrative pace, I mean the next body dropping. It almost feels when you go back and read this one after many years, that this might have been a better tale had Hammett not chosen to insert his Continental Op from the pulps, even though it's a string of Op stories strung together. Instead, Hammett could have turned this into a noir melodrama, an unsuspecting stranger encountering the town and getting twisted up in its corruption. Hardboiled doesn't have to be this bloody, and what's worse, we don't really care about the people dropping left and right, can't even keep track of all the players.

Hammett subtly uses Personville/Poisonville as a metaphor for all of America, painting it as corrupt and violent at its core, and crime-laden due to the “evils” of capitalism. There are plenty of rather quiet and vague marxist underpinnings to the serpentine goings on in the corrupt town, which Hammett based on his own experiences in Montana during a miner’s strike. This would be neither here nor there, if this were a good story, like The Glass Key, or delightful fun like his The Thin Man, but it’s just an unpleasant mess.

Perhaps because Hammett himself hadn’t yet distanced himself from the pulps, this comes off as an ambiguous hodgepodge of some wonderfully written moments, and some that go on much too long. Even the metaphor angle is ambivalent, as Hammett doesn’t proffer any alternatives. If the left-leaning Hammett had an argument to make, he chose not to make it, leaving us with only the violence and ugliness, and a tepid underpinning.

Red Harvest is certainly bloody enough for a hardboiled detective novel — the Op takes a body count while talking with Dinah Brand before an ice pick finds her, and it’s staggering — and there are flashes of good writing — really good writing — but the convoluted plot isn’t offset by an entertaining enough narrative to rank this one as high as Hammett’s better stuff.

I truly believe if this had been handed in outline form to Raymond Chandler, after a few stiff drinks, he’d have made this so readable and entertaining we wouldn’t care about its underpinnings or its flaws. In Hammett’s hands, at least at this point in his career, this is a herky-jerky ride. There is some good stuff here, even great stuff, but it isn’t put together well enough to make it a great read for this reader, or in my opinion, the average reader unfamiliar with the genre. For me, Red Harvest is a reminder why I’ve always preferred Chandler to Hammett. show less

Dashiell Hammett is considered to be the inventor of the ‘hard-boiled’ crime story and Red Harvest is certainly a fine example of this type of fiction. This is the first in his Continental Op series about a private detective who works for the Continental Detective Agency, a PI for hire who knows how to get the job done.

In this outing, the nameless Continental Op is in a city called Personville, nicknamed Poisonville, to consult with newspaper publisher, Donald Willsson about the possibility of cleaning this crime controlled city up but before he can meet with Willsson, the publisher is shot to death. After almost getting killed himself, he gains a new client, the publisher’s father who founded the city and has played close to the show more edge himself but now wants the gangs gone. The Continental Op sets to work in earnest by sowing dissension between the rival mobs and the corrupt police force and we learn that the name Red Harvest is apt as the book is riddled with gun play, murders and violence.

A little over the top and slightly dated, Red Harvest is still a fun read filled with thugs, molls and a tough-as-nails hero. Written in abrupt, spare prose, with plenty of violence to spice up the simple story, Red Harvest is a classic of it genre and is known to have influenced many writers such as Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy. show less

I actually read this in an omnibus edition, but what the hell.

The most amazing thing about this book upon reading it for the first time is the way it echoes down through some of my favourite films. Hammett was well served with adaptations, with The Thin Man and The Maltese Falcon being amongst the best of their era, Falcon in particular being one of the definitive private eye films. Red Harvest, less well known, inspired Kurosawa's brilliant samurai film Yojimbo, Sergio Leone's For A Fistful of Dollars and, er, Walter Hill's Last Man Standing, which i have a soft spot for. None of them directly adapted the book, but the influence is clear, and even more marked in the Coen brother's Miller's Crossing, which captured the language, the show more personality, the down-at-heels stylishness, the alcoholic haze and brought it to glorious life. Read this book with Gabriel Byrne's voice in your head. It's lovely.

So the nameless, overweight and frequently drunk Continental Op turns up in Personville, colloquially known as Poisonville, at the behest of the local newspaper editor. The newspaper editor turns up dead and it turns out Personville is choking on corruption and gangsterism and bootlegging and everything bad under the sun. Included in the line up of scoundrels is his client's father. Having solved the murder by page 50, the Op has also bullied the father into paying him to essentially clean up Personville, which he then proceeds to do.

There follows a scheming, twisting, tale of many, many murders as the Op pits faction against faction, finding any available spanners and tossing them into the works until the whole damn town explodes around, nearly taking him with it. the Op is the original hard-boiled, smart-talking, fast-punching quick-shooting gumshoe who's so good at outsmarting everyone around him, he even manages to outsmart himself. This is a fantastic novel, told with spare, witty language. It's a touchstone in popular culture, a classic of its kind and an all-round awesome read. show less

I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Dewey Hickey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit.

How’s that for an opening? No way you stop reading until the end. (Check out the laudanum dreams in chapter 21. Hammett would have made a great surrealist.)

Red Harvest (1929!) is the proto-hardboiled gumshoe mystery/crime novel. An out-of-towner mucks up the local criminal combine and all hell breaks loose. Hammett was good at conjuring characters with a few short lines about disarranged facial features and narrating action scenes punctuated by sharpcrack dialogue.

I put the muzzle of my gun in his left eye and said: “You’re making a fine pair of clowns of us. Be still while I get up or show more I’ll make an opening in your head for brains to leak in.”

It may not be high literary art, but it's enough to know that Hammett practically invented the pulp-gritty depiction of corruption and violence as bedrock Americana. show less

Dashiell Hammett's first novel Red Harvest is far from his best, but it sings with the same voice as his later works. No one writing today could get the sentence "She looked as if she were telling the truth, though with women, especially blue-eyed women, that doesn't always mean anything." published. No character in a modern novel describes drinking as such a detached act void of significance: "I went into the kitchen, found a bottle of gin, tilted it to my mouth, and kept it there until I had to breathe." And you don't have to listen long or carefully to Mr. Charles Proctor Dawn speak in pretentious riddles before you hear Sydney Greenstreet's personification of Kasper Gutman.

Whereas his later novels limit themselves to serial show more individual murders, Red Harvest, true to its name, produces a cornucopia of dead bodies killed in myriad brutal ways - stabbed with knives and ice picks, machine-gunned, dynamited. These grisly scenes play out over the course of several weeks yet fail to attract the faintest attention outside the city in which they occur until near the novel's end, when a few out-of-town reporters make inconsequential, almost rumored, appearances.

Hammett's unnamed detective is as intuitively wise as Sam Spade (switching hotels and registering under assumed names often), as caustically observant as Nick Charles: "His clothes were dark and unclean looking without actually being dirty." He doesn't solve mysteries so much as relate events, and is the maestro orchestrating confrontations between rival factions. In a town where even the police and government are corrupt, he manages to stay alive and out of jail despite his primacy in the mayhem. His biggest worry seems to be getting in trouble with his employer, the San Francisco branch of the Continental Detective Agency.

Red Harvest is an easy, enjoyable read if you lower your expectations and accept that this is Hammett's first foray into a new type of fiction, one he gets significantly better at through repeated practice. show less

I enjoyed the guns, cigars, and the rivers of gin flowing on every page. I like Hammett’s wordplay a lot. He turns phrases with an awkward fun-ness. One of the key characteristics of The Continental Op is his nonchalant manner. In the middle of gunfights his character is written as if everything is no big deal and he takes nothing seriously. He comes across as a man who is bored by anyone without a severe economy of words. He even gets bored with himself when he has to explain things and usually just truncates his own speech. He is all of our definitions of hardboiled.