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Loading... Red Harvest (1929)by Dashiell Hammett
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» 23 more Favourite Books (768) Best Noir Fiction (37) Books Read in 2016 (1,434) Books Read in 2022 (860) Books Read in 2020 (2,531) Books Read in 2021 (3,270) 501 Must-Read Books (325) 20th Century Literature (1,024) 1920s (116) Read (156) Books (71) No current Talk conversations about this book. I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit. I didn't think anything of what he had done to the city's name. Later I heard men who could manage their r's give it the same pronunciation. I still didn't see anything in it but the meaningless sort of humor that used to make richardsnary the thieves' word for dictionary. A few years later I went to Personville and learned better. 3,5 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 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. 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. no reviews | add a review
Is contained inClub del misterio. Volumen I: Prólogo de J. J. BORGES. "El cuento policial, IX" . Dashiell HAMMETT: "Cosecha roja". Arthur CONAN DOYLE: "Las aventuras de Shrlock Holmes". Hellery QUEEN: "Cara a cara". Raymond CHANDLER: "El sueño eterno". Patricia IHGSMITH: Erle STANLEY GARDNER: "El cuchillo". "El caso del juguete mortífero". James HADLEY CHASE: "Impulso creador". "El secuestro de Miss Blandish". Nicholas BLAKE: "La bestia debe morir". Volumen 2: Prólogo de R. CHANDLER: " El simpl by AA. VV. (indirect) InspiredAwardsNotable Lists
Detective-story master Dashiell Hammett gives us yet another unforgettable read in Red Harvest: When the last honest citizen of Poisonville was murdered, the Continental Op stayed on to punish the guilty--even if that meant taking on an entire town. Red Harvest is more than a superb crime novel: it is a classic exploration of corruption and violence in the American grain. No library descriptions found. |
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![]() GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.52Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1900-1944LC ClassificationRatingAverage:![]()
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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. (