Red Harvest

“Poisonville was beginning to boil out under the lid, and I felt so much like a native that even the memory of my very un-nice part in the boiling didn’t keep me from getting twelve solid end-to-end hours of sleep.”

Welcome to Personville. If you are a local or just visiting, you can call it Poisonville. Steeped in corruption, this is a place that needs some cleansing. And the Continental Op is the man called to do just that. You can be sure that wherever the Op goes, there is a hail of bullets not too far behind.

Hammet’s Red Harvest laid the groundwork and set the bar for many pulpish, hard-boiled crime novels. It also inspired many filmmakers to complete variations of its story, and many filmmakers have taken the blueprint for this story as a basis for their crime films.

While I can see Red Harvest’s relevance and importance, and how its title comes to symbolize the amount of bloodshed and corruption within this fictional place, I thought it was somewhat a disappointing read in comparison to others in this genre. The pace is there, but you have to strain some credulity when trying to figure out this convoluted plot. Also, because of the novel’s fast-paced action, the characters are rather underdeveloped and serve just as a means to getting to the next part of the action.

As far as the characters, there were way too many, with so many just being there to be soon bumped off a few pages later. Many of the thugs and unclean types from both sides were fairly interchangeable. By the end of the novel, it was difficult to figure out who killed who or why they did it. I did think that Dinah was an apt femme fatale, as she seems to know the ins and outs of Poisonville, maybe a little too well. Even the Op barely rises above the vermin he’s trying to take down.

While Red Harvest effective in action and pacing, it is less so in mystery or build up. I know the Op is there to basically rid the corruption that exists in Personville and cleanse the town without becoming “blood simple”, but the action and violence sort of plays out a little too over-the-top and becomes repetitive.

In total, Hammett’s Red Harvest is dripping in booze, deception, double crosses, sucker punches and many, many bullets. To me, it was sort of like that action flick that is fun escapism, but never goes much beyond that.

Red Harvest

Donald Willsson hired a private detective from San Francisco. When the Continental Operative (CO) went to Willsson's house his young blond wife answered the door. Donald won't be home. Then he went to City Hall to visit the Police Department. Donald, the publisher of the newspaper, had been rubbed out. The CO meets Bill Quint, the head of the local IWW. He learns about the local economy. Hired thugs broke the strike then took over the town (Chapter 1). Donald started a reform campaign to clean up the town. The dirt was stronger. The next day the CO meets Donald's father Elihu Willsson the czar of Personville. He tells what he saw. Was Donald's wife involved? Elihu disapproved of Donald's policy. The CO investigates the newspaper (Chapter 2). Donald wrote a large check to Dinah Brand (Chapter 3). The CO talks to Chief of Police Noonan; they share facts. Widow Willsson explains.

The CO visits Dinah Brand (Chapter 4). Why did she want that check certified? Knowledge of a future strike could allow a profitable investment. Dinah offered information for that money. The CO warns her. Early in the morning the CO gets a telephone call from Elihu; he wants the town cleaned up (Chapter 5). Also, a dead burglar was in his room. The CO visits the Chief, they plan a raid on Whisper's joint. They won't have to prove anything if he is shot resisting arrest. The CO learns a lesson as he enters the place (Chapter 6). The CO figures out who really shot Donald and the motive (Chapter 7). But there' more! There is a flurry of shots thru his hotel window. A warning to get out of town (Chapter 8)? Can a local boxing match be fixed (Chapter 9)? The CO learns about a hidden crime (Chapter 11). He gets a statement from a witness that will take care of Whisper (Chapter 12). A telephone from Dinah brings him there (Chapter 13). There is a surprise and conflicts. The other operatives arrive and will be put to use (Chapter 14). They travel to the `Cedar Hill Inn'.

Dinah collects her fee (Chapter16). Chapter 17 tells about crime and punishment in Personville. As they motor to the "Silver Arrow" they hear gunshots. There is a peace conference at Willsson's house (Chapter 19). Will this end the gun-work? A telephone call tells what happened to Noonan (Chapter 20). The events are summarized. There is another murder under the CO's nose (Chapter 21). There are new members to the police force (Chapter 22). He learns about another murder. A lawyer calls the CO with an offer to defend him. The next morning the CO finds another body (Chapter 23). A notebook has a clue, so too four letters. The newspapers reported the news (Chapter 24). How accurate was it? Reno and his boys go for a ride (Chapter 25). There is success, then complications. The CO visits Elihu Willsson and tells him to call the governor and ask for the national guard. Then he goes to look for a deserted warehouse (Chapter 27). Does it have bootleg whiskey? The next warehouse has bodies and a solution to one murder. The CO takes a vacation, and learns how the town was cleaned up under martial law. [Will the same conditions lead to the same problems?]

The name "Personville" is a generic name for all the towns named after a big land owner. Hired gunmen were brought in for strike-breaking, then took over the city. Machiavelli's Letter warned against a mercenary army: they can takeover the government that hired them. Only a citizen army is proper to a republic. Creating a militia of armed citizens could have put an end to these gangs, but they would gain political control. The 1877 strike in Pittsburgh's coal and iron industry led to the abolishment of the traditional local militia and its replacement by a state-controlled militia. Newly powerful corporations controlled state governments, the new "National Guard" developed into a strike-breaking force with the power of law.

Red Harvest

Donald Willsson hired a private detective from San Francisco. When the Continental Operative (CO) went to Willsson's house his young blond wife answered the door. Donald won't be home. Then he went to City Hall to visit the Police Department. Donald, the publisher of the newspaper, had been rubbed out. The CO meets Bill Quint, the head of the local IWW. He learns about the local economy. Hired thugs broke the strike then took over the town (Chapter 1). Donald started a reform campaign to clean up the town. The dirt was stronger. The next day the CO meets Donald's father Elihu Willsson the czar of Personville. He tells what he saw. Was Donald's wife involved? Elihu disapproved of Donald's policy. The CO investigates the newspaper (Chapter 2). Donald wrote a large check to Dinah Brand (Chapter 3). The CO talks to Chief of Police Noonan; they share facts. Widow Willsson explains.

The CO visits Dinah Brand (Chapter 4). Why did she want that check certified? Knowledge of a future strike could allow a profitable investment. Dinah offered information for that money. The CO warns her. Early in the morning the CO gets a telephone call from Elihu; he wants the town cleaned up (Chapter 5). Also, a dead burglar was in his room. The CO visits the Chief, they plan a raid on Whisper's joint. They won't have to prove anything if he is shot resisting arrest. The CO learns a lesson as he enters the place (Chapter 6). The CO figures out who really shot Donald and the motive (Chapter 7). But there' more! There is a flurry of shots thru his hotel window. A warning to get out of town (Chapter 8)? Can a local boxing match be fixed (Chapter 9)? The CO learns about a hidden crime (Chapter 11). He gets a statement from a witness that will take care of Whisper (Chapter 12). A telephone from Dinah brings him there (Chapter 13). There is a surprise and conflicts. The other operatives arrive and will be put to use (Chapter 14). They travel to the `Cedar Hill Inn'.

Dinah collects her fee (Chapter16). Chapter 17 tells about crime and punishment in Personville. As they motor to the "Silver Arrow" they hear gunshots. There is a peace conference at Willsson's house (Chapter 19). Will this end the gun-work? A telephone call tells what happened to Noonan (Chapter 20). The events are summarized. There is another murder under the CO's nose (Chapter 21). There are new members to the police force (Chapter 22). He learns about another murder. A lawyer calls the CO with an offer to defend him. The next morning the CO finds another body (Chapter 23). A notebook has a clue, so too four letters. The newspapers reported the news (Chapter 24). How accurate was it? Reno and his boys go for a ride (Chapter 25). There is success, then complications. The CO visits Elihu Willsson and tells him to call the governor and ask for the national guard. Then he goes to look for a deserted warehouse (Chapter 27). Does it have bootleg whiskey? The next warehouse has bodies and a solution to one murder. The CO takes a vacation, and learns how the town was cleaned up under martial law. [Will the same conditions lead to the same problems?]

The name "Personville" is a generic name for all the towns named after a big land owner. Hired gunmen were brought in for strike-breaking, then took over the city. Machiavelli's Letter warned against a mercenary army: they can takeover the government that hired them. Only a citizen army is proper to a republic. Creating a militia of armed citizens could have put an end to these gangs, but they would gain political control. The 1877 strike in Pittsburgh's coal and iron industry led to the abolishment of the traditional local militia and its replacement by a state-controlled militia. Newly powerful corporations controlled state governments, the new "National Guard" developed into a strike-breaking force with the power of law.

This is the novel that started the anti hero "stranger" phase in film and fiction. From Yojimbo's nameless Ronin to Fistful of Dollar's Man With No Name, and countless other films this novel inspired an archetype for both an action hero and invented one in the world of noir detectives. This may be the original Man with No Name, but it is also the original Private Eye first person narration.
Hammet's Red Harvest is a brilliant story of a town owned by rival gangs. It is corrupt on every level. When the last honest citizen (a reformer) is murdered, the Continental Detective Agency sends in the "Op" to stir things up. The detective or operative (simply known as "the Op" ) is solving the case when he is asked to look into some corruption. At this point the Op plays both sides against each other in order to clean up the town in a "red harvest."
The storyline is tight. The characters are interesting, but what caught me was the wonderful descriptions. Hammett used to be a Pinkerton detective and had to describe a person for the teletype services in a limited amount of characters but with precise detail. This makes for a wonderful style of prose. This novel is one of the earlier examples of pulp noir. It has detectives, femme fatales, gunmen, corrupt police, all the tropes of the traditional pulp. If you enjoy this I would recommend The Maltese Falcon, The Dain Curse, and The Glass Key (all by Dashiell Hammett). I would also recommend any of the Philip Marlowe series by Raymond Chandler starting with The Big Sleep.

This novel does not stack up well compared to Hammett’s classics like The Thin Man or The Dain Curse. It has a couple of moments where the hero, The Continental Op, surprises us by pinning one of the many murders on someone I at least never suspected. But mostly this is the tale of a terribly corrupt town and the hero’s efforts to clean it up. I was about two-thirds of the way through the book before I decided for certain that I didn’t really like it so it probably is owed another half star.

Published in 1929, `Red Harvest' is the first of five classic novels written by Dashiell Hammett, inventor of the `hard-boiled' school of fiction. Since there are dozens of reviews already posted here, I will take a different slant, citing how quotes from the 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche apply to the novel's unnamed main character/narrator, a man simply known as `Continental Op' and the city where the novel is located, Personville aka Poisonville, a dingy mining city of 40,000 squeezed between two Northern California mountains.

"Without music, life would be a mistake."
There isn't one reference to music in the entire novel. Not surprising, since, from the perspective of music and the arts, this grimy berg run by gangsters, bootleggers, crooked cops and gritty thugs could be considered one colossal mistake. Of course, I'm not entirely serious, but imagining a Personville String Quartet playing an evening of Mozart at the town's public building would be belly-laughable. Not laughable, that is, for the townspeople, who would probably protest such music by riddling the musicians with bullets after playing the first few bars of their Mozart.

"He who has a why to live can bear almost any how."
The Continental Op is a private detective for a national agency; he's insulted, double-crossed, and has to listen to the lies and cons from the city's sleazy power-boys as well as dodge unending gunfire. All in a day's work as he goes about seeking revenge for being set up to be bumped off by Noonan, the fat chief-of-police. Such a `why `and `how' is the stuff of Hammett's riveting story.

"The best enemy against an enemy is another enemy."
This Nietzsche quote could have been used by Hammett as the novel's epigraph. The Continental Op sets gangsters, bootleggers, professional thieves, police and politicians all against one another. The result? Too many dead bodies to count. With dozens and dozens of murders, Red Harvest qualifies as a 200 page blood bath. But, please don't be put off by all the blood; fortunately, for lovers of great literature, this is great literature. Always good to keep in mind many works of great literature, for example The Iliad and Richard III are chock full of blood.

"Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent."
Meet Poinsonville's femme fatale: Dinah Brand. If you are a man and would like to pick lead out of your belly, hang around Dinah. Here is the Continental Op's reflections on meeting Ms. Brand for the first time, "She was an inch or two taller than I, which made her about five feet eight. She had a broad-shouldered, full-breasted, round-hipped body and big muscular legs. The hand she gave me was soft, warm, strong. Her face was the face of a girl of twenty-five already showing signs of wear. Little lines crossed the corners of her big ripe mouth. Fainter lines were beginning to make nets around her thick-lashed eyes. They were large eyes, blue and a bit blood-shot. Her coarse hair--brown--needed trimming and was parted crookedly. One side of her upper lip had been rouged higher than the other. Her dress was of a particularly unbecoming wine color, and it gaped here and there down one side, where she had neglected to snap the fasteners or they had popped open. There was a run down the front of her left stocking."

Those who fights with monsters must take care lest he thereby become a monster."
Here is a quote from the Continental Op after taking the necessary steps in starting to clean up the city for his double-crossing client, old Elihu Willsson. "Look. I sat at Willsson's table tonight and played them like you'd play trout, and got just as much fun out of it. I looked at Noonan and knew he hadn't a chance in a thousand of living another day because of what I had done to him, and I laughed, and felt warm and happy inside. That's not me. I've got hard skin all over what's left of my soul, and after twenty years of messing around with crime I can look at any sort of a murder without seeing anything in it but my bread and butter, the day's work. But this getting a rear out of planning deaths is not natural to me. It's what this place has done to me." The Continental Op knows the truth of Nietzsche's words here from his own first-hand experience.

"Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood."
Dashiell Hammett spent some years with the Pinkerton agency as a detective. He had a first-hand Poisonville-like experience in Butte, Montana where he probably had occasion to see his own blood in the line of service. So, if there ever was a book that could have been written with the author's own blood, Red Harvest is that book.

The Continental Op is sent to Personville, Montana better known as "Poisonville." The back story is that the local business tycoon-Elihu Wilson-had hired thugs to break a strike and once everything was settled, they stayed in town and each set up his own racket. Later the son of Wilson takes over the local paper as Editor and begins a campaign to clean up the town. He sends for the Continental Op from San Francisco who arrives in town the same day the son is killed. After a confrontation with Old Man Wilson, the Op solves the son's murder in the 1st 60 pages.

The Op gets Old Man Wilson to hire him to clean up the town. Elihu agrees thinking that the Op is not man enough to do it. The rest of the story is about the shady characters-and woman-who inhabit the underworld of the town of about 40,000

I loved the vernacular of Hammett's descriptive writing and dialogue. Examples: "It's not fun being a sleuth when somebody steals your stuff, does all the questioning" is the Op's response to a witness asking him questions. And "I come all the way down here to rope you and you're smarted up." "He pursed his gray lips, by forcing breath between them made noise like a rag tearing."

There is plenty of gun play, but the Op manages with one exception to stay above it. But it happens all around him. The Op is outnumbered but outwits to the denouement. Time Magazine included Red Harvest as one of the 100 best English Language Novels.

If you find yourself wanting to read noir crime fiction, read the best--and this is the best (although Raymond Chandler fans might disagree). Hammett invented the "hard-boiled" detective, writing with a gritty style, witty and fast-paced dialogue, and picture-perfect character descriptions. His hero has a strong sense of right and wrong, but does not back away from letting the ends justify the means in cleaning things up.

In this novel, the Continental Detective Agency operative (never named) is brought into town by the newspaper's publisher, who turns out to be dead by the time the operative arrives. Soon finding out that the town is "owned" by the dead man's father, the operative finagles a contract from the father to clean up the town, which has been taken over by four gang factions (and a crooked police force), who had originally been brought to town by the same father to break a labor strike. The plot from here on is very complicated, with the operative cleverly pitting gang against gang, leading them to all-out warfare. In the process, the body count mounts, but the operative escapes harm, through cunning and just blind luck.

All this "red harvest" is almost too much for even the jaded operative, who says he is finding joy in the killing and is going "blood-simple."

The dialogue here is smart and stylish, the hero is appropriately jaded, and the plot is clever. Most of all, this dark world seems absolutely authentic and perhaps still exists, though in a more sophisticated and clandestine form; I would be willing to bet that criminals today are just as sordid and amoral as they were in 1929. And the people who oppose them still run the risk of going "blood-simple."

One of the first novels of the "hard-boiled" genre, in which an investigator, usually a private eye, a loner, hardened by experience, acts straddling the margin of the law to solve a case. Of course, when a reader of our time first approaches a book like this, one thinks it's full of cliches and commonplace, until one realizes that it's here where they were created, to be further copied to satiety and taken to film down to self-parody.

A detective with the Continental Agency, known only as the "Continental Op", has been summoned to the small mining city of Personville (otherwise known as "Poisonville") by one Dan Willsson. But before he has the chance to meet the guy, Willsson is murdered. Without even knowing what the mission would have been, if eventually he had landed a contract, the Op focuses on solving the murder, which he quickly does. But so it happens that Willsson was the son of Elihu, the decrepit owner of the town. This Elihu seems to have lost control over his gangsters, who are now fighting each other for power. Taking advantage of the old man's confusion, the Op coaxes him into a contract with the objective of getting rid of the gang, during which the Op causes a bloody war. At the center of the intrigue is the seductive (but alcoholic, careless and greedy) femme fatale Dinah Brand. Her most recent conquest is a gangster with a speech disability which only allows him to speak in whispers, who is waging a particular war with the Chief of Police. The internecine fight soon escalates to a chaotic level, and amid the blood-spilling the Op must now, first and foremost, try to get out alive while figuring out if he himself has committed murder.

Yes, a twisted and manic plot, told with short, dry sentences full of witty bravado, in a town where cynicism, corruption, and avarice are kings. The novel has the virtue of being believable and coherent throughout the mess, including the necessary turns of the screw which keep readers at the edge of the seat (but whiskey-in-hand). Genre and style are a perfect match, and every cliche is enjoyable in its full originality.

Originally published in 1929, Red Harvest is a classic crime novel that helped established the hard-boiled genre. This is most definitely not a polite, parlor mystery where most of the blood is spilled off of the page. As the title suggests, this book is filled with mayhem and the bodies are falling left and right.

The main protagonist is the Continental Op, who doesn't remotely resemble the genteel Hercule Poirot or any of the other fictional detectives who were so popular in the 1920s. The Op is certainly smart and skilled, but he's a squat, overweight man who's more than willing to cut whatever corners are necessary in order to achieve what he believes to be the greater good.

The Op, who is employed by the Continental Detective Agency in San Francisco, is detailed to the Personville, a mining town known to most as Poisonville. The town was, for a long time, under the thumb of Elihu Willsson who owned the Personville Mining Corporation, the local newspapers, and a number of other businesses as well. He also controlled all of the politicians of any consequence, up to and including the state governor.

During the First World War, Willsson had made whatever deals were necessary with the miners' unions to ensure that the company's operations were unimpeded. But once the war ended, he determined to break the unions and in doing so, invited in a number of thugs and crooks to assist him. The unions were effectively cowed, but the thugs and crooks stayed in town and carved out interests for themselves, effectively reducing Willsson's authority.

As the book opens, Elihu's son, Donald, has asked the Continental Detective Agency for assistance. Elihu has now turned the town's newspapers over to his son and the son is something of a reformer. But before the Op can even meet with Donald, Donald is murdered. The Op believes that it is his obligation to identify the killer. As he attempts to do so, old Elihu Willsson offers the Op $10,000.00 to clean up Personville. In reality, he wants to get rid of the gangs that are competing for control of the town so that he can dominate it unchallenged once again.

The Op is repulsed by the level of corruption in the town and by Elihu himself. But he decides to take the job so that he can indulge his own desire to clean up the town and cleverly drafts his agreement with Willsson to effectively give himself carte blanche, even if Willsson should ultimately change his mind about turning the Op loose on the problem.

The plot that unfolds is dense and convoluted, but the strength of the book lies in Hammett's prose style, in the characters he develops, and in picture he paints of Personville. As a practical matter, there is not a single moral, selfless person in the entire town, the Continental Op included. He quickly proves that he's ready to get down in the muck with the croooks, grafters and corrupt city officials and do whatever is necessary to complete the quest he's assigned himself.

As a young man, Hammett had worked as a detective for the Pinkerton agency in San Francisco and had spent some time during the war in the mining town of Butte, Montana as a strikebreaker. People have long speculated that "Poisonville" was modeled on Butte, a company town controlled by the Anaconda Mining Company. People have also speculated about Hammett's motives for writing the book, suggesting that he might have been seeking some redemption for the actions he had taken in Butte. Whatever the case, the result is a seminal work that stands as one of the great classics of American crime fiction and that has influenced scores of writers who have attempted to follow in Hammett's footsteps.

"Red Harvest” was originally published in serial form in 1927 and 1928 and published as a novel in 1929. It is Hammett’s first novel involving the Continental Op and it is dark, gloomy, and as hardboiled as it gets. There are other hardboiled novels that feature a detective or other person coming into a corrupt town and trying to solve a murder when no one wants to help him and every hand is turned against him, but many such novels by Spillane, MacDonald, and Latimer came a decade or two after Red Harvest. What’s remarkable about this novel is how tough, how unyielding, and how hardnosed it was. It all takes place in “Personville” which the narrator describes as “Poisonville,” the ugliest town ever imagined both physically and metaphorically and even the dames in it are as hardboiled as they come, particularly Dinah, the toughest talking femme fatale ever imagined. This was one of the novels that ushered in the hardboiled era of detective writing.

The story starts easily enough. The Continental Op is called to a small town on business unspecified, but with a retainer that holds his interest. Before he gets to Personville, though, his employer is brutally murdered. It doesn't take long for him to look just a bit under the covers. Personville - Poisonville - has become a battleground where competing gangs, the so-called police included, vie for control. After an attempt or two on his life, he takes it personally. With another fat retainer in hand and a contract to clean out the corruption, he goes about it his own way: turning the rats on each other.

One might argue about whether Hammett invented hard-boiled noir - but there's no arguing that he took it to new levels. Unlike modern gore-fests, this one has real personalities driving the action and driven against each other. Layers of bloody schemes unfold until, in the end, only the Op remains. Not as well known as Hammett's others, this one has all their classic character, and maybe a bit more.

-- wiredweird

In prohibition-era Personville, Continental Op (what a great name for a character!) has been hired to learn who murdered the son of the czar of the town. Nicknamed "Poisonville," its a city riddled with corruption and graft. Continental Op speedily resolves the case, but is subsequently hired to "clean up the town." In doing so, a veritable blood-bath ensues, hence the title. (I had originally assumed the title was a reference to the IWW and labor disputes - it turned out it was a red herring if you will pardon the pun.)

The plot is fast-paced and typical Hammet as Continental Op pits one crook agains another in a widening circle of violence - ultimately over 20 characters are murdered. What really makes the book, though, isn't the resolution of the conflict, but (as with all of Hammet's stories), his dialouge. And while its a bit dated, it is classic noir: (what follows, in spite of appearances, is not a spoiler)
"... Dinah told me you were a pretty good guy, except kind of Schotch with the roll."
"I had a nice visit. Will you tell me what you know about Donald Willsshon's killing?"
"His wife plugged him."
"You saw her?"
"I saw her the next second - with the gat in her hand."

Hammet's description of action is also priceless: "Pat twisted us around a frightened woman's coupe, put us through a slot between street cara nd laundry wagon - a narrow slot that we coudln't have slipped through if our car hadn't been so smoothly enameled and said, 'All right, but the brakes aren't so good.'"

This was my first Continental Op story. It won't be my last. While he's not as well developed a character as Sam Spade, I much prefer Continental to his Nick and Nora - maybe its a west coast thing, but Hammet's San Francisco characters are much more interesting to me than those set in New York. In broad terms, you can't go wrong with anything by Dashiell Hammet, and _Red Harvest_ has all the elements one expects and loves about his writing. Recommended.

I have always enjoyed mystery and crime novels, but I can't say I'm an avid fan of either genre. I've read a fair amount of Sherlock Holmes, Edgar Allan Poe as well as some Victorian Gothic fiction. I've read some Agatha Christie and other early/mid-20th century mystery/crime novels. I'd paid attention in history class and had a basic idea of life in and around the Prohibition era in America and the world of gangsters and bootleggers. And despite all of that, I wasn't entirely prepared for what to expect from Red Harvest.

The general style of the novel was intriguing from the onset. We're dropped into a gritty first person narration from an unnamed character as he wanders the streets of `Poisonville' to meet some unknown client and then, later, to solve the murder of that client.

I really enjoyed the way the details of the story were presented. The writing was very detailed and the narrator conveyed his thoughts and perceptions very well. With the tight first person narration, the mystery for the characters was just as much a mystery to us. Even simple details such as names and places seemed to come on a "need to know basis." Thus, there existed the mystery of the crime to be solved, as well as the mystery of what details were being withheld from the reader and why.

As the story progressed, I grew attached to the protagonist as a cynical hard-nosed detective of the sort who "always gets his man." When he solved the murder, I was impressed by the logic involved and by his way of seeing through the prejudices and smokescreens around the case.

The way the case was solved was quite unlike a Holmesian solution in that there weren't any telltale clues at the crime scene or analysis of fingerprints or paper fibers. Instead, the Continental Op made a logical supposition and then through manipulative and threatening speech worked enough of a confession out of the killer to close the case. It reminded me of the intimidation tactics seen in so many of the crime movies and TV shows today.

I expected the confession to be incorrect since so much of the novel was left unread. Instead of letting the murder unravel, the plot took a different turn that I rather enjoyed. The corrupt "head" of Poisonville asks the Op to clean up the town and gives him carte blanche to do so.

The resulting manipulative method of setting crook against crook was a lot of fun. What was interesting to me, as the city grew more and more corrupt, was that our protagonist had become an antihero. Instead of the altruistic detectives of other early crime novels, the Continental Op was secretive, manipulative, vengeful and dishonest. He had an end goal in mind and he planned to achieve it at any cost. While he wasn't actually running a bootlegging or gambling operation himself, he largely became as corrupt as those he hunted. He compromised those around him who may be innocent or, at least, less corruptible.

Finally, he fell beyond the point of no return and concluded his downward spiral. At that point, I had no idea whether or not the story would allow the Op to be redeemed or if he would simply succeed in cleaning up Poisonville and then leave it a tainted and broken operative, ready to take his cynicism to the next case. While the Op did end the novel a bit more hardened and broken than when he started, the resolution did lighten some of his burden and return his respectability.

I definitely enjoyed my experience with this book. Looking to the few books I've read from the Victorian era, I can see numerous stark differences. The dialog was much harsher than that of a Sherlock Holmes story and the violence was more over the top and graphic than the Victorian Gothic novels I've read. The mystery was tight and well organized, but the clues were extracted more through force and intimidation than through insight and deduction.

What is even more striking to me is the pacing of the novel. While it did have vivid descriptions and various scenes of thoughtful internal monologue, the pacing was much quicker than the average 19th century mystery or adventure novel. While the story did expose many sides of human nature, the narrative didn't pause for lengthy paragraphs reflecting on the motivations or psyches of the characters or of society as a whole. Any explicit analysis was concise and well integrated into the peppy, fast-paced world in which the action revolved.

The book's first purpose seemed to be one of escapism and it does provide an exciting escape from a mundane life. The heightened action and quickened pace would coincide well with the quickly expanding world of the post-war Americans watching the world zip past them. Added to the speed is the vivid portrayal of the exciting and frightening criminal underworld which puts a human face on the stories people may hear about on the radio or speculate about as they drink their own Prohibition scotch and think about where it came from.

This book opened new storytelling elements and devices that are still being used today. It seems to create a new realistic novel that allowed it to show the darker underbelly of the world without flinching. It also provided a darker antihero who ends the novel only partially redeemed and yet more human and relatable.

Likely somewhat shocking at first, I suspect this sort of adventure was quickly accepted by the younger for its fast pace and "real" portrayal of the tenuous world of the 1920s. The older generation may have found it too shocking and may even have condemned its graphic and violent content. I can see the crime story of the 1920s as being a huge boundary pusher in terms of content and style in the same way that violent radio and then television, movies and eventually video games would continue to do over the next century. The shock value would be titillating to the younger crowd, intriguing to the middle generation, and hateful and offensive to the older generation engrained in the classic values of days gone by.

****
4 stars

"Red Harvest," Dashiell Hammett's first published novel (in 1929), reveals a world of venality, mayhem and revenge that set the tone for detective novels half a century into the future.

A Continental Detective Agency Op is summoned from California to "Poisonville," Mont. by aged newspaper owner and banker Elihu Willsson. Elihu's criminal enterprise of imported thugs threatens to turn on him. The aged banker gives the Op enough of information to let our nameless narrator work his way through a host of evil-doers: Bill Quint, an affable old IWW member; corrupt police chief Noonan; greedy Dinah Brand, who has scandalous information on everyone; jealous bank clerk Robert Albury; hoodlum Max "Whisper" Thaler; and other evil-doers who run the town and its rackets. The first question is "Who killed Elihu's son?"

The Op sets about pitting the factions against each other, saying, "Plans are all right sometimes. And sometimes just stirring things up is all right." This "stir-it-up novel" is filled with offhanded shootings, explosions, and murder by icepick. The carnage is colorfully expressed in passages where the Op says, "We bumped over dead Hank O'Meara's legs and headed for home" and "Be still while I get up or I'll make an opening in your head for brains to leak in."

Don't expect plausibility, but do look for the snappy dialogue, strong characters (especially in the Op), and writing style that moves fast. Time magazine included "Red Harvest" in its list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1922 to 2005. Literary critic Andre Gide also called the novel "the last word in atrocity, cynicism and horror."

Hammett's "Red Harvest" has given us a sub-genre of the crime/adventure/detective novel that might be termed "the man with no name." "Red Harvest" can lay claim to being the successor to the classic Western -- not the Sherlock Holmes "whodunit." The novel's amazing power and plotting led movie director Akira Kurosawa to create "Yojimbo," focusing on a freelance samurai who confronts town's warring factions. Look for thematic vestiges of Hammett's novel also in Sergio Leone's "spaghetti Westerns" with Clint Eastwood and in John Sturges's "The Magnificent Seven." "Red Harvesst" is the novel that started an epic genre.

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, the store Reviewer

Red Harvest, originally published in 1929, is Hammett's first full-length novel featuring the nameless "Continental Op", a private detective employed by the fictional Continental Detective Agency. This book and Hammett's other Continental Op stories are based on his real life experience working for the Pinkertons. Red Harvest and the Continental Op, along with Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe series are the "fathers" of hard-boiled private-eye fiction.

Attempting to outline, let alone explain the plot of this book, is difficult and describing it as convoluted is an understatement. When our hero arrives in Personville, aka Poisonville, for a case, he finds the mining town a cesspool of corruption, embroiled in a life and death struggle with rival gangs, hoodlums, grifters and crooked cops all vying for the top of this squalid, but lucrative heap and their piece of the financial pie.

Our nameless hero insinuates himself into the middle of this mess playing the warring factions against each other with double crosses, misinformation and manipulation. (This storyline of the lone gunman in a corrupt town the precursor/basis for Kurosawa's Yojimbo, Clint Eastwood's A Fistful of Dollars and Bruce Willis' Last Man Standing.)

Written 80+ years ago this story still has a modern flavor - particularly the violence as well as the smarmy characters and their less than stellar motivations. If you're a fan of the PI genre, pick up Red Harvest to see where and how it all began.

Red Harvest is acclaimed as one of Dashiell Hammett's best even though the work did not, like The Maltese Falcon, also become a movie classic. Brutal and cynical in conception, it pits a San Francisco detective against a corrupt Midwestern town nicknamed poisonville. The hero, after his client dies on the very evening of his arrival, becomes embroiled in a triangular fight between police, gangsters, and their common, industrialist paymaster. Shifting allegiances, gunfights, and repeated murders pepper the breathtaking contest that ensues. And the plot would not be complete without the involvement of the femme fatale Dinah Brand, the protagonist's beguiling but faithless information supplier.

Red Harvest is breathlessly-paced and highly readable. Still, I came to Hammett after having exhausted Raymond Chandler, and I did not find one quite on the same level as the other. This is a different kind of noir: rawer, punchier, less polished. The Continental Op, the anonymous hero, does not match the self-deprecating Philip Marlowe in complexity. Sultry L.A. has been lost in favour of a more rough-and-tumble setting. And the style of writing reflects this, stripped of Chandler's quirky yet apposite metaphors, of his ironic asides and wry character sketches. I will no-doubt be trying out more Hammett. As this did not match my extremely high expectations, however, I can only give it four stars.

"Red Harvest" tells the story of one of Dashiell Hammett's greatest creations, the Continental Op detective. The detective goes to a town called Personville to take a case from the newspaper publisher in town, but the publisher winds up dead. The detective decides to dig deep into the politics of the town and unfoil some of the town's corruption. It leads to scene after scene of grittiness and blood. Overall, this was a strong book, but The Maltese Falcon is better.

Some novelists are great in their genre. Some novelists create a genre. In many respects, this book exemplifies the birth of the genre referred to as the American crime novel - one which Raymond Chandler said ". . . took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley. . . ." And, oh how from-the-street this novel is.

This novel started a critically acclaimed writing streak for Hammet - 1929 ("Red Harvest"and "The Dain Curse"), 1930 ("The Maltese Falcon"), and 1931 ("The Glass Key"). Hollywood was right behind the publishers as they produced his books to film almost as soon as the print dried on the second printing: 1930 ("Roadhouse Nights" based on "Red Harvest), 1931 ("Maltese Falcon" ) and 1935 ("Thin Man" and 5 other movies to follow with the Thin Man theme.)

Hammett was hot. Maybe the hottest commodity in print and screen the first five years of the 1930's. Then in 1936 he secretly joins the Communist Party and you can guess the rest.

This book reviews many of his personal experiences. At 31, he became a private detective (Pinkerton Agency) and the major character of this book is a 190-pound 5'6" solidly built unnamed character who works for a similar agency. He is called an Op. And, his "Old Man" sends him to Personville which is affectionately referred to as Poisonvile - dank and mysterious, it lost its innocence when old man Willsson hired Italian goons as union busters to preserve his bottom line for his many capitalistic ventures. After they did their dirty business, they stayed and the old man could not live as he had before - in total control of the city.

When the Op is shot at by goons and cops, he decides that even though his business is over, he will stay and earn $10,000 while making himself a Poisonville regular. Thereafter, 24 bad people are murdered - cleaning the streets of the bad blood - and the worst injury suffered by the Op is a burn. Good conquers all, or mostly all. The Op meant what he said, and said what he meant, he hated the town 100%.

Hammett, probably from having to gumshoe streets following leads for the Pinkerton Agency, understood American vernacular. Implementing the same created his "style" which probably was not consciously done. But, it was artistic. And, this artistry is purely Americana. American vernacular was new in literature - something which was also brought to readers by another hot commodity of the 1930's - Ernest Hemingway.

His curt and precise statements, dialogue, and great descriptions of the physical appearances of characters are Hammett's best weapons. And, this is one of his best books - probably only exceeded by "Maltese Falcon." It seems only a shame that he could not produce more of these novels

I have just finished reviewing in this space all of Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe detective series. It occurred to me that I might as well review the work of that other exemplar of the modern hard-boiled noir detective story, Dashiell Hammett. Most of those familar with his work know it from Nick Charles of the Thin Man or, more likely, Sam Spade of the immortal Maltese Falcon but Hammett, like Chandler, did not blossom forth with these classics without a grinding apprenticeship in pulp detective fiction. Red Harvest represents Hammett's baptism. This story of an unnamed shamus who moreover works for a detective agency runs against the type we have come to expect from Hammett and Chandler-the independent, no-holds barred character. Have no fear our Continental Op has most of those qualities and the single-mindeness to clean up a rotten crime-dominated town no questions asked. While there is not the plot or character development of Hammett's later work here this is still a good read.

****

Dashiell Hammett, along with Raymond Chandler, reinvented the detective genre in the 1930's and 1940's. They moved the genre away from the amateurish and simple parlor detectives that had previously dominated the genre to hard-boiled action characters who knew what was what and didn't mind taking a beating to get the bad guys. And along the way they produced some very memorable literary characters as well. Nick Charles, Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe are well known exemplars of the action detective. However, on the way to creating these literary works of art Hammett did journeyman's work at the detective genre in various pulp detective magazines. Moreover, in the beginning he hid his detectives behind the anonymous, although not faceless or without personality average detectives, of a national detective agency (shades of his own past).

The unnamed universal Continental Operative (Op) who is the central character of here is the is the prototype for Hammett's later named detectives. He has all the characteristics that mark a noir detective-tough, resourceful, undaunted, and incorruptible with a sense of honor to friend and foe alike that sets him apart from earlier detectives. The plot line here requires all the resourcefulness of the Op as he tries to cleanup a new Western boom town tied together by many a criminal enterprise and the greed (and complicity) of the local bourgeois big shot who let things get out of hand. The twist and turns as Op tries to mix and match with the various interests at play drive the drama of the film. Along the way, of course, just like in the Old West, there plenty of shoot- `em-up action before the town, Personville (aka Poisonville ) is fit for respectable folks to make an honest dollar in. If you want a well-thought out story, although not as memorable as The Maltese Falcon or the The ThinMan, that is also well-written, although without the numerous unforgettable lines of the above-mentioned novels, from a member of the second echelon of the American literary pantheon, this one is for you.

Dashiell Hammett was maybe the earliest hard-core mystery writer, and this novel is tops. An earlier reviewer said "blunt wit"--that's dead right. Hammett can do more with fewer words than any writer I know--poetry but you never notice it. Humor follows horror follows betrayal.

His detective is unusual in belonging to a Pinkerton-type organization, and in other stories cooperates with the police, but here he systematically isolates himself by breaking all rules, betraying one ally after another, refusing to clear himself of suspicion, and generally inciting mass murder. By the end he's driven away colleagues, his employer, gangster allies, his girlfriend [who he apparently has killed], and any semilegitimate forces such as the police. He's very conscious he's doing this, and explicitly describes the bloodlusting cultural corruption that he is reveling in, feeding, steering, and using to clash and destroy itself. He starts counting up the killings at one point, gets up to eighteen or 20, clearly is leaving some collateral damage out, but on he goes. Initially, Hammett throws in examples of business corruption, police corruption, and gangsterism as everyday asides, but then as his detective undermines the prior balance of power, 'normal corruption' breaks down and the whole town feels the anarchy.

Hammett remarkably demonstrates the power of account-giving skills: his detective tells one story of a murder one time and causes one mob war, then gives a rival account to cause another murder. He doesn't know the truth, but while searching for it he raises doubt that truth may even exist, as one more account emerges to fit every new cumulated and reinterpreted set of facts. Thus, he keeps turning the idea of 'mystery story' back on itself into a whirling cesspool--he ends up sort of uncovering the truth, but has created a lot of doubt along the way.

One wishes his detective came to the 21st Century US and were hired with the billions of dollars necessary to do a similar job on our politics and economy. Yes, the dead would need to number in the thousands [at least!], but the improvement in life would be very evident. One problem is that a major flaw in the US is the current hopeless value-free cynicism [that also infects 'Red Harvest'], and a mass murder of the elite would not solve that--on the contrary.

Aeschylus. The harvest of death is both plentiful and bloody in Dashiell Hammett's marvelous thriller "Red Harvest".

Dashiell Hammett, a former Pinkerton detective, pretty much invented the hard-boiled (U.S.) detective genre. The influence of Hammett's short stories and novels, "Red Harvest", "The Dain Curse", "The Glass Key", "The Thin Man" and "The Maltese Falcon" can be seen in much of the detective fiction writing that followed, including among others Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Jim Thompson, Ross Macdonald, James Ellroy, Robert Parker, James Lee Burke, and Michael Connelly. The plot of "Red Harvest", Hammett's first novel, also found its way into movies such as Akira Kurosawa's "Yojimbo", Sergio Leone's "For a Fistful of Dollars", and the Coen brother's "Miller's Crossing".

"Red Harvest" begins with the arrival of the Continental Op, Hammett's trademark "man with no name" in the town of Personville. The client he has been summoned to see is found murdered before the Op can meet him. In short order the Op finds that Personville's nickname, "Poisonville" is well-earned. It is a town filled with small town greed and big time corruption. The Ops arrival coincides with the onset of a turf war for control of the city between rival gangsters. The Op pays a call on the dead man's father, Elihu Willsson. The Op soon determines that the town's descent into a state approaching a low level of hell began when Willsson imported some mobsters to break up a strike. Their stay turned out to be far from a temporary one.

For reasons of his own, perhaps just to be stubborn or perhaps as a matter of some principle or warrior code, the Op decides to stay and clean up the town. His method is simple, pit each gang and its various factions and sub-factions against each other until the dust settles and it is discovered that they have pretty much killed themselves off. The Op is not afraid to pitch in and help the process along.

As noted above, "Red Harvest" was Hammett's first full length book. Perhaps as a result some of the sentences were longer and more `literary' than his later books, by which time he had perfected a leaner, staccato, machine gun style of dialogue. Nevertheless, "Red Harvest" was and remains an impressive and exciting piece of writing.

"Red Harvest" along with just about everything else Hammett ever wrote is well worth reading.

L. Fleisig

This was the first novel featuring Hammett's short story character, The Continental Op, and it's well worth reading. The Op is sent from his home in San Francisco to Personville, Montana on the request of a client. The fact that Personville is pronounced posionville by its residents will tell you the kind of town he enters. The violence is so bad that the Op never actually sees his client alive, but he sticks around to avenge his death. The deep plot is as convoluted as any detective novel, but the basic plot of a man playing two sides against each other proved to be important in the history of film even more so than literature.
The Op was the original Man With No Name. Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Western borrows both the stranger concept and the plot from Red Harvest. Though the credit is usually given to Akira Kurosawa for his film Yojimbo, both films actually borrow their essence from Hammett.
It's not necessary to have seen either film to enjoy this story. Overshadowed by the classic Maltese Falcon, Red Harvest deserves more ink than it gets. It's here with Hammett that the noir detective novel was born. The romantic notion of a poor detective who would rather live up to his own standards of justice than take a big payoff is a very American outlook. I can only figure that such a character comes from the many assignments that Hammett got working for the Pinkerton detective agency and the many times that Hammett wasn't allowed to do the right thing. Our detective is so virtuous under the standards of his own ethics that you admire him even when he is creating a bloodbath.
The most surprising thing is how well the whole book flows and quickly I read it. Hammett has a great way of leaving each chapter with enough questions that you want to immediately read the next one. He'll leave you with the conclusion of a boxing match and with a fighter that falls over with a knife in his back. How can you go to sleep on a chapter like that?
Any fan of detective novels and film noir should do themselves the justice of reading all the Hammett they can get. Red Harvest is a good start to that goal.

Red Harvest is one of only five full length novels completed by the legendary Dashiell Hammett. The action unfolds in a western mining town nicknamed Poisonville. It's protagonist and first person narrator is the Continental Op, a San Francisco detective whose name the reader never learns. Summoned to Poisonville by local newspaper publisher Donald Willsson, the Continental Op quickly gets a taste of the town's predilection for violence when Willson is murdered before the two men even have a chance to meet.
In the following days, a seemingly never ending series of shootings, stabbings and bombings account for multiple deaths in a nihilistic frenzy of violence fueled by greed, corruption, jealousy and unbridled aggression. A number of the killings are instigated by the Continental Op himself. It is his belief that only through purging the town of its plentiful criminal element will anything resembling normalcy ever have a chance of gaining a foothold.
As always, Hammett's writing is crisp and highly readable. Most of the characters are colorful and quite fascinating to read about. On the negative side, I found the the narrative a bit too convoluted for my taste. Worthwhile reading for Hammett fans but less compelling than either The Maltese Falcon or The Thin Man.

The name "Personville" is a generic name for all the towns named after a company owner. "Red Harvest" is about a town where hired gunmen were brought in for strike-breaking. They then gained control of the town, going from servants to masters; but no one gang gained control. The company owner then used his newspaper to try to advocate a "civic reform" campaign to regain control. His newspaper publisher son hired the Continental Op, but was killed before they meet. (Was this similar to Robert F. Kennedy's prosecution of organized crime?) Machiavelli's Letter to the Prince of Florence (p.9) tells of the problems with a mercenary army: they can takeover the government that hired them. Only a citizen army is proper to a republic. Creating a militia by arming the cirtizens of "Personville" could have put an end to these gangs, but the political control of "Elihu Willsson" would have ended as well. The 1877 strike in Pittsburgh's coal and iron industry led to the abolishment of the traditional local militia and its replacement by a state-controlled militia. Newly powerful corporations now controlled the state government, and the new "National Guard" developed into a strike-breaking force with the power of law. The Continental Op purges "Personville" and leaves, but the book doesn't tell how quickly new gangs re-appear. The corporate control continues, with its need for strike-breaking gunmen; they pop up like teeth in a shark. Corporate control of politicians and government may only be possible with this corruption. The politics of this novel guarantees that it will never be faithfully filmed by Hollywood, unlike some of his other novels. But this made it a best sell in 1929 and afterwards.

The Continental Op, an anonymous agent of the Continental Detective Agency, comes to corrupt Personville (aka Poisonville) and investigates a series of murders. In succession he confronts the murder of the publisher of the local paper, the murder of the police chief's brother, and the murder of a beautiful woman. The publisher's father, convinced that local gangsters are responsible for his son's death, employs the Op to break up the organized crime stranglehold on Personville. The Continental Op determines that he cannot quickly destroy the crimelords by lawful means, so he decides to work outside the law to destroy them. The murder of the police chief's son provides him with a golden opportunity to maneuver the rival gangs into lethal conflict. During these investigations, peripheral characters drop like flies as rival gangs feud over turf. The Continental Op continues his investigations, stirs up strife among the gangs, and tries to elude arrest himself as the dance of death lumbers to its bloody denouement. It is near impossible to keep an accurate bodycount through the course of the novel. Despite the carnage, the detective work is excellent, the intrigue is gripping, and the mysteries are satisfying.
This book inspired three movies: Akira Kurosawa's "Yojimbo," the Clint Eastwood oater "A Fistful of Dollars," and the Bruce Willis prohibition era epic "Last Man Standing." I haven't seen "Yojimbo," but the Eastwood and Willis movies hardly compare to "Red Harvest" for complexity and character development. They accentuate the bloodshed and virtually ignore everything else.

Dashiell Hammett took the mystery story out of the drawing room and put it squarely into the American street with his stories of his nameless Continental Detective Agency Private Eye during the 1920's. Known as "the Continental Op" Hammett's hero, a short middle aged, slightly fattish loner was a break from the past as regards mystery stories. Hammett, along with Carroll John Daly and other BLACK MASK MAGAZINE pulp writers revolutionized the detective story with their gritty realism and adventurous stories of gats, guns, and molls.
RED HARVEST is probably the Continental Op's best know adventure, pitting him against the forces of corruption and crime in a small town named Personville. The Op calls the burg "Poisonville" and the cast of villainous characters that he encounters and goes up against make the nickname quite apt.
If you've seen the movies "A Fistful of Dollars", "Last Man Standing", or "Yojimbo" then you have a general idea of what the tale is about. While none of these follows Hammett's intricate plot, the premise of a lone gunman outsmarting and out dueling the whole town is what the story is about. From the time that the Op breezes into town to talk with his client, whom is murdered before the Op can ever meet with him, till the end of the story, there is lots of violence, murder, double dealing and cynical observations by the narrating detective. While we never learn very much about the Op his driven and unswerving dedication to riding the town of any and all opponents takes on the role of obsession and vigilantism by the end of the novel, so much so that the Op himself even begins to have some doubts. Not enough to stop him from completing the job however.
Hammett's spare lean style of writing isn't for everybody, especially those who want in-depth character studies where the protagonist spends a lot of time mulling over the state of the universe and his own personal angst. However if you want action and good tight writing then he's your man. A justly acclaimed classic ever since it came out, this novel is the one that started the "hard boiled" school of writing ball rolling.

This is not my favorite Dashiell Hammett book, but there is no such thing . . . well, I was going to say that there was no such thing as a bad Dashiell Hammett book, but then I remembered that the last couple of things he wrote, when he was trying to write "literature" instead of extraordinary hardboiled stories. There is, however, no such animal as a bad Continental Op story, and this is one of the Op's adventures. One of the most lamentable situations in contemporary publishing is the rather small number of Op stories in print. It is occasionally possible to turn up one of the old anthology of Op stories that Hammett published in BLACK MASK, but these are getting harder and harder to find (though several of them recently appeared in the new Library of America edition of Hammett's stories). BLACK MASK itself put out in the late forties, I believe, several issues collecting the otherwise uncollected stories. My understanding is that Lillian Hellman, who held the copyright on Hammett's books until her death, would not allow these stories to be reprinted. The copyright must be getting close to expiration, so perhaps all of Hammett's stories will once again be available.
I was fortunate enough to read all the stories that Black Mask collected in their special issues. My access was through the marvelous holdings of the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University. I sat in the reading room where others were undoubtedly reading manuscripts of Boswell or Ezra Pound or Yeats, while I sat engrossed in Continental Op detective yarns. My best guess is that there may have been enough stories to produce one or two more collections to supplement the two collections we already possess, THE CONTINENTAL OP and THE BIG KNOCKOVER. I must admit that the quality of these stories were not overall up to the quality of those in the latter volume, which are in turn not quite up to the quality of the stories in the former volume. That volume is in my humble but most accurate opinion, the finest detective short stories ever written, along with "Red Wind" by Raymond Chandler. I feel that of the two founding fathers of the hardboiled detective genre, Hammett wrote better stories and Chandler wrote better novels.

RED HARVEST is very good Hammett, but is not quite up to the level of his very best work in THE CONTINENTAL OP and THE MALTESE FALCON. The story has been widely imitated in film. Akira Kurosawa borrowed heavily from it in making the movie YOJIMBO, which was in turn used by Sergio Leone in making A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS. More recently the story was mined for the semi-awful Bruce Willis vehicle LAST MAN STANDING--which had tons of wonderful period atmosphere to go along with tons of stupidity, and which provoked for the three thousandth time the perennial question of why bad guys are such dreadful shots while the good guys never miss.
I must further add that the Vintage covers of all the Hammett books are both attractive and wonderfully evocative of the era. I don't know about others, but I always have a more satisfying reading experience if the books look inviting.

Between 1915 and 1922, Dashiell Hammett worked for the Pinkerton Detective Agency, initially from Baltimore's Continental Building office and later in Washington State and California. His experiences for the firm provided the background and the name for the Continental Detective Agency that features in most of his stories and in two of his novels (including "Red Harvest"), and Pinkerton operative James Wright served as the model for the "fat, middle-aged, hard-boiled, pig-headed guy" referred to only as the Continental Op.
In "Red Harvest," the Op is summoned to Personville (known locally as Poisonville), where he is engaged by newspaper publisher Donald Willson, who is murdered before the agent has an opportunity to meet him. At first the novel feels like a traditional murder mystery; in its first half there are two homicides (among more than two dozen gangland-style assassinations) whose clues are scattered for the reader--and the Op--to solve.
Yet the two whodunits are red herrings meant to distract--and entertain--the reader (and crime novel aficionados will figure both of them out within a few paragraphs). Not just a murder mystery, "Red Harvest" pursues broader themes: how corruption and greed poisons the inhabitants of Poisonville, how the Op is able to thwart the ambitions of various criminals by playing their own unprincipled game, and how his own abandonment of professional code nearly destroys the detective himself.
Most of the crooks are stock figures from noir central casting, but the novel's femme fatale, Dinah Brand, is the most memorable. She serves not only as foil to the Op's passionless cynicism but also as a warning to the dangers of the sport: like the Op, she insinuates herself into whichever camp is in control, never dirtying her own hands with the unsavory activities that bring her the money she voraciously accumulates--only to find herself expendable when no faction needs her at all.
During a flirtatious rendezvous with Dinah, the Op slips into a laudanum-induced dream, in which he imagines himself "hunting for a man I hated. I had an open knife in my pocket and meant to kill him." He finds the man and pursues him across a rooftop, where they tussle near the building's edge, only to realize "that I had gone off the edge of the roof with him." When he awakes, The Op--and the reader--discovers just how near the edge of precipice he has crawled, and the remainder of this perceptive book recounts his journey back from the brink.

I do despise the whole concept of books on audio, primarily because the reader almost never matches my concept of a book's narrative voice. (Elliott Gould's comatose renderings of Phillip Marlowe, as an extreme example, make me want to "hurl my lunch over the fence," to borrow a phrase from Raymond Chandler.)
And so I was in no way prepared for William Dufris' reading of Hammett's grossly underrated "Red Harvest"; Dufris caught me completely by surprise with his sure sense of pacing as well as his deftness in shifting from character to character in his voicings without resorting to caricature.
Most importantly, however, there's the sheer insightfulness he brings to his reading: For all the times I've reread this novel, I had never been quite able to figure out the Continental Op's true motivation behind his instigation of what leads to wholesale carnage. Dufris, in his delivery of one key line in the first third of the story, crystallizes the man's motive. (And no, I'm not going to tell you the line; listen to this superb reading for yourself.)
So yes, I hate books on audio . . . but here's one I'll readily listen to time and again. I definitely recommend it, particularly to anyone who has previously read the novel. It's an eye (and ear) opener!

The story is told by an agent from the Continental Detective Agency. He has been called to the town of Personville or, as he explains, is more aptly named, Poisonville. His client is Donald Willsson, but Willsson is shot and killed before the Continental Op can meet him. He decides to visit Willson's father, Elihu, who until recently ran the town. Elihu Willson winds up hiring the Continental Op to clean up the town by getting rid of the town's 3 criminal bosses. In true gangster-style, the names of the criminals are Max "Whisper" Thaler, Lew Yard and Pete the Finn.
The clean up job becomes the main focus of the rest of the book, although along the way, the Continental Op manages to solve the murder of his original client as well as most other minor crimes that spring up around him. The Continental Op is an interesting character, having no qualms about setting others up, knowingly placing them in mortal danger in order to uncover evidence or confirm his suspicions. He will lie, cheat and double-cross just about anyone.
The deaths come thick and fast and are mentioned off-handedly, almost as an afterthought. Red Harvest is fast moving and entertaining and as hardboiled as they come.

"Red Harvest" was author Dashiell Hammett's first novel. The material was not entirely original; it first appeared in serial form in "Black Mask" magazine in 1927-1928 under the title "The Cleansing of Poisonville". Hammett reworked the story into novel form, and "Red Harvest" was published in 1929. This is also the first of Hammett's popular "Continental Op" novels, which feature an unnamed private detective employed by the Continental Detective Agency of San Francisco. "Red Harvest"'s narrator and veteran Continental operative defies any idea of a glamorous or attractive crime fighter. He's short, pot-bellied, alcoholic, and resolutely cynical. He's living in an immoral world, where success comes to those who fight fire with fire. Like all of Hammett's protagonists, he has little use for the law, but lives by a personal code to which he strictly adheres. That doesn't make him especially ethical, only principled. But Hammett's characters, like Hammett himself, are coping in their own way with the widespread corruption that ruled America's cities in the 1920s and 1930s.

"Red Harvest"'s opening paragraph is one of the best hooks I've ever read in a novel. It's fantastic. We are sucked into the mind of our narrator, the unnamed Continental operative, and we want only to read more about this man of such blunt wit. The Continental Op has been called to a town named Personville by the owner of the town's newspaper, Donald Willsson. He doesn't know what the job is, but before he can find out, the client is murdered. So the first order of business is to solve the murder. In doing so, our detective discovers how Personville got its nickname, Poisonville. Everything and everyone in this town is corrupt. Its citizens are ruled by bootleggers and low-lifes who retain their power through indiscriminate violence. Even the town's former boss, Elihu Willsson, a wealthy industrialist who was not above murder in his own day, is now reluctantly under the thumb of the new crop of thugs. Our detective takes offense at Poisonville's powers trying several times to assassinate him in the course of his murder investigation, so he decides to stay and clean up the place. Little did he expect that Poisonville's rampant bloodshed would poison him, as he is seduced by the town's murderous ways.

It's surprising to me that Dashiell Hammett wrote "Red Harvest" years before "The Thin Man". "Red Harvest"'s style seems more developed and its characters better drawn than in the later novel. That's not to say that I don't like "The Thin Man". I actually prefer its more scandalous brand of cynicism. Hammett is always cynical, but sociopathic behavior is to be expected from the characters that inhabit Personville's landscape. They are criminals and police officers (remember, this is the 1920s). The undeniably sociopathic behavior of everyone in "The Thin Man" -from small time con men, to respectable bourgeois, to Park Avenue blue bloods- is like a slap in the face. And so is the book's shameless lack of justice. But perhaps Hammett just chose a different shock tactic in "Red Harvest". The book's greatest cynicism is in the ease with which the Continental Op is seduced into abandoning his own code of conduct when faced with the opportunity to murder without consequences. That's why they call it Poisonville. Fans of noir detective stories wont' want to miss "Red Harvest". There are enough hard-boiled one-liners to inspire glee in those who really enjoy them. Hammett's style is fluid and easy to read. And there is more than one mystery to be solved.

Nowadays, not many people think of reading a pulp detective novel from 1929. Most would expect the plot to be superficial, the characters one-dimensional, and the dialogue filled with obscure eighty year-old words like 'dames', 'dingus', 'gams', and 'gat'.

But 'Red Harvest' is one of the best (are there any bad ones?) novels from Dashiel Hammett, arguably the most artful if not memorable detective story writer of all time.

If you are reading this, then you are already a fan of the genre or you are branching out from your usual 'mystery' choice. You're looking for an entertaining read that won't dumb you down. You're hoping to stumble upon a lesser-known gem from a great mystery writer. Or maybe to find out why they say Hammett was so good. Well, you've found it.

I won't recount the story line--- plenty of other reviewers will do that. But I will tell you why you should buy it and read it.

'Red Harvest' is a fine piece of American literature, one of the most perfect detective novels I've read.

The serpentine plot winds it way between the predictable and unpredictable, telling the story about one man against an entire town. In 2007 this might seem trite and overdone, but it was a fresh idea in 1927.

If violence and gunplay is your thing, you're in luck. Chapter 21's title is 'The Seventeenth Murder'.

The Obscure 1920's Gangster Dialogue Index is set to 'Low'. I don't want Edgar G, Cagney or Bogie to pop into my mind while I'm forming my own mental image of the character.

Dialogue and exposition are extremely well-written. Words tumble naturally from the pages like dice in a crapshoot.

In his exquisite portrait of femme fatale Dinah Brand, Hammett succeeds in the difficult task of capturing for his reader the essence of a physically imperfect woman who has perfected the art of attraction and allure, enchanting any man she wants.

Best of all things about `Red Harvest' is the wily Continental Op himself. He appears a deceptively average guy: anonymous, middle-aged, average height, soft around the middle, receding hairline. But smart and tough as nails, he's not one to cross.

It's hard to overemphasize just how important this book is to modern literature. In one fell swoop, Dashiell Hammett forever upset the world of "nice" genteel adventure and mystery stories, flooding the world in a clipped, tight-lipped, ugly torrent of blood and violence -- and I ain't compaining! Just about all modern novels and films of savagery and violence can be traced back to this crazy-kilter detective story in the sin-burg of Poisonville. I give it four stars instead of the full five only because the narrative, composed of linked but separately published units, doesn't cohere in the same astonishing way that Hammett's follow-ups, "The Maltese Falcon" and "The Glass Key" do. Still a kinetic fix for those interested in the seamier side of classic American literature. Practically adapted lock stock n' barrell by Akira Kurosawa for his Samurai movie "Yojimbo" (which later became "Fistful of Dollars" and "La! st Man Standing" -- the latter coming the closest to Hammett's original setting, making this sequence a huge circle back to the origin of species).

This was my first time reading a hard-boiled detective novel and I loved it. Hammett is an impressive writer with an amazing talent of packing in tons of action into very few words. Example:

"A garbage can helped me over the gate into a brick-paved yard. The side fence of that yard let me into another, and from that I got into another, where a fox terrier raised hell at me.

I kicked the pooch out of the way, made the opposite fence, untangled myself from a clothes line, crossed two more yards, got yelled at from a window, had a bottle thrown at me, and dropped into a cobblestoned back street."

This story is about a nameless private detective who's called upon by an important man in Personville, but the client is murdered before the detective can meet him. He decides to do a little investigation of his own and before you know it the entire town is in chaos with non-stop shoot outs, wholesale murder, crooked cops, a dangerous woman and lots of drinking and trash talking.

Of all the books written by the chronological trio of Hammett, Chandler, and MacDonald, only Red Harvest seems as honest and truthful now as I am sure it did in 1939. Although Hammett lacks Chandler's writing flare and sarcasm, his style makes for fast-paced, edge of the seat reading. As his Continental Op escapes harrowing situation after another, I was left with a disbelief, but this novel is not about whether the Op could ruin an entire town with merely a scratch. It is instead a commentary on society, and on the cutthroat nature still evident in us all. In so many ways, this novel reminds me of Shirley Jackson's haunting story "The Lottery" because the evil in our world is within the system, and in each person. Just as the Op confesses to wanting to join the killing spree, Hammett has made us want to read about more killing. He dupes us into playing the Op's game. This novel is so much deeper than what can be read in the text. In his own way, he tells us to look out for a system corrupted by greed and a quest for power. Much like Chandler, Hammett always has a message. Heed this one readers, but enjoy the enchantment of this amazing novel.

This black pearl of noir unleashed on the reading public in 1929 is a lethal paper cut of a reminder that Greed exists; the antidote for anyone who thinks Life was easier `back in the day.' The Depression was the car wreck around the corner. The Coen Brothers translated this novel to screen in Miller's Crossing, but what gets me about this novel from Dash is how he peered into darkness of the American psyche before the Depression, before Yuppies showed up. Yes, he will be forever known for The Maltese Falcon, but this is a really dark, violent novel.

I had problems with this novel. I couldn't follow all of the complexities of the ultra-complicated, ever-shifting plot of wholesale corruption in a small, industrial Western city (corporate, police, mob, etc.). And it all seemed so familiar, hackneyed. But then I remembered a couple of things: That this was so familiar because hundreds of other authors and thousands of other books have tried with varying degrees of success to mimic and further develop Hammett's "hard-boiled", noirish style in the past 75 or so years. And also, that perhaps it wasn't necessary to follow the incredibly convoluted plot, or even keep full track of who each of the legion of sleazy characters are, in order to best enjoy the book. After I made those decisions, the rest of my reading experience was much more pleasurable and rewarding. In a strange way it reminded me of some the French "nouveau romain" authors where the style, the words, the way things are expressed, the endless repetition of certain motifs, words, and concepts become the primary or perhaps only true point of the novel. After a while, it became hypnotizing, marvelous, and, for me, laugh-out-loud hilarious, particularly with the "Laudinum" chapter (and actually, a lot of the second half of the book) beginning to remind me of things like Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a favorite book of mine. Always very granular and factual, the overload of facts, events, wise cracks, sleaze, and more sleaze and wise cracks becomes like some kind of demented (but amazing) symphony. I believe I'll remember this one for quite a while -- although I'm not sure I'm ready to jump into another one of his works right now. I'll save it for later when I've recovered from this one.

This novel was an excellent change from the sweet innocence of Mrs. Marple or the cold calculations of Sherlock Holmes. The novel follows the attempts of a Continental Op to clean up Poisonville. He has accidentally gotten himself into something too large and complex for him to handle. The town sucks him in though, not letting go until he is done. There are times when the streetwise detective wonders if the town hasn't also corrupted him. I love the detective's bumbling attitude that sometimes lands him in more trouble than good but always helps him survive. Throughout the entire story our main character has no idea what's going on which is a change from our most famous detectives. This was an excellent book that I would recommend to anyone looking for a good detective story.

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 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.

Red Harvest is noir prohibition era novel set in a corrupt western mining town. The story begins with the narrator, a private investigator from a prestigious detective agency based in San Francisco, arriving into the dirty and unkempt town of Parsonville (pronounced Poisonville). In the first act the narrator finds out the client that hired him is killed shortly after the detective arrives in town. What follows is a gritty and deadly whodunit. The narrator is taken through the dark and dangerous streets in an attempt to unravel the mysteries and clean up the town of organized crime. He is shown to be circumspect and tough, with a weakness for alcohol and making impulsive decisions.

The highlight of the book is in the descriptions and observations of the detective. This is Dashiel Hammett's greatest skill as a writer. The narrator makes clear and keen observations without any unnecessary details. There is a Sherlock Holmes like astuteness in his conclusions and solutions in the unsolved crimes of the town. As a whole though, the story might seem a bit cliched and overwrought to the modern reader. Tropes and twists that have been used repeatedly and refined in books and movies in the ensuing years might seem to be cheap and simple in retrospect. The story is a bit weak too. By the end of the book there are close to 30 corpses. Life is quite cheap and killing is done repeatedly and without much remorse. In this aspect the book lacks realism. However the real power is in the writing. Hammett makes acute observations. The dialogue is filled with the long lost vocabulary and idioms of the prohibition-era. While the book has its flaws, its rich with well-crafted descriptions and action.

All those writers that flood the market these days, who cannot write a book of less than 500 pages and who think a "violent" story means also "gross and gruesome;" all those intellectuals that cannot see pith in dime novels, they should be locked up somewhere with this very slim book and not be released until they have learned some facts of literature.This is a gem of a book, from the unforgettable opening paragraph to the final "he gave me merry hell," there is not one word, one comma or one period too many. Hammett can describe a character or a situation in five lines, the way a good painter may draw a human figure or an object with just five strokes of the pencil. The plot is tight, raw and yet elegant; however not to be recommended for people with short attention spans, because it has so many twists and turns, and more characters than a Russian novel. This only adds to the interest, though. I have read this book over and over and always find new things about it.

This a strange story that starts out with a murder that is solved in the first half of the book, so you are left with what else can happen in this story? I listened to this story, so I do not have a copy of the book to refer to, and can not make sure of what all was really written. It was an excellent reading.
The detective gets to the town, goes to see the man who hired him, meets that fellow's wife, she goes out after getting a phone call, comes back and shoos him out. The next day he finds the man who hired him was killed while the fellow's wife was gone. The ball starts rolling then – the detective finds a rat's nest of criminals and vows to clean out the town.
In the end there are about a dozen deaths. The town has been cleaned out, mostly (being Prohibition days, and in general, you just could not get rid of all of them). I found it amazing how blithely these people could kill, and then not feel any sadness for their friends who were struck down.

Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett, is a tense, fast-paced well written tale of Hammett's hero, The Continental OP, cleaning up a criminal-ridden town by setting all the various factions againts each other. I enjoyed this novel, though I prefer Raymond Chandler's style to Hammett's. Hammett's is a little more sparse. However, if you searching for a good introduction to the genre, here's a good place to start.

Trivia note: This novel has inspred three movies (none credited the book as inspiration). Toshiro Mifune as a samurai in YOJIMBO; Clint Eastwood as the man with No Name in FISTFUL OF DOLLARS and more recently, Bruce Willis in LAST MAN STANDING.

Dashiell Hammett is the master of classic detective novels!!

In Red Harvest a detective is called in on a private case and his client is murdered in the company town of Personville (Poisonville by the locals) This is the classic detached, hard guy detective, who does what he does because he wants to finish the job he started. In this case it is to find out who has murdered the man that just may be the last honest man in town. In this company town, murders seem to be a dime a dozen, some just to mislead, others, just because. The dialogue is sharp and brief, yet clear as a diamond!! The women can be just as hard hearted as the men, with motives that reach only as far as their wallets.

This is another classic detective novel!!!

One of the major pioneering works of the hardboiled detective genre, Red Harvest is also a nightmarish vision of a world thoroughly corrupted by capitalism in an era of crisis. Hammett has received plenty of attention for his brilliantly drawn characters, razor-sharp dialogue, and judicious use of humor, revulsion and violence in moving his plots along. The key character in Red Harvest, however, is not the unnamed "Continental Op" who narrates the tale but meglomaniacal Elihu Willsson, the mining magnate who transforms Personville into "Poisonville" through his insistance on retaining absolute power over his company town by unleashing murderous gangsters to crush the local labor movement when they go on strike after World War I. By the time the Op arrives on the scene the city has become a criminal cesspool engaged in every form of vice, and claiming Willsson's reform-minded son as its latest victim.

No serious assessment of Red Harvest can fail to take into account the way in which it parallels the contemporary rise of fascism. Using violence to preserve the privileges of capitalist elites at the expense of any pretense of democracy or liberty, fascism's paramilitary brownshirts and the sharp-dressed gangsters in Red Harvest are brothers in arms. In his effort to "clean up" Personville, Hammett's Continental Op finds the only means of doing so is by exploiting the distrust, greed, and corruption of its gangsters and local government officials, a process that draws him into the same moral pit and from which he recoils by seeking to escape. While we continue to grapple with the corruptions of late capitalism, Hammett's work is as relevant in the 21st century as it was in 1929.

Despite what Europeans say, Americans do have a culture all their own. This is proven by the existence of our own myths, legends, tall tales, archtypes. One of our most repeated myths which you will see repeated in fictions of all kinds, be it films or books, is that of the law coming to tame an uncivilized society. It is merely a shadow of that oldest of myths, namely, of gods giving laws to humans. In Red Harvest, a detective known as the Continental Op is the law, and much like Gods of old, he punishes those who transgress.
The Continental Op has been summoned to Personville (also known as Poisonville to those in the know) but when he gets there his client has been murdered. His client's father, a local business bigwig named Elihu Willsson, hires him to clean up the town. You see, to prevent unionization of his companies, he called in all sorts of criminal elements to brutally supress them, whether through hook or crook, or just plain murder. But after doing their job, Elihu cannot just politely ask them to leave. So he offers the Op money to get rid of them any way he can. Out of a sense of outrage, justice, or just plain bloodlust, the Op accepts.
This novel almost seems a horror novel to me. There's a lot of blood, lots of murder, and the characters are all creepy and grotesque. For example, one character is described as "a bow-legged man with a long jaw like a hog's". At one point in the bloodshed, the Op talks about "going out to feed" as though he is a vampire who feeds on violence. It reminds me of the demonic descriptions of Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. There's something very unsettling in Dashiell Hammett's books. Like H.P. Lovecraft's stories, you always sense some monster moving underneath the prose that might burn your eyes out if you saw it full on.
Having said this, except for that feeling of disturbance, Hammett is not the great writer that he is cracked up to be. From the 3 works I have read of his, he's not that much better or worse than the typical contemporary crime writer. His characters seem pretty blank and empty but this actually helps out the stories which usually involve the most animalistic motives. It is an interesting experience to read his books, but I don't know if it's a rewarding or entertaining one. I guess if you want to feel unsettled, ill at ease, check his work out. If you like Red Harvest, there are two other books featuring the same character, The Continental Op, and The Dain Curse. In the end I am more impressed by this author's influence on American myth than the actual bones of his writing.

For most people, The Maltese Falcon is the first name that enters their mind when you talk about Hammett. But to me, Red Harvest with the Continental Op is the best Hammett ever.

Old gang-town story. Vivid descriptions. Incredibly complicated plot. Action. Drama. Spine chilling twists. Characters. The Language.. oh.. what language. Every phrase designed to excite and to be enjoyed. This book, in a genre that traditional English Depts do not consider as literature, is one of the literary classics of all time.

No wonder this endured generations and can underly a universal script.
Hammett catches the brutality and raw violence of the abyss of human nature
run amuck in unadorned and unbridled gangs, politics and law enforcement.
Brilliant piece. Undeniably one of the top ten best ever.

The posters for the Bruce Willis blood-fest Last Man Standing credit the original story to Akira Kurosawa's insanely funny destroying-the-town-to-save-it movie Yojimbo (AS IF Bruce Willis had an earthly of filing the blood-and-dust soaked waraji of Mifune). And there, for the majority of movie-goers, no doubt, the story begins and ends.

Unless you know Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest. Unless you've ripped through the pages in an agonizing frenzy of suspense and awe, desperate to find out WHAT HAPPENS NEXT but hanging on to each page a second longer to savor the impeccable use of words, the flawless balance between economy and imagery, the sheer perfection of the writing.

It's gang warfare in Poisonville, set in motion by the venomous old snake whose bite sickened the town in the first place. Poisonville is an oozing sore ripe for cleaning, and the Continental Op cleans it with a vengeance.

Wolf this one down in one gulp the first time through and then start over again at the beginning and linger over the sweet taste of nastiness made delicious through the brilliance of a master word-chef.

Hammet perfected the hard-boiled private eye genre even as he invented it. The genre would have been complete had no-one ever written another word in it

From the moment the book begins,with the reference to Hickey Dewey of Detroit who called his shirt a shoit and Personville Poisonville to the last words in the last chapter, this is probably the best book in ANY genre of writing ive read. Even the chapter names are great. Theres enough gore in it for the blood thirstiest reader and enough class for professors of English literature. Read this and any current action novel will read like a Mills & Boon romance!

'Red Harvest' starts off so well, much like a Raymond Chandler novel. A man is murdered under strange circumstances, with his intriguingly strange family members being either suspects or wanting revenge. In waltzes a private investigator, ala Philip Marlowe, who seems tough, street-wise, and does well with the ladies. Oh, and the lingo throughout is very 1930s tough guy talk. However 'Red Harvest' ultimately sinks into mediocrity. Why?

Firstly, Dashiell Hammett spins an overly complex story with way too many characters ... into what is a very short book. Too many killings, too much action, very little coherence. While the story sort of pulls itself together in the end I find myself ultimately bored, and disappointed, with the entire effort.

Bottom line: not an enjoyable reading experience.

This is vintage noir and Hammet at his best. However, that being said, David Goodis still rules the nest in this genre form...for while Hammet created the form and excelled at it...Goodis took it a step farther, elevating the form from being about detection to the dark gravel that exists in the grime of the human spirit...

This engrossing story will keep you hooked as the Continental Op slyly orchestrates a clean up of Poisonville by any means necessary. The plot of Red Harvest takes you through more action and mysteries than 10 other crime fiction novels, so if you solve one crime you've barely got the time to pat yourself on the back before the next one. Well paced, and very entertaining.

This was my introduction to Hammett and I knew from reading the first page that I would read everything he'd ever written. Nobody mines the aspect of "tension and release" in narrative better, except maybe Raymond Chandler. Two authors I'd give anything to ask 20 questions. If you haven't read Red Harvest, I envy you the terrible joy of reading it for the first time. Have at it, folks.