Red Harvest (Murder Room)

In “Red Harvest” Dashiell Hammett’s inimical hard-boiled hero, the Continental Op, returns but this time it’s for a full length story with twists, turns and more gun play than you can shake a gin bottle at. Mr. Hammett’s prose is pithy, his characters astute and the novel is oh so

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enjoyable. Red Harvest was definitely mined for ideas, not as salaciously as the Maltese Falcon was but I can see the plots of at least a half-dozen movies were lifted from Mr. Hammett’s sagacious pen. The action and suspense is extraordinary, virile and has an "oh so modern" flair. Even though it was written close to seventy years ago, age seems only to potentiate Mr. Hammet's work.

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As a writer, I've never gotten a good handle on how to plot, which is one reason why this book was such a good read for me. From the first paragraph, Hammett launches straight into his iconic story of the corrupt town and the enigmatic and morally ambiguous loner who arrives and proceeds to blow

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the corruption apart, and he nevers slows the pace for inconsequentials such as giving his protagonist a name. As readers and cinema goers, we've seen countless iterations of the enigmatic loner taking down the corrupt system, to the point where the plot seems more than a little trite, to me at least. But Hammett (who may have well launched this peculiar American slant on it) knows his characters, has a fine grasp of their psychological depths and how to mine them (even as his protagonist plays the various thugs and villians against one another to their destruction). Underneath the blood and mayhem and petty corruption, Red Harvest is a thinking person's revenge story, but Hammett keeps the plot adroitly moving at break-kneck pace through so many twists and turns, the reader barely has time to register it.

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If this book seems familiar, its because so much of it has been ripped on and ripped off in both novels and in film. It should have just been titled, "How to write."

Red Harvest. The title gave me hope I’d be reading a communist revolutionary-farmer action thriller. No such luck. The “red” is blood and a plentiful harvest is made of it. This could have been a police procedural except that the police here are criminal rat bastards. So are pretty much

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everyone else. An exception is the unnamed P.I. (the “Continental Op”). He’s barely more moral in his acts but does know how to honor a contract. Luckily, a femme fatale (rather worn by that role) stirs the air at intervals. It’s set in Montana and inspired, it would seem, by the sordid chapters of that state’s mining industry. Otherwise, there’s so little sense of place that it could as well have been Missouri, Minnesota, or Manitoba.

The plot goes off in lots of directions and soon you expect that every time anyone arrives at a building something bad will happen. Accompanying the action are some decent lines. Examples:
“Donald Willson sent for me. I was waiting to see him while he was being killed.”
“Like a lot of people, I looked most honest when I was lying.”

Despite the violence, I didn’t find the story as heart-pounding as I’d have liked, but it is good at confronting us with the threatening habits of hard-hearted men. Not a waste of our time then, and the brisk pace is helped by Hammett not being a writer over fond of sentences needing commas. It’s as if he had suffered the misfortune, when young, of spending scarce cash on late-period Henry James. I’d be bitter too.

To conclude, and to give credit where credit is due: Hammett’s Op proves himself one “mucker” of a detective.

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Red Harvest is one of those books that, if you're a fan of the Noir or Hardboiled genre, you absolutely *have* to read. Hammett is the original author wisecracking, tough-nosed detective fiction. He practically invented the detective story as we know it today. But at the same time, it isn't the

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best out there. Don't get me wrong--it's still an entertaining story, and I wasn't disappointed in any way. But the story meanders at times, and only gets going again once Hammett gives the plot a kick in the pants.

And speaking of the plot, it involves the unnamed "Continental Op" who travels to the mining town of Personville (known as "Poisonville" to its more cynical residents) to speak with a new client. Before he arrives, the client is murdered and the Continental Op sets out on to discover the hows and the whys. In his investigation he learns about several warring criminal factions in Poisonville and subsequently decides to serve as the one-man wrecking crew to tear it all down--all against the agency's orders.

Hammett does a good job exploring the protagonist's downward into the maelstrom. As the body count starts to grow, the Continental Op begins to almost enjoy the bloodshed, and his companions start to question his motives.

Hammett also amazes me with his ability to paint vivid pictures of his characters even with his minimal style. It encourages the reader to read between the lines and make conclusions not just on what was said or how the narrator felt, but also on what is *not* said. This style of narration aids in making the story a true mystery and encourages the reader to play along.

And if you're a mystery fan, I'd encourage you to play along with Hammett. Even if it isn't the most entertaining book you've ever read, it's still fascinating (in this reader's opinion) to see where it all started.

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Elihu Willsson came West and made a fortune in mining. He owned the bank, the newspaper, and all the elected officials in "his" town. The workers unionize and make Old Elihu give them their share, but Elihu only waits until he is ready and then takes them on; the union strikes. Old Elihu calls in

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strike breakers so he can break the union. When they are successful at breaking the union (using lots of illegal activities to do it), the strike breakers stay and take over Elihu's town. Elihu can't call in outside help this time because his hands are as bloody as the men he hired. So he calls his son Donald home from Paris, gives him the newpaper and waits for him to clean up the town for him. As Donald begins his crusade, he hires a private detective from San Fransico to help him ferrett out the rascals he is after. When the detective arrives, Donald is killed while the operative is waiting to meet him at his home for the first time.

This is the set-up for Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, a set-up that he saw first hand while he was a private investigator himself in the Pinkerton's Detective Agency before he began writing novels. Mysteries began with Edgar Allan Poe and were perfected by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes. By the 1920's the British had Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers perfecting the parlor room murder mystery genre. But with Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammett ""Americanized" the crime novel/murder mystery genre and for the next 3 decades the major Americans in crime fiction were patterned after Dahisll Hammett's writing style, not the Brithish version of murder mysteries. And the American version of the murder mystery is decidedly different from the British version.

In 1926, Agatha Christie wrote one of the early quintessential British murder mysteries in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. In it she develops a great who-dun-it set in a small English village where the most prominent man in the village is murdered - there is only one murder in the book. Three years later Dashiell Hammett wrote the American version of the murder mystery - set in a small American town - in which the title of Chapter 21 is "The Seventeenth Murder". And there are at least that many more murders before the case is closed.

Murder mysteries from Sherlock Holmes on, made the detective our protector from evil. He was smarter than the killer, more determined and highly moral in his fight against evil. Hammett turned the whole murder mystery genre on it's ear. The detective is short, overweight, middle aged and balding. He does not fit our perception of what our hero will look like. It is half way through the book before you realize that the narrater/detective does not even have a name. Hammett has denied the reader even this most basic form with which we can identify and then attach to the hero. Hammett then takes the detective's motive and clouds the picture even more. Initially the detective is trying to find out who killed his potential employer. But that is accomplished early on in the book. The detective does not go back home at that point, he stays to "clean up" Poisonville. His motive for cleaning up the town at that point seems a little vague but that is what hero's do. It is not until you realize what his intended method of "cleaning up " Personville is that you see how Hammett has made the murder mystery genre much more Americanized than ever before. The detective has no intention of trying to find out what each of the 4 main antagonist have done so he can bring them to justice; he wants to know what they have done to each other so he can turn them against each other and thereby clean up Poisonville by having them kill each other off. In fact the femme fatale tries to sell him some inforamtion that will help him do this at one point and the detective tells her he doesn't need her information. Now that he has them killing each other, he doesn't need the truth, a lie will serve his purpose just as well. The only thing he has to do is keep stirring the pot. Keep stirring it until they all kill each other. He's not trying to catch them doing bad things so he can send them to jail - he is trying to get them to do even more bad things so they will clean up the town by killing each other.

It is hard for me to imagine that in 1929 any other country could have produced this level of cynicism in what starts out as a murder mystery. In some ways this cynicism probably came from what was happening in the 1920's where corruption was rampant in goverments all over the country from bootleggers corruptting local police departments to even the Hoover administration having so many scandals that you could hardly keep up with them all. A person could not really trust government to help or to even be trustworthy. Then in 1929 the wages of greed also led to the stock market crashing. And we all found again that even in the American Dream where we all believe that any person can grow up to be what they want to be if they are willing to work hard enough, that there is also an underbelly to that dream where you can work hard and still get shot down in the street by the bad guys and the hero ends up not just seeing murder as the crime but also seeing murder as the answer to crime.

This was Hammett's first novel. He would write only 4 more books in 5 years and then would never publish another novel. In the subsequent books he would continue to write about people in this underbelly world of the American Dream. He would have his hero looking for a reason to try and be apart of what was happening around him in the subsequent books. But in his final book The Thin Man, Nick Charles does not want to be a detective, does not want to find the murderer. He does not want to solve the case, he does solve it, but he doesn't want to do it anymore. And I guess in some ways Dashiell Hammett just didn't want to do it anymore either, so he quit writting. But in this his first novel, he starts on page one and like a run away train goes straight to the final page with a clear, apocalyptic message, you can't fix a town like Personville by arrestting a bunch of people. You can't fix it until all of them are dead.

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I really enjoy Hammett's prose (and The Maltese Falcon is one of my favorite mysteries ever) but the vast array of characters speaking in near-cryptic slang made it nearly impossible for me to follow along! As far as I was able to make out, some things happened and people died and then more things

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happened. I think.

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This is a really exciting book. I had difficulty putting it down. What a mess Poisonville is.

Awesome. One of my favorites. A book that casual readers will love for all the action, and die hard literary critics will love for the thematic content. Cover to cover action, highlighted heavily with humorous and sarcastic dialogue.

A slow starter that was nothing to get excited about even once it got moving.”

Excellent book. Hammett writes in a manner that's just like dangling a carrot in front of a donkey-- he gives you enough information to keep going, but keeps you in the dark just the right amount. This book was hard to put down. The names got a little confusing at times (a lot of characters), but

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overall it was pretty simple to keep up with what was happening. I'm glad I finally got around to reading this book!

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Like a game of chess, with live ammunition, broads with laddered stockings and messy hair, bootleggers with phony printing sets, keystone cops with empty pockets and the upstanding young hero gets shot off stage before the game begins. Last man standing's a loser...

The great grand-daddy of all crime novels, Red Harvest was Dashiell Hammett's first commercial success, and laid the ground work for his later novels such as The Thin Man and The Maltese Falcon. It created a new genre of protagonist, the hard-boiled, quick-tongued, and street-smart man who got by

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on a combination of wits and near-prescience.

Red Harvest was by legend the inspiration for Akira Kurasawa's Yojimbo. While this has never been confirmed, it seems obvious by the themes explored. That film was later made into Last Man Standing starring Bruce Willis, although by then the story bore little resemblance to the original. The idea of playing both sides of a political struggle to one's own ends was retained throughout the generations of film.

The original story follows the efforts of an un-named protagonist working for the Continental Detective Agency of San Francisco, told in first person. He has been summoned to the small western industrial town of Personville to assist in the dealings of a local banker, discovering upon arrival that his employer has been murdered. Discovering the motivation behind the murder also uncovers the criminal dealings of "Poisonville," a situation that both demands results and offers the protagonist a chance to accomplish more than anyone expected.

Naturally, the murder is only the tip of the iceberg, and involves two gangs as well as a corrupt police department. Allying himself with whomever is convenient at the time, the "Continental Op" works to uncover the truth while avoiding constant threats on his life.

Thoroughly enjoyable and addicting, Red Harvest is a great read for anyone who wonders where the detective genre came from and the resultant glut of films and jargon. The protagonist may seem unrealistic, but one must keep in mind that Hammett based this story on his time spent as a union-buster for the Pinkerton Detective Agency after World War 1.

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Better this time around. Clever and well plotted

Red Harvest: Being an eighty-three year old story, some of the slang is a bit hard to follow. Entertaining and as hard-boiled as you could want, but the shoot-outs and body count are a bit over the top.

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

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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

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Welcome to the town Personville or better known as Poisonville where everyone is crooked and bad and all of them kill each other in the end.

Still its fun to reach such kind of books once in a while.

The original hard-boiled thriller, albeit not the best. Definitely an enjoyable read, but the prose never quite crackles with the wit of Chandler, nor does the protagonist's wisecracking match up to Marlowe's.

Great noir, with an even darker edge than usual. The double-crosses come thick and fast, and the narrator shows interesting (and not all that typical) development.

(I think I picked this one up because it was referenced here and there as inspiration for both _Yojimbo_ (and by extension _A Fistful of

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Dollars_) and _Miller's Crossing_, both favorites of mine. Certainly, none of those films is a direct adaptation, but you can see the elements there. If you're a fan of any of those films, you might move this up your list a bit.)

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Best quote ever, "I've got a mean dispostion. Attempted assassinations make me mad."

There are a lot of great one-liners in here. And it's a fun read. (And what is fun is generally quick...) :)

A nap-taking, Scotch drinking, detective who doesn't sleep cleans up "Poisonville" aka, Personville.

Best quote ever, "I've got a mean dispostion. Attempted assassinations make me mad."

There are a lot of great one-liners in here. And it's a fun read. (And what is fun is generally quick...) :)

A nap-taking, Scotch drinking, detective who doesn't sleep cleans up "Poisonville" aka, Personville.

This 1929 private eye story, the first of the Continental Op series, is one of the founders of the hard-boiled school of crime fiction. This type of crime fiction is not my favorite (in fact, I absolutely hate much of it such as the Mickey Spillane books), but I found this book well written and

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gripping. There is still a lot of violence (huge amounts!) but it isn't graphic and that makes a big difference for me.

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This book is uniquely written, containing two or three mysteries in one story. Dashiell Hammett made another success with his "hard-boiled detective" novel and is sure to please any mystery fan with this story. However, it was slightly gruesome, seeing that half the characters are killed.

My favorite of Hammett's full-length novels. An Op story (originally told in serial form, of course) that's full of all kinds of terrible corruption, which doesn't spare the hero himself either. Purportedly an influence on Kurosawa's "Yojimbo".