Red Harvest

Oct 26, 2011 Stephen rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: mystery, crime, hardboiled-and-noir, ebooks, classics, classics-americas, audiobook, 1900-1929, love-those-words

Question: How to induce a gushing, mind-blowing noirgasm?

Answer: Have your amoral, no-nonsense, no-name main character bust out with slick, cool-dripping phrases like: "I poured out a couple of hookers of gin [while] She went into the kitchen for another siphon and more ice.

Friends, if there’s a unit of measurement more loaded with juicy, quintessential noirness than “a hooker of gin,” please let me know because I spent my entire happy wad when I read that. No offense to fans of Raymond Chandle...more

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Aug 24, 2012 Terry rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: crime

2.5 – 3 stars (I hope Dan and Kemper don’t throw me out of the noir club before I even get in!)

I feel as though I ought to have liked _Red Harvest_ more than I did. After all it was written by Dashiell Hammett, one of the fathers of noir fiction (perhaps more famous for The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man) and, like many of his books, became the source for numerous (often excellent) film adaptations. It has an interestingly conflicted protagonist and is chock full of killing, double crosses, dec...more 2.5 – 3 stars (I hope Dan and Kemper don’t throw me out of the noir club before I even get in!)

I feel as though I ought to have liked _Red Harvest_ more than I did. After all it was written by Dashiell Hammett, one of the fathers of noir fiction (perhaps more famous for The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man) and, like many of his books, became the source for numerous (often excellent) film adaptations. It has an interestingly conflicted protagonist and is chock full of killing, double crosses, deception, and shoot-outs, but somehow it didn’t fully hold together for me. Our story details the entanglements entered into by the character known only as “the Continental Op” (due to the fact that he is an operative working for the Continental Detective Agency out of San Francisco, a veiled nod to Hammett’s own days working for the Pinkerton Detective Agency). The Op was a character featured in many of Hammett’s short stories, but I believe this was the only novel featuring him (though it was originally published in serial form). The Op himself is in many ways the prototypical noir protagonist: hard-boiled, not averse to violence, and ready with a quip when the occasion warrants; on the other hand he is no dashing detective able to make the dames swoon, for he’s described as overweight, middle-aged, and generally ugly in appearance. He’s a man who will do what it takes to get the job done, whether that means manhandling his clients into agreeing with his methods, lying to all and sundry in order to get the information he needs, or joining in on some endeavours not strictly legal in their methods and intentions if it will get him in good with the people he needs to bamboozle. All in all, the Op is a real piece of work…though he’s someone you’d probably rather have on your side than against it (the trick is knowing when he’s genuine about his partnership, even some of his compatriots from the Agency aren’t sure of this).

In this tale the Op finds himself in the town of Personville, aptly named Poisonville by all and sundry, one of those little burgs that got itself under the thumb of a domineering and greedy ‘patriarch’ who subsequently had to relinquish some control to various crooked cops, gamblers and boozerunners in order to keep things going. Now the patriarch’s son (who for reasons unknown had asked the Op to come to town) has been murdered and his pop wants revenge. Enter the Op who decides this town needs a change of management and upgrades his assignment from finding a murderer to cleaning out the sewer that is Poisonville. The Op proceeds to get the lay of the land and inveigle himself into every criminal nook and cranny he can, cannily playing off each faction against the other, planting seeds of doubt (both true and manufactured) in the right ears and hoping to be able to simply step back and watch the fireworks. Things turn out to be a little more complicated for the Op than he had hoped and start to look very bleak indeed for our “hero” up until the very end.

This tale of a stranger coming to a corrupt town and proceeding to clean up by playing one side against the other is a great set-up (perhaps most effectively portrayed in film in Kurasawa’s Yojimbo, but also used in A Fistful of Dollars and Last Man Standing to name but a few), but I just wasn’t totally sucked in by the book. I think D_Davis nailed it in his review with the observation that this book was just longer than it needed to be (not surprising considering it was originally published serially). The twisted plot of lying and deception could probably have been pared down, and tightened up as a result, and I therefore found that some points sagged a bit. The Op is an interesting character though, someone who is world-weary and damaged enough to be willing to do whatever is deemed pragmatically ‘necessary’ regardless of how dirty it might be, and yet at the same time you can tell that he wishes the world wasn’t thus and he wants to be the 'good guy'…whatever that might ultimately mean to him. I plan on eventually checking out his further adventures as well as some of Hammett’s other more famous noir tales. I just wish I had been blown away by this one.(less)

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Oct 05, 2012 K.D. Oliveros rated it 4 of 5 stars

Recommended to K.D. by: 501 Must Read Books; 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2006 only)

Shelves: 501, time-100, modern-library, guy-lit, crime, noir, 1001-non-core

My second in this genre called noir and I loved it. To like this genre one needs to develop an acquired taste because it is something that is very distinct and could be alienating if you just delve into it without opening your mind.

The setting is dark and the characters' prospect for happiness is almost nil. According to Wiki, Hammett himself worked as an investigator for the Pinkerton's Detective Agency and he was therefore able to bring strong sense of realism to his milieu and to the characte...more My second in this genre called noir and I loved it. To like this genre one needs to develop an acquired taste because it is something that is very distinct and could be alienating if you just delve into it without opening your mind.

The setting is dark and the characters' prospect for happiness is almost nil. According to Wiki, Hammett himself worked as an investigator for the Pinkerton's Detective Agency and he was therefore able to bring strong sense of realism to his milieu and to the character of the nameless narrator - the Continental Detective Agency Operative or Op. This book, Hammett's first, was first published in 1929 and its setting was the Depression and the Age of Prohibition. I have read a number of stories, both fiction and non-fiction, about this period in America, but Red Harvest is one those that masterfully used to its advantage the chaotic situation during that time. There was too much lawlessness and crimes were rampant. Rich and influential businessmen had their own armies and could manipulate a town to their own benefits.

However,I still prefer my first novel read from this genre, James M. Cain's Double Indemnity. Even in this genre, I think I still prefer the story to be character-driven rather than event-driven. I know that crime or mystery fiction is normally the latter, i.e., the more complicated the plot is, the harder it is for the reader to guess whodunit. However, I thought there was not too much inner struggle inside the main characters in this Hammett. For example, the character of Dinah Brand was killed halfway the story and only became really the focal point of the plot when she was already dead. Unlike in Cain's Double Indemnity, his femme fatale Phyllis Nirdlinger was the one who manipulated the narrator. I prefer to read on alluring ladies to be the predators, outsmarting men because of their beauty, instead of having them as the usual preys. Worst if they end up dead in the end. They are beautiful so they deserve to live!

Oh I am enjoying this genre called noir. There's just too many books. Too many genres to pick and try. The endless allure of literature.(less)

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Nov 06, 2011 Mohammed rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: To anyone who likes literary masterworks

Shelves: hardboiled-detective, classics, dashiell-hammett, favorite-books

My second time reading this and i saw things i missed the first time. Some nuances of the characters,dialouge,the authors world view. I dont re-read ever but i should re-read this every two years when i forgot little of the mystery,the work The OP is doing in Posionville.

This novel is a true literary Masterwork that makes you understand why Hammett has the reputation he has in mainstream American Literature let alone in crime,noir fiction.
It is a great,fun,bleak hardboiled PI story. Also Hammett...more

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Dec 26, 2007 tENTATIVELY, cONVENIENCE rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: mysteries

This subject is probably discussed at great scholarly length elsewhere (perhaps in Joshua Waletsky's 1999 documentary "Dashiell Hammett: Detective, Writer") but, at the moment, I'm not sure where, so I'll add my 2¢'s worth: "Red Harvest" is about a detective hired to 'clean up' a town who pits various gangsters against each other in the process & destabilizes the criminal community into a bloodbath, a Red Harvest. The detective becomes increasingly psychotic as he begins to enjoy the mayhem...more

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Jul 18, 2011 Marvin rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: mystery

I keep vacillating from three to four stars on this. I recently finished The Maltese Falcon, which I loved, and quite a few people told me that if I loved Maltese Falcon I will love Red Harvest. I simply liked this one. Maltese Falcon was a tight mystery with a gritty but likable protagonist (Sam Spade) sparring with a few other well written character with some of the tightest dialogue this side of Shakespeare. Red Harvest had too many characters, too many jerky sub-plots, too many red herrings...more

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May 14, 2008 J rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is one of those books I love beyond a number of other “better” works of art, so don’t expect a balanced and overly critical review. Not that the book isn't fantastic. [SPOILERS AHEAD, SPOILERS AHEAD:]

My very first exposure to Hammett was the novella, Woman in the Dark, published separately as a slender volume which I read in college. I knew very little about Hammett save he was supposed to be the man who inspired Chandler and I loved Chandler as much back then as I do today. The edition I r...more This is one of those books I love beyond a number of other “better” works of art, so don’t expect a balanced and overly critical review. Not that the book isn't fantastic. [SPOILERS AHEAD, SPOILERS AHEAD:]

My very first exposure to Hammett was the novella, Woman in the Dark, published separately as a slender volume which I read in college. I knew very little about Hammett save he was supposed to be the man who inspired Chandler and I loved Chandler as much back then as I do today. The edition I read was this long skinny page of sans serif font that made my head ache in just the short time it took to read one chapter. Since I was always suffering from some kind of hangover in those years, I attributed the crummy feeling the book gave me not to a layout and design idiot, but to Hammett himself and didn’t pick up another book of his for ten solid years.

This was the book I picked up. If there were ever a novel to cure anyone of those delusional “good old days” nostalgias for times before when they lived, back when everything was good and pure unlike the filth we see today, this is the novel. Red Harvest oozes corruption, crime, murder, and action from every page and it’s a nasty, thrilling piece of business.

From page one, Hammett had me by the throat and he didn’t let go. Here’s how the book opens:

I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit. I didn’t think anything of what he had done to the city’s name. Later I heard men who could manage their r’s give it the same pronunciation. I still didn’t see anything in it but the meaningless sort of humor that used to make richardsnary the thieves’ word for dictionary. A few years later I went to Personville and learned better. [snip:]

The city wasn’t pretty. Most of its builders had gone in for gaudiness. Maybe they had been successful at first. Since then the smelters whose brick stacks stuck up tall against a gloomy mountain to the south had yellow-smoked everything into uniform dinginess. The result was an ugly city of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had all been dirtied up by mining. Spread over this was a grimy sky that looked as if it had come out of the smelters’ stacks.

The first policeman I saw needed a shave. The second had a couple of buttons off his shabby uniform. The third stood in the center of the city’s main intersection — Broadway and Union Street — directed traffic, with a cigar in one corner of his mouth. After that I stopped checking them up.

Hired by a young newspaper man, Donald Willsson, son of Elihu Willsson, whose mining company owns Personville lock, stock, and barrel, Hammett’s unnamed detective, the Continental Operative arrives in town to meet with his client. His client is dead before the fourth page is over. His father hires the Continental Op to investigate the murder, and the Op makes his own arrangements. It seems that several years ago Elihu called in the mob to help break the coal miner’s union and ever since then the mob has owned a sizable chunk of Willsson’s ugly little city. The Op promises Willsson he will clean the town out.

What follows is a quickening descent into hell. The Op cozies up to a money addled floozy in town, Dinah Brand, and through her he temporarily gets on the good side of a gambler and muscle man in town, Max “Whisper” Thaler, before setting him against Dinah and dragging in the town bootlegger, Pete the Finn, loan shop and bail bondsmen Lew Yard, bank robber Reno Starkey, and police chief Noonan. And each guy’s own personal army of thugs and hired guns.

What’s remarkable throughout the book is how Hammett, and through him, the Continental Op manages to keep all the plates spinning, keep all the heavies against each other, keep unhelpful power blocs from forming, and keep each person from tumbling to the fact that he’s the man who’s balling up the works. This is not to say that no one takes a shot at the detective or that he leaves unscarred.

Poisonville works its vicious magic on our “hero” as well turning him blood simple. Along the way, the Continental Op finds he rather enjoys pitting one crime boss against the other and watching them blow merry hell out of each other. He walks a very fine line between cleaning out the town and becoming just another vicious member in the city’s power plays. Along the way he solves not just the murder of his client (a piece of cake he cracks early in the book), but also who murdered Dinah Brand (possibly he himself), who murdered lawyer Charles Proctor Dawn, and who killed Noonan’s younger brother Tim years ago.

There are so many bodies piled up in Poisonville that sometimes keeping track of the story is tricky. Hammett has put a lot of story in the way of the plot here. The only real drawback to this is keeping track of the various criminals, no easy task since they’re really only briefly introduced before we move along or they die. The pacing throughout is tight, breakneck tight, the Op barely even sleeping and the story hustling along with him. Working against a deadline of his boss finding out just what kind of mayhem he’s up to, the gangsters finally putting two and two together, and a bullet finally catching up to him, the Op has no choice but to think on his feet and sleep that way too.

Blisteringly well written, Hammett's second novel packs the kind of wallop modern crime writers only wish they had in them.(less)

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Dec 03, 2007 Alison rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: noir fans

Shelves: alltime100novel

"Here's how she stacks up. Pete's throwed in with McGraw. That lines coppers and beer mob up against me and Whisper. But hell! Me and Whisper are busier trying to put the chive in each other than bucking the combine. That's a sour racket. While we're tangling, them bums will eat us up."

This is a masterpiece of crime fiction. If any book ever got the language right, this one did. This work is plot heavy (to put it lightly) and by the time you thought you'd figured out which thug (or copper) went...more

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Feb 19, 2008 Anne rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: class

A blood- and gin-soaked hardboiled detective novel, noir before there was noir. Kinda goes like this for about 200 pages:

"There was a time when I wanted to be left alone. If I had been, maybe now I'd be riding back to San Francisco. But I wasn't. Especially I wasn't left alone by that fat Noonan. He's had two tries at my scalp in two days. That's plenty. Now it's my turn to run him ragged, and that's exactly what I'm going to do. Poisonville is ripe for the harvest. It's a job I like, and I'm go...more

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Jun 12, 2007 Catie Bloomfield rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: fans of gangster and P.I. stories

Shelves: vintagecrimefiction, americanliterature, timemagazine100greatestnovels, 20th-century, regular-mystery

My favorite Dashiell Hammett novel. It has a great plot, probably the most complicated mystery story I've ever read. It makes one feel dirty after reading it because the imagery is so vivid.

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Dec 29, 2008 Ann rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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 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 d...more

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Sep 17, 2011 Michael rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: hard-boiled, mystery, 1001-books-to-read-before-you-die, cwas-top-100-crime-novels, mwas-top-100-crime-novels, pulp, organized-crime, detective, 1920s

When I read this book I kept thinking this book reminds me of the Bruce Willis movie Last Man Standing. Then I find out that movie was a remake of a Japanese movie called Yojimbo, which is based on Res Harvest. Have no fear though, this book is heaps better than that plotless movie. This book is full of gritty and complex side plots, red herrings, greed and corruption.

The unnamed main character is brought into Poisonville to clean up the town from all the gangsters and corruption. Pinning one a...more

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Feb 19, 2013 Jeff rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 52books52weeks, crime, kindle, mystery

Stunning book. The appalling thing about Red Harvest is I read it in my first or second semester of college and thought it was great...and I didn't even have a god-damned clue how good it was.

Or at least so I felt upon rereading this book in 2013. Oh, I'd been (barely) smart enough to recognize the plot (unnamed stranger comes to corrupt town, proceeds to turn the corrupt factions against one another) in Kurosawa's Yojimbo and Leone's Fistful of Dollars (and all the goofy derviations from there...more Stunning book. The appalling thing about Red Harvest is I read it in my first or second semester of college and thought it was great...and I didn't even have a god-damned clue how good it was.

Or at least so I felt upon rereading this book in 2013. Oh, I'd been (barely) smart enough to recognize the plot (unnamed stranger comes to corrupt town, proceeds to turn the corrupt factions against one another) in Kurosawa's Yojimbo and Leone's Fistful of Dollars (and all the goofy derviations from there on out, like that one where Rutger Hauer is wearing a shapka-ushanka and looks pregnant and is (once again) an android). But I missed a lot. Like....ugh. A lot, okay? Just a frickin' ton of subtext and awesomeness. Anyway, a lot of that stuff is what struck me on the re-read.

I mentioned the book's elevator pitch, but I suppose I should embellish a bit even though the chances of me doing justice to the Red Harvest's elegant plot is very, very slight.

Our unnamed narrator/protagonist, an operative for the Continental Detective Agency (and so is known, by the book blurbers at least as the "Continental Op") comes to Personville (which the locals pronounce "Poisonville"), only to discover the man who hired him, the town's crusading newspaper editor, has been murdered. The man's father, Elihu Wilsson, is an industrialist who in smashing his company's union is in bed with the thugs, corrupt cops, and gangsters who helped him smashed it. Extracting from Wilsson a payment and letter authorizing him to find the murderer and clean up the town, The Op begins ingratiating himself with one crooked faction, then courting another faction and using what he's learned to set the two against one another... Decades before Joseph Campbell worked overtime to make you think George Lucas had tapped into the essence of archetype, here's the hero with no name descending into the underworld, risking the loss of his own personality and righteousness in order to do what is right.

If this has been the extent of Hammett's genius--this story's creation/iteration (I run hot and cold on Campbell's heroic cycle, but am too lazy to make up my mind on it) and the delicious tough, witty hardboiled prose--this book would deserve to be read and remembered and passed from generation to generation. Even the dipshit I was in my first year of college could see that.

But once you've read a little, and lived a little, and especially if you've written a little, you'll be kind of shocked that people don't talk about Red Harvest all the time. Like, "Hey, honey, how was lunch with your friend John?" "Oh, it was great, dear, but it's still nothing compared to how Hammett stretches his protagonist's ethical boundaries past the breaking point to the point where you don't know for thirty pages or so if he murdered an innocent woman or not." Or "Could you pass the chips?" "Sure, but let me first say that wow, I did not realize that not only did the Coen Brothers rip off Hammett's The Glass Key like cuh-razy, but they also took a few dollops off the top from Red Harvest...and probably poached the name 'Blood Simple' from it as well!"

Oh, sure, they sound tedious to you BUT THESE CONVERSATIONS SHOULD BE HAPPENING ALL THE TIME. Red Harvest is so damn good, we should hold it in the same esteem we hold a national disaster: it should be discussed at every meal and as we are getting ready for bed, and after we get up in the morning and part the curtain to look warily at the sky.

One thing that staggered me is that while Hammett gives the Op one huge goal to achieve (break the hold of corruption on the town), he layers the book with mini-mysteries, the kind of great "because the person died falling this way, then the person who shot him isn't the person everyone thinks" bits of classic puzzle-solving that make people fall in love with mysteries. Although Hammett probably did this because Red Harvest was originally written in serialized installments for Black Mask Magazine (thank you, Wikipedia, I did not know that), it still gives each section of the book a nice bracing jolt. The book all but spins like a top under all the plot reversals without being overwhelming. Even with a first person narrator, it always shows more than it tells (in fact, Hammett uses the Op's hard-boiled nature to wring a delicious sense of ambiguity about whether or not the Op killed that woman, and I think that ambiguity works twice as well because the book is in first person, not third....which is a hell of a thing when you think about it).

As I said, if you've written a little, Red Harvest will stagger you with how effortless it masters plot, character, tone, action. Sadly, I can see why Hammett went on to produce so little in later years and drink so much: if this is the bar you have set for yourself, you are probably well and truly fucked. Because it's astonishing enough this bar was hit at all, much less setting it for yourself as a baseline.

If you want a quick, entertaining read where the bodies pile up and the action keeps coming, Red Harvest is the book for you. But if you want to look at an achievement that will fill you a little bit with despair because of its effortlessness--a book with so much juice it started a sub-genre of mystery, powered two international film genres, and gave big Ray Chandler the roadmap to easy riches? Then Red Harvest is also the book for you. Just be prepared to be like me, and read it twice so you can see the totality of Hammett's achievement. It's that big.
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May 27, 2013 Evgeny rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: crime-and-mystery

Of all classic hard-boiled novels, this one has a record of having maximum number of dead bodies per page. A nameless narrator from Continental detective agency is invited to a city for corruption investigation by the city tycoon's son. Unfortunately, by the time the MC arrives, his potential employer is already killed. It does not take a genius to realize the city is rules by criminals with the entire police department being on their payroll and chief of the department being a member of crimina...more

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Aug 09, 2007 Michael rated it 5 of 5 stars

Militant high brows and low brows agree, this is one of America's coolest novels. Dirty, violent, hardboiled and yes, every character swigs down cheap booze in every chapter. But Red Harvest will always defy the cliche's, and its not just because it is the source for most of them. On its surface, Red Harvest is a detective story (although most of the reviews on this site think its about Yojimbo) but what its really about is Fascism. Dashiell Hammett may be the only great detective writer to actu...more

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Feb 17, 2009 Mark rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: crime-and-mystery

Hammett's first novel is a cobbling-together of several BLACK MASK short stories: there are some bumps in the narrative road, and a lot of characters come and go (emphasis on "go," where I mean "for good"), but ultimately this novel is a masterpiece of violence and cynical social commentary. It's also a cornerstone of the "cleaning up the corrupt town" genre that ranges from the spaghetti Western to the films of Kurosawa. Furthermore, it's also the debut of Hammett's character "The Continental O...more

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Oct 21, 2008 Michael rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

I always love the tone of a good hard-boiled mystery from the golden days of pulp fiction. This book delivers plenty of short, biting dialog and cold, remorseless characters. The Continental Op is a classic anti-hero. My problem with it is that there is too much violence and not enough mystery for me. The plot seems to change somewhere around three times, which would be fine if all of the different mysteries to solve were more interconnected, but they aren't. There is a good scene in which the h...more

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Mar 09, 2008 Dan rated it 3 of 5 stars

Entertaining. It gets a little repetitive- the narrator cleans up a corrupt town one bad guy at a time- which probably explains why it's one of the few Hammett books that wasn't made into a movie. Hammett's a great writer, and, as with The Maltese Falcon, some of the best parts are those that don't closely fit the story line, like a sequence in which he describes a series of dreams that the narrator has. I'd still probably read The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man first, but this works as a fine...more

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Dec 15, 2008 bup rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2008, 1001, novella

I can cheat fate right there with the best of them. F'rinstance, I didn't read the edition of Red Harvest I told goodreads I had. I read Red Harvest as part of Dashiell Hammett - Five Complete Novels - and nobody but you, me, and the Specter of Death is the Wiser - and ol' Spec's giving me a pass this time.

This is a dark, dark book.

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Dec 07, 2010 Kirsty Darbyshire added it · review of another edition

[these comments are taken from a mailing list discussion and contain spoilers]

[about the continental op]

He's a very sketchy character, we don't learn much about him at all except through how he acts and what he does. Whilst the lack of fleshing out characters annoys me in some books I thought it worked well in this book. Nothing in the book was particularly detailed and the narrator fitted right in with the general mood of the book.

I didn't think he was especially heroic. He solves one problem

...more [these comments are taken from a mailing list discussion and contain spoilers]

[about the continental op]

He's a very sketchy character, we don't learn much about him at all except through how he acts and what he does. Whilst the lack of fleshing out characters annoys me in some books I thought it worked well in this book. Nothing in the book was particularly detailed and the narrator fitted right in with the general mood of the book.

I didn't think he was especially heroic. He solves one problem quite early on in the book and then stays on in Poisonville to sort out the rest of its problems more because the town has annoyed him and he wants to get his own back than because he has any great ideas of justice.

I'm not sure how to compare him to other PIs. He's such an early PI that almost everyone who's come since owes a debt to him. There's a quote from Raymond Chandler on the back of my copy of this book:

"Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it in the alley, giving murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse."

This sounds like a backlash against the cozy to me so I've had a quick look around to find out what fictional detectives that are still well known today were published before Red Harvest. Certainly both Christie's Poirot and Sayers' Wimsey were around beforehand and the Continental Op is nothing like those characters.

[about the characters]

If bad guys hadn't been so endemic to Poisonville the Op would have been able to have a more subtle approach to getting rid of them. Pretty much everybody who mattered in the town was a baddie so the only feasible strategy was to set them all loose upon themselves.

The majority of the characters were, as others have said, thumbnail sketches. Few characters made it from one end of the book to the other so we didn't need to remember much about them for more than a few pages. Sometimes this got a little confusing with new people coming on the scene and then vanishing again very shortly. I think this is something that makes sense in a serialisation. The book wasn't intended to be read all at once with expectations of character development. We knew who characters were for the length of a chapter and that was all we needed to know.

The character who I felt got fleshed out the most was Dinah Brand. I thought she was interesting and though I wasn't surprised when she was murdered (it wasn't a book to get out of alive!) I did feel I wanted to know who had murdered her for her own sake as well as for the Op's sake.

This would probably have made a better book if the characters had been deeper in places, but I don't think the fact that they weren't made it a bad book. Old man Willsson and the police chief Noonan were two characters who were quite major but who stayed quite thinly drawn despite numerous appearances.

[on the structure of the book as described by Michael E. Grost]

Looking at the book this way is making it make much more sense to me. I found it a real page turner but I wondered why I did. When the first plot "Who killed Donald Willsson?" was concluded in chapter 7 I was surprised as my expectations for a novel are that a mystery will run all the way through it.

Chapter 20 ("Laudanum" in my copy) is the one in which Dinah Brand is killed and sets up the final whodunnit of the book, one in which we know the main suspect to be innocent. I thought this rounded the book off nicely.

The whole central section from Chapters 8 to 20 was about the Continental Op cleaning up the town. I can see how you could split it into two halves as Chapter 14 is where we discover who killed Tim Noonan and Chapter 15 is where Mickey and Dick come on the scene. The whodunnit about Noonan's brother didn't start until chapter 10 and I didn't think that there was really an equivalent puzzle in the third quarter of the book; this is the part where they really start to drive the baddies against one another.

I liked this book in itself but looking at it from a different angle as a serialisation rather than a novel is making it even better in my opinion. I felt like the book was breaking rules that I was used to, when actually it is that those rules hadn't really been invented yet.

[about why the op does what he does]

The Op is technically a professional as he's working at an investigative job but, related to the next question, because he's alone and far from his organisation he tackles Poisonville in a far more personal way that he would have done in a different place.

The first thread of the book, about the murder of Donald Willsson, is the most organised part of the story. There's a clear cut job for the Op to do, even though it's not the one that he came to do, and he investigates and solves it very neatly. He employs what I presume to be the general practices of the Continental agency in the way he goes about resolving the mystery.

After that he goes to work on what was, I think, the real job that Donald Willsson brought him to town for: cleaning up the town. This is where I think his personal motives, and code of conduct, came into play though I'm not entirely certain what the motives were now. He didn't gain much apart from personal satisfaction when he'd completed his task.

[about the setting]

I had this vision of a town where it never got light. It felt like the whole book took place in the dark even though I can recall that quite a lot of it definitely took place in daylight hours. In my mind's eye it all took place in the half light cast by gas lamps in the streets. I guess that means that the author didn't do too good a job with the physical scene setting but I think the mental scene setting and dark atmosphere worked pretty well on me.

Taking a PI (or anyone) away from their home turf means that they can behave in a different manner. They can afford to take more risks or employ different morals than they might if they were in a place where they were known. Not having to stick around to see the consequences changes the way that things can be dealt with.

[summarising]

I liked the book to start with and the discussion's enhanced it in my eyes because I understand it far better now and I see why the things that I thought were the weak points when reading it were there.

I read Hammett's _The Thin Man_ last year and enjoyed it and after this book I'll certainly read more of his work in the future as well as other classics. I'm disappointed that my Hammett anthology doesn't include any background info about the serialisation and such like and I'm going to make a point of looking for classics that include introductions rather than just finding the cheapest edition in future as I really think background information helps me understand the books.

I don't think it holds up so well as other classics because it's being read in a different environment from that which it was written for. I think books that are written as books rather than serialisations stand the test of time better. That said, I found it a lot easier to read than some older books and I thought it was a real page turner.

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Dec 15, 2008 John rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: readers who like a laugh & a challenge

Recommended to John by: other crime buffs

Shelves: american-thuggery

Hammett didn't invent the crime novel, as old as icon-thieving Odysseus, nor even the American version. But before alcohol rotted his sawtooth, this former Pinkerton strikebreaker repositioned American thuggery & its counter-force amid the new dehumanizing engines of the 20th Century. Hammett's better angels are, in his two or three significant shoot-em-ups, outnumbered, & so of necessity tough, heady, skeptical, subtle but never prevaricating: hard-boiled, in a (portmanteau) word. Their...more

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Jun 02, 2013 Michael rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Hard boiled detective fans, Hammett fans, literary historians

Recommended to Michael by: Serendipity

Shelves: literature, pulp-fiction

To begin with, I'm a huge Dashiell Hammett fan, and there's a part of me that's inclined to simply rate all of his books with five stars. But, within that pantheon of excellence, there are degrees of perfection, and for me this book doesn’t – quite – reach the same heights as The Maltese Falcon or The Glass Key. It’s still probably better than 90% of the books I’ve given four stars – call it 4.75 or 4.9 stars.

While a lot of readers are familiar with Sam Spade and Nick Charles (if only because of...more To begin with, I'm a huge Dashiell Hammett fan, and there's a part of me that's inclined to simply rate all of his books with five stars. But, within that pantheon of excellence, there are degrees of perfection, and for me this book doesn’t – quite – reach the same heights as The Maltese Falcon or The Glass Key. It’s still probably better than 90% of the books I’ve given four stars – call it 4.75 or 4.9 stars.

While a lot of readers are familiar with Sam Spade and Nick Charles (if only because of the movies), fewer are conversant with Hammett’s most frequently-appearing detective star, the nameless “Continental Operative,” the hero of this novel. The Continental Op is unappealing, middle-aged, overweight, unambitious – in many ways, probably more like the consumers of masculine detective fiction than most of its heroes. But, he’s tough and methodical, and just sharp enough to stay ahead of the game and usually cause a certain amount of mayhem while he solves whatever case he’s on to his own satisfaction.

“Red Harvest” may actually be Hammett’s most violent and cynical novel, which helps to explain why there was never a Hollywood film noir directly based on it. It has influenced the movies, though, most notably “Miller’s Crossing,” by the Coen Brothers (which borrows liberally from “The Glass Key” as well), but I would also say “Yojimbo” and its various spin-offs and homages (including “A Fistful of Dollars”) owe much to this book. Fans of those films will be familiar with a scenario in which a self-motivated outsider comes to a corrupt crime-ridden community and starts playing off the local power-holders against one another in order to come out on top. That’s at least part of what’s going on, here.

It’s pretty well-known today that Hammett was a communist and wrote his fiction in part to expose the contradictions and corruption of capitalist society. He probably went further in “Red Harvest” than anywhere else in that respect. The characters even include Wobblies, radical labor organizers that want to improve things for the workers, but get caught up in the Hell that is “Poisonville” and wind up just being another competing corrupt power within the fray. Hammett’s a bit kinder to the IWW than to most of his victimized characters, but only slightly. If you’re interested in a truly hard-boiled crime novel, this is one of the best, and hardest boiled, of them all.(less)

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Oct 13, 2012 Ryan Rebel rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: reviewed

"Red Harvest" is not only a classic, but a frontrunner in the hardboiled detective genre. This may not be where it all started, but it's where it all came together. The Continental Op (the protagonist) feels raw, untainted by the subgeneric conventions and countless filters of today's noir. Alcohol, smoking, physical violence, wanton killing, streaky moral code, vigilante rule, racism, sexism, and most importantly: the briskest, crispest, crackling-est language you can find. It's straight out of...more

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Sep 09, 2012 Claudia Glezz Cisneros rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Citas: There’s no sense in a man picking out the worst name he can find for everything.

She looked as if she were telling the truth, though with women, especially blue-eyed woman, that doesn't always mean anything

I've got hard skin all over what’s left of my soul.

Mientras la gente llamémosla normal hace sus cosas de gente normal y tiene sus horarios y cuelga sus cortinas, hay otros mundos de gente que pasa el día haciendo cosas más inesperadas como, mientras toma ginebra con hielo, zumo de limón...more Citas: There’s no sense in a man picking out the worst name he can find for everything.

She looked as if she were telling the truth, though with women, especially blue-eyed woman, that doesn't always mean anything

I've got hard skin all over what’s left of my soul.

Mientras la gente llamémosla normal hace sus cosas de gente normal y tiene sus horarios y cuelga sus cortinas, hay otros mundos de gente que pasa el día haciendo cosas más inesperadas como, mientras toma ginebra con hielo, zumo de limón y agua de Seltz al mediodía o con vermouth y amargo de naranjas por la noche, asesinar a sus semejantes y amañar combates de boxeo. De gente que sustituye con bourbon las comidas y las siestas y sabe de qué calibre es la pistola del vecino está lleno Cosecha roja, un libro de esos de leer la primera frase y darte cuenta tres horas más tarde de que llegó la madrugada y tienes los dedos de los pies encogidos de la tensión. En Cosecha roja todo el mundo es malvado y perverso y las muertes y los disparos pasan muy deprisa. Hasta el que decide limpiar la ciudad de hampones (el agente de la Continental de nombre cambiante que para mí siempre tiene el aspecto de Orson Welles en Sed de mal), lo hace porque le tocaron las narices y porque le agarra el gusto al crimen y no por moralidad. Su método de trabajo de participar en la criminalidad hasta hacerla estallar por los aires desde el por dentro y aún así sostener un férreo sistema moral es lo que hace grande al personaje y a Cosecha roja, que fue el primer libro que publicó Hammett allá por el 29. No somos nadie, ya dentro de nada hace un siglo.
De Dashiell Hammett, además de todo y de sus diálogos gloriosos (ese encanto del ingenio gansgteril démodé sobre todo porque nadie dialoga o dialogó jamás así), me gusta su manera de describir a la gente con ojo clínico de detective (las orejas se le despegaban como alitas rojas), generalmente con tres frases, la primera sobre cosas peculiares que tenga el interfecto en la cara, la segunda sobre su manera de llevar la ropa y la tercera cualquier cosa que funcione como un mascazo inesperado, alguna característica que no te sirve para nada saber y sin embargo es como conocer el color y el diseño de la corbata del príncipe de Gales: superfluo pero certero para crearte ambientes imaginarios.

Por fuera del libro:
Si de relaciones turbulentas está la literatura llena, la de Dashiell Hammett y Lilian Hellman se lleva medalla y diploma. Ruidosos, creadores de escándalos, desfasados y atormentados, se hicieron sufrir y se quisieron y crearon cada uno su obra por separado durante treinta años. La de Hellman, obras de teatro y libros de memorias cambiadas tomo tras tomo (de ella dijeron que todo lo que escribía era mentira, hasta las y y los artículos). La de Hammett, novela negra tomada en serio por los escritores serios.
Otra novela de Hammett pasada por las manos de otra pareja literaria diametralmente opuesta a Hammett/Hellman por lo chispeante, discreto, amable y bien allegado, Albert Hackett y Frances Goodrich, salió The thin man, una de mis películas predilectas. Es curioso cómo el amor según se lo maneje etcétera. Pero otro día hablamos de Nick y Nora Charles.
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Aug 14, 2012 Allan Dyen-shapiro rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Okay, I was deliberating between three and four stars here. This novel essentially invented the hardboiled private eye genre. Some of the key elements were laid down: first person narrative with abundant description, dark tones, complex plot with lots of characters and twists. I loved the femme fatale character--Dinah was extremely well drawn.

But while this novel invented the genre, Raymond Chandler brought it to its heights. I find myself missing the wild exaggeration/intentionally crazy phras...more

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Aug 06, 2012 Nick Jones rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The Continental Op had solved many cases through the 1920s: here Dashiell Hammett promotes him from the short story to the novel and creates one of the first Private Detective novels. (Or was it the first?) But it is the very thing that people love about the Private Detective novel – the existence of the mystery which the detective unravels and explains, the bringing of understanding to chaos – which I have little interest in. If Red Harvest is my favourite Private Detective work it is because t...more

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Jul 09, 2012 Wilson Lanue rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

While I generally prefer my noir from Raymond Chandler, this little domino train of violence has a lot to recommend it.

Hammett's first novel, it is heavily informed by his time making and breaking mining-town riots as a Pinkerton man to discredit and disarm leftists there. (He would later become a card-carrying Communist himself, probably in response to the Pinkertons' tendancy toward police-state tactics of framings and lynchings.)

A non-fiction account of Hammett's days in the labor-enforcement...more

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Apr 22, 2012 Ian Tregillis rated it 2 of 5 stars

Wow. I know this is noir, so there are certain expectations. But even reading the book with that filter in place, the Continental Op is really sort of a dick.

This is competently written, in my humble opinion. Although, as more eloquent folks here on Goodreads have said before me, the difference between Hammett's prose and Chandler's is the difference between trying to describe everything and using one perfect telling detail. Hammett has a weird obsession with describing people's faces, and in p...more

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Nov 11, 2011 Brian rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

* The book is well named. You know you're in for a blood bath when one of the chapters is titled, "The Seventeenth Murder." With the climax still to go.

* But it isn't gratuitous. It's the point. Violence, Hammett is saying, is the only way to clean up a corrupt, crime-ridden town--and even at that, it's only temporary. Bleak? sure, but it isn't hopeless. Not quite, because even though our hero, the Continental Op, finds himself seduced by the dark side, he is able to overcome it.

* This is a very...more

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Nov 08, 2011 Jesse rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 1920-s, hard-boiled, mystery, literary-modernism, read-in-2011

"In English, or at least in American, many subtleties of the dialogue escape me, but in The Red Harvest the dialogues, written in a masterful way, are such as to give pointers to Hemingway or even to Faulkner, and the entire narrative is ordered with skill and implacable cynicism. In that very special type of thing it is, I believe, it is the most remarkable I have read" -Andre Gide, Journals, 1943

Far be it from me to argue with M. Gide, so I won't. But can I say that I agree with everything he...more

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Red Harvest (The Continental Op #1)

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