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Rural Noir: Bluebird, Bluebird and Pop. 1280
By Joe · 1 post · 14 views
By Joe · 1 post · 14 views
last updated Sep 19, 2020 10:14PM
What Members Thought
"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 R
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Possibly the earliest modern detective story. And it shows. I made it through the book, but it took a while.
Hard-boiled:
The sandpaper prose is rapidly fired from start to finish. Not immersive or accommodating. I found it to be rough and unforgiving prose, merely adequate for the story and without any depth or character.
The plot is plenty complex, and presented without info-dumps, mostly.
However. There was not one single character in the whole book that I cared about. I know this was Hammett's f ...more
Hard-boiled:
The sandpaper prose is rapidly fired from start to finish. Not immersive or accommodating. I found it to be rough and unforgiving prose, merely adequate for the story and without any depth or character.
The plot is plenty complex, and presented without info-dumps, mostly.
However. There was not one single character in the whole book that I cared about. I know this was Hammett's f ...more
A juicy bit of old ultraviolence. My impressions:
1. I read the original collection of four short stories in The Big Book of the Continental Op, not the later heavy edited recompilation published as Red Harvest. The prose here is even more sparse, and every word reads like a bullet being fired. What's more, as these four novellas do not try to pose as a 'proper' novel, the reader can’t possibly complain that there are four separate murder mysteries, four culminations and four denouements. At leas ...more
1. I read the original collection of four short stories in The Big Book of the Continental Op, not the later heavy edited recompilation published as Red Harvest. The prose here is even more sparse, and every word reads like a bullet being fired. What's more, as these four novellas do not try to pose as a 'proper' novel, the reader can’t possibly complain that there are four separate murder mysteries, four culminations and four denouements. At leas ...more
Part of the Library of America omnibus.
I mean, I am not really a twists and turns kinda guy and this story has many. More of a mood person myself, luckily the atmosphere is also amazing. Very hard-boiled detective story about a PI who even half of the time doesn't even know why he is hired in the first place. Still, he keeps finding lots of opportunities to drink good booze, lots of fistfights, gun fights, car chases and yes lots of murder. Ofcourse, a femme-fatale too, well kinda - but not real ...more
I mean, I am not really a twists and turns kinda guy and this story has many. More of a mood person myself, luckily the atmosphere is also amazing. Very hard-boiled detective story about a PI who even half of the time doesn't even know why he is hired in the first place. Still, he keeps finding lots of opportunities to drink good booze, lots of fistfights, gun fights, car chases and yes lots of murder. Ofcourse, a femme-fatale too, well kinda - but not real ...more
This novel is nuts. It’s all over the place and it influenced so many. It took Jim Thompson to wrangle all of this type of insanity into a more organized set of tropes but Red Harvest is where it all began.
Dec 05, 2016
Christopher (Donut)
rated it
really liked it
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review of another edition
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