Red Harvest ebook

Who wants to read a book about a short, fat, middle-aged detective and a raw-boned, slovenly gold-digger? Anyone who's discovered Dashiell Hammett.

I love Hammett's short stories about the gritty, no-frills detective known only as the "Continental Op." Hammett himself worked as an operative for the famous Pinkerton Detective Agency and his writing has an authenticity not seen before or since. In this case, the Op is sent to a mining town where a crusading newspaper editor is trying to expose corruption. But corruption never wants to be exposed and his client is dead before the first meeting.

It's the story of a ruthless mine-owner who subdues his workers (and their union) by bringing in gangsters. His hired guns now control City Hall as well as gambling and illegal liquor. The ageing tycoon finds that he's fallen out of the frying pan into the fire.

And then there's Dinah Brand. She's the kind of "gutsy broad" who was very popular in the 1920's. Tall, strong, and carelessly dressed, she's nobody's idea of a femme fatale. A two-fisted drinker and a bum cook, she's made her way in the world by forcefulness, greed, and audacity. She knows how to play both ends against the middle and she's the kind of gambler who either pulls off the big deals or dies trying.

This is a fascinating book from start to finish. If you think "noir" requires a big city locale, you need to get acquainted with Hammett. He knew that tough, ruthless men (and women) go where the money is. And sometimes it's in a little mountain town called "Poisonville."

This is something of the Ur-source for the hard-boiled detective genre. The main character is the "Man with No Name" - the Continental Op - who is called to Personville aka "Poisonville" to meet with Donald Willsson, the last honest man in town. Unfortunately, the Op is five minutes too late and the man is murdered. The Op takes the lay of the land and learns that the police are corrupt and the town is run by three gangs - the gambling gang headed by Max "Whisper" Thaler, the bootleggers run by Pete the Finn, and the thugs run by Lew Yard. The Op meets with Willsson's father, Elihu Willsson, who owns the mining company that underlies Poisonville, and everything else in town, and who brought in the gangs to break a miner's strike. Elihu is curmudgeonly, contemptible and cowardly, and the Op browbeats him into paying him $10,000 to clean-up Poisonville.

The remainder of the book involves the Op playing the cops against the gamblers against the thugs against the bootleggers. Murders happen every couple of pages as the players whittle themselves down to nothing. The Op plays games of alliance and betrayal. Along the way, the Op solves several of the murders with flawless intuition. Throughout it all, the Op is tougher and more dangerous than his adversaries, and usually one step ahead.

If any of this familiar, it should. If you've seen "Fistful of Dollars" or "Yojimbo" or, even, Bruce Willis' "Last Man Standing," where a stranger comes to town and destroys the equipoised gangs that control a town, then you've seen the Red Harvest plotline. In fact, Yojimbo and Fistful of Dollars were based on Red Harvest, and Last Man Standing is a re-make of Yojimbo.

I enjoyed the book, but I had two problems that keep me from giving five stars. First, the book shows that it was written in 1929. The dialogue is very dated with "tough guy" language that often eluded my grasp or which just sounded weird. Here's an example:

"“Who? Who?”

She stood up, suddenly almost sober, tugging at my lapels. “Tell me who did it.”

“Not now.”

“Be a good guy.”

“Not now.”

She let go my lapels, put her hands behind her, and laughed in my face.

“All right. Keep it to yourself—and try to figure out which part of what I told you is the truth.”

I said: “Thanks for the part that is, anyhow, and for the gin. And if Max Thaler means anything to you, you ought to pass him the word that Noonan’s trying to rib him.”

"Trying to rib him"? "Be a good guy"? Unfortunately, this sounds like cliched movie gangster talk, rather than normal speech, probably because Hammet's dialogue did become cliched gangster movie dialogue. Take this for example:

"“I may say, in all justice, that you will find it the invariable part of sound judgment to follow the dictates of my counsel in all cases. I may say this, my dear sir, without false modesty, appreciating with both fitting humility and a deep sense of true and lasting values, my responsibilities as well as my prerogatives as a—and why should I stoop to conceal the fact that there are those who feel justified in preferring to substitute the definite article for the indefinite?—recognized and accepted leader of the bar in this thriving state.”

That is dialogue from a lawyer in Red Harvest, but try not to hear Sydney Greenstreet from The Maltest Falcon voicing that dialogue.

The other problem I had was the way that the Op solved mysteries in an offhand way. There would be gunplay followed by fistfights and threats, and then, suddenly, when he needed it, the Op would just arrest someone who had actually committed one of the three or four murders that mattered. As a mystery, the book was not much, but as "hard-boiled detective," it is first rate.

This doesn’t have the feel and refinement of The Maltese Falcon. The characters are pastiches of stereotypes, almost like a Dick Tracy comic strip. Hammett moves his characters around like puppets in a Punch and Judy show. It's all about characters shouting tough guy lines, which sound pretty corny by today's standards. That doesn’t come together into art until The Maltese Falcon. And when it does, it creates something new. Something interesting. Something of value. Interestingly enough the same thing happened to Raymond Chandler before he wrote The Big Sleep. That doesn’t mean this book is bad or that you shouldn’t read it. It means that when you do read it you’re experiencing and enjoying an important point in the author's development.

Hammett's writing, as always, dazzles. The story was non stop action. His language and use of the slang of the 1920's really set the scene. The characters were rich and distinctive.

However, I found the story somewhat confusing. The plot seemed to me that the main character, who is never named, Is hired by a rich man's son to help him fight corruption. The man gets shot as soon as the detective gets there. His father, who owns everything including the governor and the senators, hires him to clean up the town. Then he tells him to forget it. The detective says no and proceeds to start a gang war between the three biggest mobsters controlling the town. For what reason, I have no idea.

The Continental Op attempts to purge a town of the gangsters that control it by pitting them against each other.

Dashiell Hammett penned a seminal work in the genre of noir fiction with his first book, a lean, stark novel whose hard-edged protagonist adopts amoral means to achieve a moral goal. The prose is sharp and witty, and the body count is high. The real paradox is how a novel with such a bleak take on human nature can be so much fun to read.

Hammet was a Pinkerton off and on for a while before getting to earn his living as a writer. As a Pinkerton he dealt in mining town company-union conflict, and came to have a fine contempt for the bosses and thugs he aided in breaking the unions. Red Harvest is his expression of remorse and fictional pay-back. It has lots of passion, a slew of corpses and moves right along. Several movies were made based on the plot, and a movie finally not pretending it isn't based on Red Harvest is slated to come out in 2018.