Red Harvest, by Dashiell Hammett
This one made my personal Top 100 Books list, and I was quite happy to read it again for this project. If you haven't read it yet, I envy you, because you are going to have SUCH a ball!
Red Harvest, by Dashiell Hammett
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 been all 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-directing traffic, with a cigar in one corner of his mouth. After that I stopped checking them up.
Forget Sam Spade. Forget Nick and Nora. Red Harvest, featuring Hammett’s unnamed Continental Operative, is Hammett’s noir masterpiece.
For one thing, it completely smashes the myth of pure capitalism so popular among Republican con artists and immature libertarians, and does so in the form of an exciting thriller. That alone is worth the price of the book. The story takes place in “Personville” (note the implied power and supremacy of the individual, until you notice the New Joisey accent people seem to affect when talking about it), a fiercely independent mining town in the Rockies, far from the interfering Federal Government. It begins when a captain of industry, a “job creator” named Willson, hires several “private security” agents to break up a rotten old socialist labor strike, and wins...with predictable natural capitalist consequences in a “small government” environment. Willson and the three biggest “security agents” go into competition with one another, and the bodies begin to pile up. The local police force is small enough to drown in the bathtub, and the chief has no more power than any of the others, and is no more bound by altruism or any other ethic than self-interest. No one kingpin can form a monopoly because of the competition and distrust from the other players. The Dame is a blue eyed Amazon who trades her favors with the one who gives her the most money. The only ethical way to organize a society, right? And yet...somehow it isn’t quite perfect.
But that’s just the philosophy behind it. The murder mysteries are among the best combinations I’ve seen in fiction. Many whodunnits have a second or third murder in the book, almost always committed by the same culprit in order to silence someone who knows she committed the first one. Red Harvest is the only book I’ve encountered in which the crimes are committed by several culprits with different motives, and each one stands as its own mystery, with its own clues that make each one solvable by the reader, and yet they all interlock into one plot, in which everyone is a suspect and everyone is at war with several different factions, has untrustworthy henchmen and alliances, and has plenty of not-so-innocent bystanders to frame for the crime. The craftsmanship is a thing of wonder to behold. The central murder is solved in chapter seven of a twenty-seven chapter book (pause at the end of chapter six, if you wish, to see if you can work it out. It can be done), but don’t worry if it fools you-there are sixteen more murders by Chapter twenty-one, as well as thefts, bank robbery, fixed fights, bribery and blackmail. Very highest recommendations.
Red Harvest, by Dashiell Hammett
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 been all 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-directing traffic, with a cigar in one corner of his mouth. After that I stopped checking them up.
Forget Sam Spade. Forget Nick and Nora. Red Harvest, featuring Hammett’s unnamed Continental Operative, is Hammett’s noir masterpiece.
For one thing, it completely smashes the myth of pure capitalism so popular among Republican con artists and immature libertarians, and does so in the form of an exciting thriller. That alone is worth the price of the book. The story takes place in “Personville” (note the implied power and supremacy of the individual, until you notice the New Joisey accent people seem to affect when talking about it), a fiercely independent mining town in the Rockies, far from the interfering Federal Government. It begins when a captain of industry, a “job creator” named Willson, hires several “private security” agents to break up a rotten old socialist labor strike, and wins...with predictable natural capitalist consequences in a “small government” environment. Willson and the three biggest “security agents” go into competition with one another, and the bodies begin to pile up. The local police force is small enough to drown in the bathtub, and the chief has no more power than any of the others, and is no more bound by altruism or any other ethic than self-interest. No one kingpin can form a monopoly because of the competition and distrust from the other players. The Dame is a blue eyed Amazon who trades her favors with the one who gives her the most money. The only ethical way to organize a society, right? And yet...somehow it isn’t quite perfect.
But that’s just the philosophy behind it. The murder mysteries are among the best combinations I’ve seen in fiction. Many whodunnits have a second or third murder in the book, almost always committed by the same culprit in order to silence someone who knows she committed the first one. Red Harvest is the only book I’ve encountered in which the crimes are committed by several culprits with different motives, and each one stands as its own mystery, with its own clues that make each one solvable by the reader, and yet they all interlock into one plot, in which everyone is a suspect and everyone is at war with several different factions, has untrustworthy henchmen and alliances, and has plenty of not-so-innocent bystanders to frame for the crime. The craftsmanship is a thing of wonder to behold. The central murder is solved in chapter seven of a twenty-seven chapter book (pause at the end of chapter six, if you wish, to see if you can work it out. It can be done), but don’t worry if it fools you-there are sixteen more murders by Chapter twenty-one, as well as thefts, bank robbery, fixed fights, bribery and blackmail. Very highest recommendations.