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3.5 

Red Harvest

By Dashiell Hammett
Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett digital book - Fable

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Publisher Description

From one of the great pioneers of detective stories, a classic novel reissued with a new introduction by S.A. Cosby

The steadfast and sturdy Continental Op has been summoned to the town of Personville—known as Poisonville—a dusty mining community splintered by competing factions of gangsters and petty criminals. The Op has been hired by Donald Willsson, publisher of the local newspaper, who gave little indication about the reason for the visit. No sooner does the Op arrive, than the body count begins to climb . . . starting with his client. With this last honest citizen of Poisonville murdered, the Op decides to stay on and force a reckoning—even if that means taking on an entire town. 

Red Harvest is more than a superb crime novel: it is a classic exploration of corruption and violence in the American grain.

284 Reviews

3.5
“Red Harvest is a novel by Dashiell Hammett published in 1929. The story is narrated by the Continental Op, a frequent character in Hammett's fiction, much of which is drawn from his own experiences as an operative of the Pinkerton Detective Agency (fictionalized as the Continental Detective Agency). I spent quite a bit of time trying to find the name of the main character only to find he never gets a name. Not in the book anyway. If only I had read the introduction first I could have saved myself some time paging back through the book looking for his name. Everyone else in the book gets a name, good guys (of which there are few), bad guys (of which there are many), police (they can be good or bad), everybody gets a name, except our number one detective. This book really surprised me because of how much I liked it. I couldn't put it down. The surprising thing is I read it before and didn't like it. I remember nothing from my first read except that I didn't like it. I'm not sure what made the difference. Since the book didn't change, it must have been me. Of course there are things that drove me crazy, but all books are like that. For example: I set fire to a cigarette and stared at it until I heard her going down the steps....He brought three cigars out of a pocket, threw one over on the bed, stuck one at me, and put the other in his mouth....Thaler sat down and lit a cigarette, an angular blond kid of no more than twenty in tweeds sprawled on his back on a couch and blew cigarette smoke at the ceiling....She lit a cigarette and threw the match out of sight....I sat down and lit a cigarette... We spent the next two hours drinking whiskey and talking.....Dan Rolff came in with a siphon, a bottle of gin, some lemons, and a bowl of cracked ice....I promised to hurry, asked the clerk to get me a taxi, and went up to my room for a shot of Scotch. The snifter revived me a lot. I poured more of the King George into a flask, pocketed it, and went down to the taxi....I moved some of the Scotch from my flask to my stomach...Dan Rolff came in with gin and trimmings. We had a couple of drinks apiece....another drink would go good...."that ought to be good for another drink" she said...I poured out a couple of hookers of gin. Our unnamed detective is going to clean up the city and getting rid of the gangs. It shouldn't be a hard job, they should all die of cancer or driving drunk before long. Or walking drunk for that matter, since there are plenty of people speeding through the city shooting at each other who wouldn't notice a drunk person stumbling across the street. But, if the drinks and smoking doesn't kill enough of them, then we'll just kill everybody else, shooting them most of the time, although we do have a stabbing with an icepick and another is killed with a knife to the back of his neck. Using incriminating information he gets here and there, mostly from the chief of police, and the lady always drinking gin, the Op spreads incriminating information to all of the warring parties, making them hate each other more than they already did. If the book soon doesn't end everyone will be dead. Finally close to the end even the guy who started it all was afraid he was getting as bad as the bad guys he is fighting: "This damned burg's getting to me. If I don't get away soon I'll be going blood simple like the natives." There is so much going on in this book I totally forgot that way back in Chapter One there was the first murder, and that murder our Op was going to solve. He did, but by then there was so much going on I forgot all about it. This book was fun, but I'm certainly glad I don't live in Personville or Poisonville, take your pick.”

About Dashiell Hammett

Dashiell Samuel Hammett was born in St. Mary’s County, Maryland. He grew up in Philadelphia and Baltimore. Hammett left school at the age of fourteen and held several kinds of jobs thereafter—messenger boy, newsboy, clerk, operator, and stevedore, finally becoming an operative for Pinkerton’s Detective Agency. Sleuthing suited young Hammett, but World War I intervened, interrupting his work and injuring his health. When Sergeant Hammett was discharged from the last of several hospitals, he resumed detective work. He soon turned to writing, and in the late 1920s Hammett became the unquestioned master of detective-story fiction in America. In The Maltese Falcon (1930) he first introduced his famous private eye, Sam Spade. The Thin Man (1932) offered another immortal sleuth, Nick Charles. Red Harvest (1929), The Dain Curse (1929), and The Glass Key (1931) are among his most successful novels. During World War II, Hammett again served as sergeant in the Army, this time for more than two years, most of which he spent in the Aleutians. Hammett’s later life was marked in part by ill health, alcoholism, a period of imprisonment related to his alleged membership in the Communist Party, and by his long-time companion, the author Lillian Hellman, with whom he had a very volatile relationship. His attempt at autobiographical fiction survives in the story “Tulip,” which is contained in the posthumous collection The Big Knockover (1966, edited by Lillian Hellman). Another volume of his stories, The Continental Op (1974, edited by Stephen Marcus), introduced the final Hammett character: the “Op,” a nameless detective (or “operative”) who displays little of his personality, making him a classic tough guy in the hard-boiled mold—a bit like Hammett himself.

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