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Red Harvest (1929)

    My God! for a fat, middle-aged, hard-boiled, pig-headed guy, you've got the vaguest way of
    doing things I ever heard of.
            -Red Harvest

He may not have invented the idea of the Maguffin, the basically pointless object of desire at the center of a thriller, but in The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett certainly popularized it (see Orrin's review). Red Harvest, in it's own way, may be even more influential. In it, Hammett's nameless Continental Op, a private eye with the Continental Detective Agency, is sent to Personville, Montana but his client is murdered before he can meet with him. He is nearly murdered himself and soon discovers that the town is called Poisonville because it has become such a cesspool of corruption.

His client's father, Elihu Willsson, had founded and run the town--''an ugly city of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been dirtied up by mining''--as the president and majority stockholder of the Personville Mining Corporation. In 1921 though, amidst ugly labor problems with the Wobblies (International Workers of the World), Elihu Willsson had called upon mob muscle to help break a strike. The mobsters did the dirty work but then took over the town too. Now he wants to hire The Continental Op :

'I want a man to clean this pig-sty of a Poisonville for me, to smoke out the rats, little and big. It's
a man's job. Are you a man?'

    'What's the use of getting poetic about it?' I growled. 'If you've got a fairly honest piece of work
    to be done in my line, and you want to pay a decent price, maybe I'll take it on. But a lot of
    foolishness about smoking rats and pig-pens doesn't mean anything to me.'

'All right. I want Personville emptied of its crooks and grifters. Is that plain enough language for
you?'

Well, the language and the task are clear enough, but not trusting Willsson to stay the course, The Op secures a large advance and sets to work. He begins to sow dissension between rival mob factions, the corrupt police force, and Willsson himself, unleashing a symphonic blood-letting, the "red harvest' of the title.

The novel actually tells the separate stories of a series of incidents, including a fixed fight and a bunch of different murder investigations, all set against the bloody backdrop of the gang war. You'll recognize the "lone man in the middle, orchestrating chaos by playing one side against the other" plotline from such movies as Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars and most recently, Last Man Standing. Of course, the crooked fighter angle shows up in a plethora of subsequent movies and books. But most interesting is that one of the murders he has to investigate is one which he may have committed himself. After a night of drink and laudanum, The Continental Op wakes with a bloody ice pick in his hand a dead woman next to him. This premise, the hero (antihero) facing the possibility that he is also the villain, was to become a real staple of the noir thriller. Between these seminal story lines, the characterization of the paradoxically detached but committed Continental Op and Hammett's trademark tough slangy banter, the book reads like the Rosetta Stone of the hard-boiled mystery; an early key to unlock the subsequent history of the genre.

It all makes for some good sanguine fun. Both the book and Yojimbo are highly recommended.

(Reviewed:05-Sep-00)

Grade: (A)

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Red Harvest (1929)

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