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Red Harvest

Page history last edited by PBworks 17 years, 10 months ago

Hammett, Dashiell - Red Harvest (1927)

I believe this is the first Continental Op novel, and this very early Hammett reads like an overlong story rather than a structured novel. Predominantly of the "shoot `em, hit `em, have a drink, have another drink, shoot him again, hit him again...." variety, it IS classy for its type, and smoothly written, but I'm not really a fan of this sort of basher nonsense, however well-done it is. The Op cleans up a mob-ridden town, with nobody and everybody's help; everyone is playing a double game, and nobody tells the truth, even (or maybe especially) The Op himself. Depressing and sad overall, and I miss the brittle humor of his later work.

Wyatt James.


Red Harvest (1927) is a set of four linked stories, all telling a common story of corruption in a Montana mining town. The boundaries between the tales are disguised in the book publication of the work. But each story has its own puzzle plot, which comes to its own ingenious, surprise solution. Readers of the book will get more pleasure from the work, if they are aware of its structural features, and follow the different puzzle plots. Each quarter of the book comes to its own separate climax. The four sections are Chapters 1 - 7, 8 - 14, 15 - 20, and 20 - 27. Chapter 20 forms both an end to the third story, and the beginning to the fourth. The linked story series has a long and honorable tradition in mystery and science fiction. Although academic critics are obsessed with the novel, the linked story sequence has many artistic advantages over the novel proper, especially the ability to squeeze far more plots into one book. The plots can be told straightforwardly, at their natural length short story length, and with no padding. Such books can display the virtues of inventiveness and artistic economy.

 

Red Harvest is not Hammett's only tale set in the Pacific Northwest. "The Green Elephant" (1923) takes place in Spokane and Seattle, and the characters talk about regularly going to Coeur d'Alene in Idaho for temporary work in the mines. "The Farewell Murder" (1930) also has a brief section in Spokane. One can also cite the Flitcraft story, in Chapter 7 of The Maltese Falcon (1929), set in Tacoma and Spokane. "The Man Who Killed Dan Odams" (1923) takes place in the Montana countryside. This story is as much a Western as it is a crime story; one is reminded that Black Mask regularly published both. It is notable for its vivid description of the country, both its landscapes and its buildings.

 

The characters of Red Harvest seem almost to parody Hammett's personal obsessions. The tone is one of detached comedy, making fun of things that Hammett had treated with emotional seriousness in his previous work. For example, Dinah Brand spoofs the crooked villainesses of such stories as "The Girl with the Silver Eyes" and "The Gutting of Couffignal". While they are portrayed as overwhelmingly attractive women whose shocking coldness lets them exploit and manipulate men, Dinah is a good natured joe who is openly mercenary about everything, telling her boy friends in advance that she is charging them by the hour. We first see her surrounded by her stock portfolios, summing up her investments, a classic comic image. Throughout the whole novel, she measures everything by money. And Dinah is a cut rate siren: a pretty but sloppy woman with stained clothes and poor makeup, she could only be a seductress in a town as hick as Poisonville. The whole portrait offers a note of comic emotional detachment, and one of realism as well: here is corruption as it actually happens, not as supervillains of crime, but the two bit denizens of a hick burg. Max Thaler, a.k.a. "The Whisper", takes off on the good looking young men who are always forming alliances with the Op. Like them a crook, in Max's case a gambler, he wants to be friends with the Op, but never makes it in the story. The Op is too busy using him as a pawn in his blowing up of Poisonville, and never notices him much as a person. The Op never responds much to any of Max' friendly overtures. Instead, he keeps having him arrested by the Chief of Police. In previous tales, this has been the tragic end of the story: Op sees young best friend and partner exposed as crook, and arrested or killed. Max is much more resilient than this however, and burlesques the tragic ends of these tales by escaping from the police. His two escapes at the end of the first two main divisions of Red Harvest are comic gems, involving mass resistance by force and guile to police power. Being turned over to the police here lacks the moral censure it attained in previous Hammett works, anyway, because the police in Poisonville are such open crooks. Indeed, the crooked Chief of Police Noonan is one of the most comic characters in the book, always running off at the mouth with moral clichés, while using the police as essentially his own private hit squad.

 

Mike Grost

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