Red Harvest

Crooked towns, femme fatales and endless double-crosses
The Hammett oeuvre is not short of heat, but Red Harvest is undoubtedly his most feverish work. Not in tone — the narration of Hammett’s Continental Op is as terse as ever — but in the sheer gleeful let’s-blow-everything-up fantasy element of it. The book’s arc is simple: The Op travels to Personville — which, we learn in the first sentence, is better known as Poisonville, and not just by someone who “called his shirt a shoit” — just in time for the murder of the newspaperman who’d called him down from San Francisco. The Op quickly finds out just how crooked the town is, decides to stick around a while and see if he can’t get the whole thing to explode in front of him, and gets a couple other Continental Detective Agency men in to help him.

The internal workings of the endless double-crosses, foul-ups and general criminal enterprise in the story are ingeniously handled; in particular, the misidentification of one crook for another because of their names, which don’t announce themselves as similar, but are. Dinah Brand, the young woman mixed up with several of the crooks in the piece, whose information can be had for the right amount (the Op eventually coughs up a whopping $200.10 for her services), is one of the great American femmes fatale. And dear lord is there a lot of violence. It’s a red harvest, after all, because there’s so much blood — on the streets of Poisonville, and rushing to the temples of anyone in Hammett’s sure grip.