Dashiell Hammett - Red Harvest

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Still brilliant

It’s at least 30 years since I first read Red Harvest and I’m very glad I went back to it. Hammett was a very fine writer and this is one of his best.

During the Prohibition Era, the narrator works for the Continental Detective Agency (and is known as “The Continental Op”) who is employed by a rich newspaper editor in the fictional Personville to clean up the vice and corruption in the city. There are four gangs plus a corrupt Chief Of Police and others whom the Continantal Op effectively sets against each other, with a resulting “war” and a huge body count.

The story isn’t wholly plausible, to be honest, but it is a good picture of the corruption that Hammett wanted to expose at the time, it’s superbly told and very involving. He is dryly witty, while plainly burning with anger at corruption and injustice and creates some very well-drawn characters, most notably Dinah Brand, whose presence makes the book worthwhile in itself. Hammett’s style is a real pleasure; he is sharp, unfussy and perceptive – and a huge pleasure after some of the over-long, overblown modern thrillers I have read. The writing is very spare – we never even learn the narrator's name, never mind any Complicated Personal Life. (Hurrah!) I read this paragraph and almost laughed with relief:

"We frisked the dead man's desk and dug up nothing in any way informative. I went up against the girls on the switchboard, and learned nothing. I put in an hour's work on messengers, city editors, and the like, and my pumping brought up nothing. The dead man, as his secretary said, had been good at keeping his affairs to himself."

In a lot of the books I've read recently, that would have taken 50 pages at least, complete with a number of irrelevant, thinly drawn characters, a lot of internal agonising and psychologising by the narrator, etc, etc.

Red Harvest is now 90 years old, but has aged very well indeed. Very warmly recommended.