Dashiell Hammett’s comical (as I take it)
Red Harvest casts a long shadow. It’s arguably the first hard-boiled detective novel, a subgenre that dominated mystery fiction across the 20th century and into the 21st. It was also influential on the movies
Yojimbo and
A Fistful of Dollars, at least via a bank shot off Hammett’s own
The Glass Key, serialized in 1930. Akira Kurosawa, director of
Yojimbo, a certain influence on director Sergio Leone, said
The Glass Key, not
Red Harvest, inspired his movie. Be that as it may, they all involve corrupt townships which an outsider manipulates into open and devastating warfare. As always with Hammett and much hard-boiled detective fare (the exceptions are James M. Cain and Jim Thompson) I tend to get confused with the typical blizzards of characters, motives, and fedoras that can be virtually indistinguishable. Characters can tend to be embodiments or markers of motive. It’s still fun to read from time to time, and reminds me it’s been too long since I looked at Hammett (or Raymond Chandler). I call this one comical because it is often funny and what else are you supposed to do? It’s a bacchanalia of blood-simple depravity. A fictional town in Montana named Personville (which many call Poisonville) is overrun by bootleggers and gangsters. Our unnamed first-person narrator, the so-called “Continental Op” and a regular in Hammett fiction, arrives and sets the various factions in town against one another. They quickly get to killing every time. One of my favorite jokes is a paragraph where our guy adds up all the corpses in his head and comes to the number 16. Shortly down the road is a chapter called “The Seventeenth Victim.” And it doesn’t stop there. The spoiler would be telling you who survives.
Red Harvest is short, under 200 pages, and Hammett remains one of the greatest writers of the form. Yes, sometimes the language may seem
too chiseled and/or overly active. But come on. How many writers ever err on that side? Most of them, like me, run on at will and leave all their wordy little darlings in place. It’s possible some may find
Red Harvest too dark and grim. But that’s only because of all the death. Lighten up, folks!
In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (
Library of America)
I wrote the first chapter of my dissertation on this novel, so you could say it's close to me. I assigned it to a class exactly once, early in my career. I thought of myself as a cool teacher who didn't assign the stuffy classics, not thinking that in 1990, a book like Red Harvest was itself seen as a stuffy classic by my students. I still remember one student asking, "What's a lunger?"
ReplyDeleteHa, that's funny. Kids!
ReplyDelete