Red Harvest

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This is something of the Ur-source for the hard-boiled detective genre. The main character is the “Man with No Name” - the Continental Op - who is called to Personville aka “Poisonville” to meet with Donald Willsson, the last honest man in town. Unfortunately, the Op is five minutes too late and the man is murdered. The Op takes the lay of the land and learns that the police are corrupt and the town is run by three gangs - the gambling gang headed by Max “Whisper” Thaler, the bootleggers run by Pete the Finn, and the thugs run by Lew Yard. The Op meets with Willsson's father, Elihu Willsson, who owns the mining company that underlies Poisonville, and everything else in town, and who brought in the gangs to break a miner's strike. Elihu is curmudgeonly, contemptible and cowardly, and the Op browbeats him into paying him $10,000 to clean-up Poisonville.

The remainder of the book involves the Op playing the cops against the gamblers against the thugs against the bootleggers. Murders happen every couple of pages as the players whittle themselves down to nothing. The Op plays games of alliance and betrayal. Along the way, the Op solves several of the murders with flawless intuition. Throughout it all, the Op is tougher and more dangerous than his adversaries, and usually one step ahead.

If any of this familiar, it should. If you've seen “Fistful of Dollars” or “Yojimbo” or, even, Bruce Willis' “Last Man Standing,” where a stranger comes to town and destroys the equipoised gangs that control a town, then you've seen the Red Harvest plotline. In fact, Yojimbo and Fistful of Dollars were based on Red Harvest, and Last Man Standing is a re-make of Yojimbo.

I enjoyed the book, but I had two problems that keep me from giving five stars. First, the book shows that it was written in 1929. The dialogue is very dated with “tough guy” language that often eluded my grasp or which just sounded weird. Here's an example:

““Who? Who?”

She stood up, suddenly almost sober, tugging at my lapels. “Tell me who did it.”

“Not now.”

“Be a good guy.”

“Not now.”

She let go my lapels, put her hands behind her, and laughed in my face.

“All right. Keep it to yourself—and try to figure out which part of what I told you is the truth.”

I said: “Thanks for the part that is, anyhow, and for the gin. And if Max Thaler means anything to you, you ought to pass him the word that Noonan's trying to rib him.”

“Trying to rib him”? “Be a good guy”? Unfortunately, this sounds like cliched movie gangster talk, rather than normal speech, probably because Hammet's dialogue did become cliched gangster movie dialogue. Take this for example:

““I may say, in all justice, that you will find it the invariable part of sound judgment to follow the dictates of my counsel in all cases. I may say this, my dear sir, without false modesty, appreciating with both fitting humility and a deep sense of true and lasting values, my responsibilities as well as my prerogatives as a—and why should I stoop to conceal the fact that there are those who feel justified in preferring to substitute the definite article for the indefinite?—recognized and accepted leader of the bar in this thriving state.”

That is dialogue from a lawyer in Red Harvest, but try not to hear Sydney Greenstreet from The Maltest Falcon voicing that dialogue.

The other problem I had was the way that the Op solved mysteries in an offhand way. There would be gunplay followed by fistfights and threats, and then, suddenly, when he needed it, the Op would just arrest someone who had actually committed one of the three or four murders that mattered. As a mystery, the book was not much, but as “hard-boiled detective,” it is first rate.