Red Harvest

This book was... Sort of a slog to get through?

Some of Hammett's other books (you know the ones) are iconic and definitely worth reading. Red Harvest? I'm not so sure. He plays around with this idea of the hardboiled detective and the allure for most reviewers and advocates for the book seems to be that it's “really hardboiled,” which I guess just means insanely violent?

Detective shows up to a small city riddled with crime and corruption, gets hired by one of the people who made it that way to ‘clean it up,' and finds himself becoming the driver of endless violence and death. He worries about himself starting to enjoy it and things are only resolved in a sense that he got blackout drunk/stoned and didn't kill the woman he sorta liked?

With quite literally almost 100 years of distance from when this book was released, this trope of someone pitting the baddies against each other to survive being done a lot (better in some cases) since then, plus reading it with modern sensibilities, this book is just eh. The protagonist wasn't super likeable and served more as a vehicle to get from action scene to action scene. He served as the audiences eyes and ears for the spectacle of endless car chases, gun fights, brawls and heists.

There were what I'd call “third act issues” in this, as well, where it just felt like it dragged and whatever the actual plot was seemed muddy and lost in all of the blood. If your idea of “hardboiled” is not just an antihero, but one that doesn't seem to exist outside of his violence and nothing but nonstop destruction it's the book for you. If you're looking for the antihero and violence with something more in it, this'll probably not be the book for you.