(Poisonville) was an ugly city of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining. Spread over this was a grimy sky that looked as if it had come out of the smelters' stacks.The Continental Op's first impression of Personville (known as Poisonville, even by those mugs who don't pronounce "shirt" as "shoit") may have been depressing to him but it was music to my ears -- here was a promise of the kind of gritty noir language that I've been enjoying so much in the books of Raymond Chandler. But, too soon, I realised that although Dashiell Hammett came first -- and despite Red Harvest being considered a bona fide classic of American literature -- this book wasn't nearly as much fun as those Chandler gems.
The plot of Red Harvest is complicated, with dozens of characters (thugs and mobsters and corrupt cops) who drop in and retreat and misdirect the detective. Having promised to clean up the town, in the end, all the Continental Op can do is set the rival gangs on each other and wait for them to take each other out. That may not sound complicated, but along the way, there are countless murders that the detective tries to solve, and the longer he spends in the corrupt town, the dirtier his own soul becomes: "This damned burg's getting me. If I don't get away soon I'll be going blood-simple like the natives."
Originally serialized in four parts in the pulp magazine Black Mask from 1927 to 28, the whole was assembled as Hammond's first novel and released in 1929 -- and this may explain why it seemed unnecessarily bloated, with false solutions along the way and new characters added so late in the plot. The Continental Op was based on Hammond's own experiences with the Pinkerton Detective Agency and Red Harvest is said to contain scenes from his time working as a detective in the mining town of Butte, Montana during labor strife there -- but if Hammond was as morally unscrupulous as the character he created, it's probably a good thing he left the agency. As an early effort in the genre -- as the pioneering effort -- I'm not exactly disappointed, but although not blown away this time, I'll definitely read some more Hammett in the future for more scenes like this:
"Don Willsson's gone to sit on the right hand of God, if God don't mind looking at bullet holes."
"Who shot him?" I asked.
The gray man scratched the back of his neck and said:
"Somebody with a gun."
