Red Harvest [Hardcover]

In "Red Harvest," the Op is summoned to Personville (known locally as Poisonville), where he is engaged by newspaper publisher Donald Willson, who is murdered before the agent has an opportunity to meet him. At first the novel feels like a traditional murder mystery; in its first half there are two homicides (among more than two dozen gangland-style assassinations) whose clues are scattered for the reader--and the Op--to solve.

Yet the two whodunits are red herrings meant to distract--and entertain--the reader (and crime novel aficionados will figure both of them out within a few paragraphs). Not just a murder mystery, "Red Harvest" pursues broader themes: how corruption and greed poisons the inhabitants of Poisonville, how the Op is able to thwart the ambitions of various criminals by playing their own unprincipled game, and how his own abandonment of professional code nearly destroys the detective himself.

Most of the crooks are stock figures from noir central casting, but the novel's femme fatale, Dinah Brand, is the most memorable. She serves not only as foil to the Op's passionless cynicism but also as a warning to the dangers of the sport: like the Op, she insinuates herself into whichever camp is in control, never dirtying her own hands with the unsavory activities that bring her the money she voraciously accumulates--only to find herself expendable when no faction needs her at all.

During a flirtatious rendezvous with Dinah, the Op slips into a laudanum-induced dream, in which he imagines himself "hunting for a man I hated. I had an open knife in my pocket and meant to kill him." He finds the man and pursues him across a rooftop, where they tussle near the building's edge, only to realize "that I had gone off the edge of the roof with him." When he awakes, The Op--and the reader--discovers just how near the edge of precipice he has crawled, and the remainder of this perceptive book recounts his journey back from the brink.

"Red Harvest"'s opening paragraph is one of the best hooks I've ever read in a novel. It's fantastic. We are sucked into the mind of our narrator, the unnamed Continental operative, and we want only to read more about this man of such blunt wit. The Continental Op has been called to a town named Personville by the owner of the town's newspaper, Donald Willsson. He doesn't know what the job is, but before he can find out, the client is murdered. So the first order of business is to solve the murder. In doing so, our detective discovers how Personville got its nickname, Poisonville. Everything and everyone in this town is corrupt. Its citizens are ruled by bootleggers and low-lifes who retain their power through indiscriminate violence. Even the town's former boss, Elihu Willsson, a wealthy industrialist who was not above murder in his own day, is now reluctantly under the thumb of the new crop of thugs. Our detective takes offense at Poisonville's powers trying several times to assassinate him in the course of his murder investigation, so he decides to stay and clean up the place. Little did he expect that Poisonville's rampant bloodshed would poison him, as he is seduced by the town's murderous ways.

It's surprising to me that Dashiell Hammett wrote "Red Harvest" years before "The Thin Man". "Red Harvest"'s style seems more developed and its characters better drawn than in the later novel. That's not to say that I don't like "The Thin Man". I actually prefer its more scandalous brand of cynicism. Hammett is always cynical, but sociopathic behavior is to be expected from the characters that inhabit Personville's landscape. They are criminals and police officers (remember, this is the 1920s). The undeniably sociopathic behavior of everyone in "The Thin Man" -from small time con men, to respectable bourgeois, to Park Avenue blue bloods- is like a slap in the face. And so is the book's shameless lack of justice. But perhaps Hammett just chose a different shock tactic in "Red Harvest". The book's greatest cynicism is in the ease with which the Continental Op is seduced into abandoning his own code of conduct when faced with the opportunity to murder without consequences. That's why they call it Poisonville. Fans of noir detective stories wont' want to miss "Red Harvest". There are enough hard-boiled one-liners to inspire glee in those who really enjoy them. Hammett's style is fluid and easy to read. And there is more than one mystery to be solved.