Red Harvest

Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest is one of those books that it’s essential to read quickly, if only to keep track of each character’s brief existence and inevitable violent death.  I swear some of the smaller time mobsters are just introduced to up the body count.  This is particularly true of the end of the book where all character development seemingly goes out of the window in favour of more killing.  Having said that, that is my only niggle with the book.  Mostly it’s a fun and fast read simply because it’s a fast paced book.  The original crime, that kicks things into motion, is solved in the first 50-odd pages and after that the story rockets off to other crimes that are being committed thick and fast.  The whole of Red Harvest is set over three or four days and, read at the same pace, neither the novel’s protagonist nor the reader has a chance to catch their breath before the plot rattles on.

The plot of the book is a simple one.  Newspaper man Donald Willsson hires a private eye, only before the pair can meet Willsson is murdered and the detective takes it upon himself to solve not only Willsson’s murder, but to clean up the corrupt town of Personville.  Personville is pretty much the Gotham of Batman Begins.  Before Batman shows up, naturally.  There are fewer mad costumed criminals and Gotham has a few policemen that aren’t completely corrupt, but there’s a whole lot of mob-based crime which the police can’t even begin to tackle.

Red Harvest is a staple of the hard-boiled genre, with which I’m pretty familiar, but there are surprising bits to it as well.  There’s a woman.  A dame, if you will.  And for while I was expecting romance.  Women in these books fall into the virgin-redeemer or the whorish-corrupter categories and, while Dinah Brand certainly isn’t a virgin type, she is a helpmate to our detective hero.  When it became apparent that none of the redeemer types were going to have anything to do with him, I hoped she’d step up to the plate despite her gold-digging tendencies.  Hammett waxes lyrical about her for a while, (“I don’t like being manhandled, even by young women who look like something out of mythology when they’re steamed up,”) but ultimately she meets the same sticky end as many of Personville’s residents.  I think hers might have been the death that was only remotely shocking and it’s only because she’s female.  Dinah spends most of the book naïvely playing very dangerous men off against each other; she’s crying out to be murdered.  And yet, part of me expected her to be protected by genre conventions, or by the protagonist, as she is a woman who hasn’t done anything actually illegal.

Red Harvest is another book narrated by an unnamed protagonist.  He’s meant to be, I think, a faceless private eye.  Hammett draws our attention to his lack of names several times- there are frequent references to any given names being pseudonyms.  Unlike The Time Machine, however, this doesn’t prevent us from connecting with the character.  In fact, as we know he is the only one who can’t die in the whole mess, it’s fairly easy to relate to him.  He’s a safe bet, at least.  And any distance that there is in the book allows us to relax around the horror of all the dead.  The ability to connect is partly down to the style.  Whereas Wells’ unnamed scientist is very factual, Hammett’s detective is full of hard boiled poetry.  He thinks as the people of his world speak and the fact that it’s written in the present tense rather than a tale relay to us second hand helps with the immediacy.

Dashiell Hammett is an author I like and Red Harvest is the kind of book I enjoy.  It’s a solid genre piece in a genre that I love.  And I don’t really need to say much more than that.

 

Next to be written about is super short The Pigeon, by Patrick Süskind.