★★★★★ Red Harvest, by Dashiell Hammett
The Continental Op cleans up Poisonville
Red Harvest
Dashiell Hammett
The Continental Op cleans up Poisonville
I was a grad student in Biochemistry in 1980, and it was around then that my fellow grad students recommended Dashiell Hammett to me. It was a good recommendation. I went on to read all the Hammett novels I could find -- there were six, I think. That I read so many, despite my constrained time, should make it clear that I liked them. Of them all, I think my favorites were the stories of the Continental Op. And that is because of the central character, the Continental Op, who is never named. Every single summary of Hammett's work I have found uses the adjective "hard-boiled", and that fits. The Continental Op is the prototype of the tough, emotionally cold private detective who, if he cares about anything, cares only about the job. He's not your typical action hero -- one of the other characters describes him as "a fat, middle-aged, hard-boiled, pig-headed guy", but he's dangerous as dynamite.
The series continues with novel The Dain Curse and a collection of stories The Continental Op. If you're a fan of detective stories, or even if you're not , they're all worth a look.
You could easily get the impression that Red Harvest is a murder mystery novel. While not entirely wrong, that impression would be misleading. There are murder mysteries solved in Red Harvest, but they are a only a small part of the plot, and are solved only in passing. Rather, Red Harvest is a western transplanted to an early twentieth century mining town. Specifically, it's one of the those westerns in which a new sheriff comes to a town that the bad guys have ruined and cleans it up. The person who ruined Personville (AKA Poisonville) was old Elihu Willsson, the mining magnate who owns everything. Long before the novel begins, Willsson's miners struck, and he put the strike down
Old Elihu didn’t know his Italian history. He won the strike, but he lost his hold on the city and the state. To beat the miners he had to let his hired thugs run wild. When the fight was over he couldn’t get rid of them. He had given his city to them and he wasn’t strong enough to take it away from them. Personville looked good to them and they took it over. They had won his strike for him and they took the city for their spoils. He couldn’t openly break with them. They had too much on him. He was responsible for all they had done during the strike.
The Continental Op shows up, brought to town by Elihu's son Donald, who is killed before the Op meets him. He convinces old Eilhu to give the Continental Detective Agency $10,000 and a free hand to clean up Personville, and he does it, with bullets and blood and fire -- a Red Harvest indeed.