Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
182 pages
Published 1929
Read from January 18 to January 20
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
This
book wasn't what I expected it to be. When I hear that a novel is going
to be about "political corruption and gang violence in a western mining
town," I picture labor struggles and company towns and hired guns
shooting up strikers, or leftist agitators making trouble for the
bosses. I knew Hammett's "Continental Op" books were hardboiled pulp
detective fare -- I don't think Hammett wrote anything else -- but I was
eager to read a pulp story that dealt with one of my pet topics. I had
high hopes when, on page four, a man was introduced wearing a red tie.
But then the leftist guy disappeared and the rest of the book was about
conventional thugs and bootlegging and such. What with the title being Red Harvest,
I figured the red tie guy had to come back and play a central role in
the denouement (why else would he be introduced first thing in the
book?). In the same way, I figured the dame would turn out to be a bad
seed in the end. It's a pulp detective story, damn it. All the broads
are ears-deep in the racket. But no. I was wrong on both accounts. I
guess the guy was just a... red herring.
My main beef with this
book is that it was too twisty. Little more than halfway through I gave
up trying to keep up with the twists and red herrings and false
accusations and lies and double crossings and who was stabbing whom in
the back. I'd need a sheet of graph paper to keep it all straight. Maybe
hardboiled detective stories aren't my game.
As with The Maltese Falcon,
this was an entertaining slip of a book and I don't have much else to
add about it. I want more well-written pulp, but maybe not another
hardboiled detective yarn just yet. Any good hardboiled Westerns out
there?
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