Red Harvest by
Dashiell Hammett
pbk out May 03
(Orion)
at £6.99
Another in the Orion Crime Masterworks series of paperbacks,
reprinting old classics for new readers. This one is the first written by
the legendary Dashiell Hammett, one of the original purveyors of
hard-boiled thrillers. This one dates from 1929 and is written in
medieval American, much of which was double-Dutch to me. I could
guess a lot of the words from the context, but I doubt if many people
in the US of A would now have a complete grasp of the vocabulary.
Written in the first person, the central figure is never given a name,
being known only as the 'Op', as he is an operative working for the
Continental Detective Agency – Hammett himself worked for
Pinkertons. He is sent to a grim mining town called Personville,
known to all as 'Poisonville', which is totally in the hands of
racketeers, including the Chief of Police. These were the days of
bootlegging, speakeasies and crooks with Tommy-guns riding on the
running-boards of large sedans.
The Op was called in by the newspaper editor, recently returned from
living in Europe with the unwelcome notion of getting the town
cleaned up. He is the son of Elihu Willsson, the godfather-style spider
that sits at the centre of the web of corruption. However, the son gets
shot the night that Op arrives and father hires him to try to break up the
syndicate, even though he is major part of it.
The plot consists mainly of everyone getting shot in turn, with gun
battles in the street virtually every day. There are almost too many
characters to keep track of, with casual killings every few pages. How
the Op manages to stay alive is the biggest mystery in the book, as he
is striving to turn every faction against each other, so that they wipe
each other out.
The terse laconic style became the hallmark of Hammett who wrote
scores of book and short stories. I am sure that I will offend many
aficionados of the hard-jawed, cigarette-smoking, gun-toting
gumshoe, when I say that I feel that the writing, though hard-edged to
the point of being lacerating, seems rather out-dated now, even apart
from the obscure vocabulary. It is an interesting experience to read it
over seventy years later, but the enjoyment is a little like browsing
around an antique shop.
(
Bernard Knight
ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series)
Red Harvest by
Dashiell Hammett
