Red Harvest
RED HARVEST (Dashiell Hammett) - Four Stars
Red Harvest, Hammett's first full-length novel, is not only a shining example of the crime fiction that was popular in the 1920s and 1930s but also a textbook on economical writing.
Hammett launches into the story with aplomb, and relates his tale with a delightful impatience for exposition and great skill for describing people and places with a few short, precise phrases. The story barely pauses to breathe, with plot twists, switchbacks, and misdirections occurring every couple of pages. What starts out as a tale about a murdered newspaper editor quickly becomes a labrynthine puzzle involving bootleggers, corrupt cops, a manipulative femme fatale and an abrasive, wealthy, elderly man who uses his fortune to pull a lot of strings. There's gun fights and car chases and lots of hard drinking. The body count is in the dozens (maybe over a hundred). It's what an action-movie script would look like transferred to fine literary form. Barely 140 pages, Red Harvest has enough action, excitement, and events for a standard 500-page novel. (All five of Hammett's novels—the others being The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, and The Thin Man; you might have heard of one or two of them—are of equal brevity, around 140-150 pages.)
The cast of characters is enormous for such a short book, and Hammett has no compunction rotating major character in and out of the plotlines for dozens of pages at a time. Somewhat amusingly, minor characters are tossed into the fray like skeet, showing up at intermittent intervals to reveal an important clue, before just as quickly embarking on their unknown quest for certain death. (One of the most smirk-worthy: a slimy lawyer is introduced to the story on page 114, says his final words on page 118, and is found dead on page 120—Hammett spares no time for dawdling!)
My biggest reservation going into the book was the fear that the 1920s gangster slang would seem trite and cliche by modern standards. Even though this was one of the ORIGINATORS of that very cliche, I was still worried that the language would not have aged well. My fears were unfounded. The story moves at such a break-neck pace, and Hammett's no-name Continental Op narrates the story with such a casual, conversational air that the slang terms seem fresh and new, as if they had never been used before. The book carries itself with a swagger, with a sort of "who gives a fuck what you think?" attitude directed towards the audience. It's here to tell a tale; too bad for you if you don't like it.
So why four-stars and not five? Well, Red Harvest just tells a tale. There's no deep meaning here, nothing to reflect on after you close the cover. The book, for all its dizzying plot-twists, is as shallow as a bowl of soup. But it's a great tale, told very well.
Red Harvest, Hammett's first full-length novel, is not only a shining example of the crime fiction that was popular in the 1920s and 1930s but also a textbook on economical writing.
Hammett launches into the story with aplomb, and relates his tale with a delightful impatience for exposition and great skill for describing people and places with a few short, precise phrases. The story barely pauses to breathe, with plot twists, switchbacks, and misdirections occurring every couple of pages. What starts out as a tale about a murdered newspaper editor quickly becomes a labrynthine puzzle involving bootleggers, corrupt cops, a manipulative femme fatale and an abrasive, wealthy, elderly man who uses his fortune to pull a lot of strings. There's gun fights and car chases and lots of hard drinking. The body count is in the dozens (maybe over a hundred). It's what an action-movie script would look like transferred to fine literary form. Barely 140 pages, Red Harvest has enough action, excitement, and events for a standard 500-page novel. (All five of Hammett's novels—the others being The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, and The Thin Man; you might have heard of one or two of them—are of equal brevity, around 140-150 pages.)
The cast of characters is enormous for such a short book, and Hammett has no compunction rotating major character in and out of the plotlines for dozens of pages at a time. Somewhat amusingly, minor characters are tossed into the fray like skeet, showing up at intermittent intervals to reveal an important clue, before just as quickly embarking on their unknown quest for certain death. (One of the most smirk-worthy: a slimy lawyer is introduced to the story on page 114, says his final words on page 118, and is found dead on page 120—Hammett spares no time for dawdling!)
My biggest reservation going into the book was the fear that the 1920s gangster slang would seem trite and cliche by modern standards. Even though this was one of the ORIGINATORS of that very cliche, I was still worried that the language would not have aged well. My fears were unfounded. The story moves at such a break-neck pace, and Hammett's no-name Continental Op narrates the story with such a casual, conversational air that the slang terms seem fresh and new, as if they had never been used before. The book carries itself with a swagger, with a sort of "who gives a fuck what you think?" attitude directed towards the audience. It's here to tell a tale; too bad for you if you don't like it.
So why four-stars and not five? Well, Red Harvest just tells a tale. There's no deep meaning here, nothing to reflect on after you close the cover. The book, for all its dizzying plot-twists, is as shallow as a bowl of soup. But it's a great tale, told very well.
"Then you'll have your city back, all nice and clean and ready to go to the dogs again. If you don't do it, I'm going to turn these love letters of yours over to the newspaper buzzards, and I don't mean your Herald crew—the press associations. I got the letters from Dawn. You'll have a lot of fun proving that you didn't hire him to recover them, and that he didn't kill the girl doing it. But the fun you'll have is nothing to the fun people will have reading these letters. They're hot. I haven't laughed so much over anything since the hogs ate my kid brother."
posted by Kevin at 1:48 PM
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