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by William Breault
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by Mobil Travel Guides
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by Karl H. Pribram
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(Larger Image) |
by Kevin Munroe, Dave Wilkins (Illustrator: Sean Galloway) (Illustrator: Tony Washington)
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by Lia Matera
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by John Wesley Howard
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Red Harvest
by Dashiell Hammett
Product Group: Book
Publisher: John Curley & Assoc (1983-06)
ISBN: 0893406082
EAN: 9780893406080
Dewy Decimal #: 813.52
Paperback: 319 pages
SKU: mon0000043263
Condition: Good
Comments: Ex-library Book. Large print.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
One of Hammett's masterpieces, this is the most vivid and realistic picture of gang war ever written--and one of the most exciting of all suspense novels.
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Customer Reviews
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Hammett's Best
Rating  (5)
Date: 2008-11-12
Above all of his other books, Red Harvest is the essential Hammett read. Dark, gritty, thought provoking and even humorous, this book delivers everything you could desire from a classic detective text. To not enjoy and appreciate this book is to dismiss the genre as a whole.
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A Tale of Our Time, from 1929
Rating (5)
Date: 2008-10-18
One of the major pioneering works of the hardboiled detective genre, Red Harvest is also a nightmarish vision of a world thoroughly corrupted by capitalism in an era of crisis. Hammett has received plenty of attention for his brilliantly drawn characters, razor-sharp dialogue, and judicious use of humor, revulsion and violence in moving his plots along. The key character in Red Harvest, however, is not the unnamed "Continental Op" who narrates the tale but meglomaniacal Elihu Willsson, the mining magnate who transforms Personville into "Poisonville" through his insistance on retaining absolute power over his company town by unleashing murderous gangsters to crush the local labor movement when they go on strike after World War I. By the time the Op arrives on the scene the city has become a criminal cesspool engaged in every form of vice, and claiming Willsson's reform-minded son as its latest victim.
No serious assessment of Red Harvest can fail to take into account the way in which it parallels the contemporary rise of fascism. Using violence to preserve the privileges of capitalist elites at the expense of any pretense of democracy or liberty, fascism's paramilitary brownshirts and the sharp-dressed gangsters in Red Harvest are brothers in arms. In his effort to "clean up" Personville, Hammett's Continental Op finds the only means of doing so is by exploiting the distrust, greed, and corruption of its gangsters and local government officials, a process that draws him into the same moral pit and from which he recoils by seeking to escape. While we continue to grapple with the corruptions of late capitalism, Hammett's work is as relevant in the 21st century as it was in 1929.
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Disappointing
Rating  (1)
Date: 2008-06-26
0 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
While this novel may have an important place in the history of crime fiction it is simply an awful read. The plot is convoluted and the violence is over the top. If you were going to read only one Dashiell Hammett novel please make it The Maltese Falcon which I have read over and over.
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Kicking Open The Door of the Hard-Boiled P.I. Novel
Rating  (4)
Date: 2008-05-20
4 out of 4 customers found this reveiw helpful
RED HARVEST arose from a series of short stories Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) wrote between about 1923 and 1927 that featured "the Continental Op," specifically an operative for the The Continental Detective Agency, San Francisco office.
Hammett has to jump through a lot of narrative hoops to consolidate these short stories into the novels RED HARVEST and the slightly later THE DAIN CURSE, and the result is often excessively convoluted; readers often have to turn back several pages to figure out who has done what. Even so, both novels continue to crackle today, and in creating them Hammett not only essentially created the American P.I. novel, he also developed a uniquely sparse, often brutal, yet often poetic style. To say that both accomplishments have cast a long shadow indeed would be a profound literary understatement.
RED HARVEST finds the nameless detective summoned by newspaper publisher Donald Willson to Personville, a mining town crammed to overflowing with corruption of every variety imaginable--and before the Op can meet with his client Willson is gunned down in highly suspicious circumstances on Hurricane Street, not far from the home of notorious good-time girl Dinah Brand. It happens that Willson's father Elihu Willson, who founded the city, is now a captive to its corruption in more ways than one, and after the Op settles the question of who killed Douglas, the Op blackmails the old man into allowing him to clean up the town.
The Op seldom plays by law-and-order rules, and his solution to the problem is both clever and direct: he creates a series of situations that sets the various crime bosses at odds. Before you know they are gunning each other down in the streets, leaving both the Op and Dinah Brand to do some mighty frisky hopping in an effort to stay clear. But can they, when there are so few easy ways out?
A mixture of alcoholism and politics cut Hammett's career short; his short stories aside, he produced only five novels, and critics are quick to point out that THE MALTESE FALCON is his finest work. I would agree with that, but while RED HARVEST may be less smoothly written, it has the unexpected energy of a great talent's first major work, and that more than makes up for the occasional rough edge in technique. Strongly recommended.
GFT, Amazon Reviewer
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Ultra-Stylish Noir
Rating (4)
Date: 2007-11-24
2 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
I had problems with this novel. I couldn't follow all of the complexities of the ultra-complicated, ever-shifting plot of wholesale corruption in a small, industrial Western city (corporate, police, mob, etc.). And it all seemed so familiar, hackneyed. But then I remembered a couple of things: That this was so familiar because hundreds of other authors and thousands of other books have tried with varying degrees of success to mimic and further develop Hammett's "hard-boiled", noirish style in the past 75 or so years. And also, that perhaps it wasn't necessary to follow the incredibly convoluted plot, or even keep full track of who each of the legion of sleazy characters are, in order to best enjoy the book. After I made those decisions, the rest of my reading experience was much more pleasurable and rewarding. In a strange way it reminded me of some the French "nouveau romain" authors where the style, the words, the way things are expressed, the endless repetition of certain motifs, words, and concepts become the primary or perhaps only true point of the novel. After a while, it became hypnotizing, marvelous, and, for me, laugh-out-loud hilarious, particularly with the "Laudinum" chapter (and actually, a lot of the second half of the book) beginning to remind me of things like Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a favorite book of mine. Always very granular and factual, the overload of facts, events, wise cracks, sleaze, and more sleaze and wise cracks becomes like some kind of demented (but amazing) symphony. I believe I'll remember this one for quite a while -- although I'm not sure I'm ready to jump into another one of his works right now. I'll save it for later when I've recovered from this one.
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