Product Description

When the last honest citizen of Poisonville was murdered, the Continental Op stayed on to punish the guilty--even if that meant taking on an entire town. Red Harvest is more than a superb crime novel: it is a classic exploration of corruption and violence in the American grain.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #23205 in Books
• Published on: 1989-07-17
• Released on: 1989-07-17
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

From Library Journal
The Continental Op, hero of this mystery, is a cool, experienced employee of the Continental Detective Agency. Client Donald Wilson has been killed, and the Op must track down his murderer. Personville, better known as Poisonville, is an unattractive company town, owned by Donald's father, Elihu, but controlled by several competing gangs. Alienated by the local turf wars, the Op finagles Elihu into paying for a second job, "cleaning up Poisonville." Confused yet? This is only the beginning of an incredibly convoluted plot. Hammett's exquisitely defined charactersDthe shabby, charming, and completely mercenary lady-of-the-evening; the lazy, humorous yet cold and avaricious police chief; and especially the tautly written, gradual disintegration of the Op's detached personalityDmake this a compelling read. In addition, William Dufris's performance is outstanding. Each character has his/her own unique vocal tag composed of both tonal inflections and speech patterns suited to his/her persona. Wonderful! The only flaw is the technical difficulty of cueing the "track book marked" CD format. An exceptional presentation of a lesser classic from the golden age of the mystery genre. Recommended for all but the smallest public and academic libraries.DI. Pour-El, Des Moines Area Community Coll., Boone, IA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From AudioFile
Dufris's boldly interpretive performance in this Hammett classic is breathtaking. He all but disappears into Hammett's rich cavalcade of characters. Man, woman, cynic, lunatic, naif, scoundrel, each personality is utterly realized, full-blooded and idiosyncratic. With expert pacing and emphasis, Dufris also manages to convey their shifts of emotion. His reading becomes every bit as engrossing as the written words themselves. The novel follows the investigations of an audacious, but never named, detective as he sifts through the violence and corruption of a flinty mining town. The novel is peopled with fascinating figures brought vividly to life by a most imaginative reader. M.O. Winner of AUDIOFILE's Earphones Award. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Review
"An acknowledged literary landmark."  --NY Times Book Review.

"Dashiell Hammett is an original. He is a master of the detective novel, yes, but also one hell of a writer." -- Boston Globe

"Hammett's prose [is] clean and entirely unique. His characters [are] as sharply and economically defined as any in American fiction."

--The New York Times

Customer Reviews

Disappointing
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.

Kicking Open The Door of the Hard-Boiled P.I. Novel
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

Ultra-Stylish Noir
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.