A private detective is sent to a town called Personville only to find his client has been murdered. The detective finds out the town is divided by a labor dispute, which is the cause for all of the crime, and decides, after solving the case of the murder, that he’s got to kill all the crimz because they’ll come after him… or something?
Red Harvest is Dashiell Hammett’s first novel and it’s not great! While I like the idea of noir (Hammett was one of the founders of the subgenre) and early detective fiction, I never find these books especially compelling and this one proved no different.
It starts well. I could follow what was happening and the action moved fast - a murder right off the bat, suspicious characters, shady business dealings, et al. Past the initial murder mystery, things become confusing - either too convoluted or too simplistic and repetitive.
Because once the main character decides to end all crime in “Poisonville” (that’s why Hammett called it Personville - for that nickname), I think all that happens is him killing everyone and/or trying to turn them against each other to kill one another for him. It’s hard to tell - for much of this novel, I really couldn’t tell you what was happening or why, what the relevance of any character’s death was, what anyone’s motivation was beyond revenge and/or vague justice.
That’s also a feature of early detective fiction that makes me dislike these books: extremely convoluted plotting. And I don’t think it needs to be. It’s essentially a capable guy taking out one gangster after another. Why there needs to be all of this subterfuge and questions over who killed who seems unnecessary to the overall story. Just keep it (blood)simple: main character kills everyone by gunning them down - nothing else, no double-crossing or whatever, which only ends in the same place anyway.
It also shows Hammett’s greenness - it’s a first novel and his writing/storytelling lacks clarity that would really improve the narrative. I was even surprised to learn the main character’s name was The Continental Op, which seems unlikely and clunky - I thought that was his employer! I saw Kurosawa’s Yojimbo a while back, which was supposedly based on this novel, so my memory of that film helped me “get” the idea of the story Hammett was trying to tell. I feel like if I hadn’t seen Yojimbo I’d be even more lost at sea with this book.
But beyond the difficult plotting, the story itself isn’t that interesting. It just seems to be rats killing rats (hence the title - the body count is quite significant, so there’s lots of blood = red, and “harvest” for, I don’t know, a reaping of justice?). All of the characters seem the same, making it trickier still to distinguish them, and it’s hard to care about when one offs another, with this same event happening repeatedly throughout.
Red Harvest, and Hammett’s other fiction, may have been foundational in the creation of the hard-boiled detective subgenre but, beyond that, I don’t think it stands out as a good novel in its own right. Plotted haphazardly, with weakly-sketched characters, Red Harvest is a story that’s hard to follow and increasingly unengaging beyond its initial premise. I don’t know if Hammett’s other four novels got better with more writing experience but I wouldn’t recommend this book if you’re interested in this author.
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