Red Harvest – Dasheill Hammett (Alfred A. Knopf 1929)

Anybody that brings any ethics to Poisonville is going to get them all rusty.

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I hadn’t heard of Hammett until I looked into the literary precursors of the Godfather of Gumshoe, Raymond Chandler. It turns out that Hammett was doing it almost as well a decade earlier and, what is more, had himself been a Pinkerton Agency detective (and later served a prison sentence due to his politics). So he knew it from both sides, which may explain why he’s considerably ‘harder-boiled’ than other writers in the genre.

This novel is set in Personville (pronounced ‘Poisonville’) which, at the beginning, the private dick narrator – the unnamed Continental Op – is hired to clean up. His services are engaged by the town’s aging bigwig, following the murder of his son, but the place is a mess of police corruption, battling gangs and ancient grudges. And, seemingly in the centre of it all, is a jaded, hard-drinking, untrustworthy beauty – with ‘a face as hard as a silver dollar’ – whom the narrator keeps running up against.

All the ingredients of a Chandler novel are here but each one of them is nastier, and so the tone is that much more cynical. The fighting is ugly, the killing brutal, and the wisecracks particularly bitter. Hammett’s narrator does a good line in self-loathing combined with the doggedness to see his job through. In fact, there are moments when completing the job seems to eclipse all moral concerns. ‘When you’re out on a job,’ he says, ‘you’ve got to do it the best way you can.’ And for much of the novel it’s difficult to believe there will be any winners – or indeed anyone left – in Poisonville.

But, for all this bleakness, it’s entertaining and absorbing detective fiction. Pithy character thumbnails abound: the narrator’s agency manager is a ‘gentle, polite, elderly person with no more warmth in him than a hangman’s rope’; a gang leader’s ‘pretty face was yellow and tough as oak…his lips were paper-thin.’ And the plot is satisfyingly multilayered: gradually Hammett reveals how much of Poisonville’s present predicament is the result of festering sores in its principal characters’ past relationships. And, once the Continental Op has started, he won’t stop until all of them are exposed – or someone stops him.

Critics have suggested Hammett wrote fiction as an antidote to (or even penance for) his role in the Pinkerton goon squad, and there is the occasional lightening of mood which certainly comes as relief from the novel’s grim business of detecting. His narrator mentions how ‘a notion stirred in my noodle’ or ‘a bullet kissed a hole in the doorframe’ or – almost jauntily as the body count rises – how ‘I bent a fresh collar round my neck and trotted over to City Hall.’ The Continental Op is friendless, resigned to resistance and goes into situations expecting not to come out; however, as he says to the bigwig who hired and then tries to fire him, ‘I’ll give you nothing but a good job of city-cleaning. That’s what you bargained for and that’s what you’re going to get.’