Review 2009-01-23T23:48:28-08:00 27 A review of Dashiell Hammett's first novel - Red Harvest dashiell, hammett, red harvest, crime, novel, review 2009-01-24T00:00:00-08:00 If you like your murder served cold and in large portions, you'll love Dashiell Hammett's first novel, [i]Red Harvest[/i]. Voted one of the top 100 novels from 1923 - 2005 by [i]Time Magazine[/i], the book features tough men and nasty women tossing back and forth short, clipped lines of classic noir dialog. For example, I flipped open a random page to find a witness end her scene with "It's hell to die ugly as this." Dashiell Hammett is best known as the creator of [i]Sam Spade[/i], a character popularized by Humphrey Bogart in the 1940 adaptation of [i]The Maltese Falcon[/i]. Before Spade, there was [i]The Continental Op[/i], a nameless character who starred in Hammett's short stories. Those stories led to [i]Red Harvest[/i], Hammett's first novel, published in February, 1929. The character returned in [i]The Dain Curse[/i], published later that year. Though Hammett only published three more novels in his lifetime, he is often hailed as the father of the hard-boiled detective novel. [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashiell_Hammett][img size=246x304]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e8/Dashiell_Hammett.gif[/img][/url][capt]Dashiell Hammet[/capt] The novel starts with [i]The Continental Op[/i] being called to Personville (or [i]Poisonville[/i], if you say it with a Boston accent), a town of about 40,000 people somewhere near Boise, ID. At the same time as [i]The Op[/i] is waiting to meet his caller, editor of the local paper, his client is murdered. As [i]The Op[/i] digs around, we learn that the dead man's father, Elihu Willsson, used to own the town - literally. When unions threatened Willsson's profits, he brought in strike breakers. Willsson might have won the battle with the unions, but the strike breakers were gangsters, and quickly took over the town. Everything from the Governor's office down to the local soda fountain was corrupt. Rather than try to bring the criminals to justice, [i]The Op[/i] sets off a gang war, leading to chapter after chapter of murders and intrigue. This isn't an [i]Arsenic and Old Lace[/i] or a [i]The Butler in the Parlor with the Candlestick[/i] kind of a murder mystery. [i]Red Harvest[/i] has drugs, prostitution, booze smuggling, rigged boxing matches, police payoffs and killing after brutal killing. The hero is no Miss Marple either. Our nameless protagonist cleans up the town with dynamite, a match and a short fuse. If you want to know where film noir came from, don't watch a movie. Go to your local library, check out [i]Red Harvest[/i], and don't put it down until the last mobster dies. I give it nine out of ten stars. 2009-01-23T23:59:19-08:00 1