Rating: 
Summary: Red Harvest
Review: Good book. The Continental Op is called to Personville - generally known as Poisonville - by a client named Donald Willsson, a newspaperman who has made it his personal crusade to clean up the town of its rampant corruption - from the bootleggers to the chief of police. Willsson is murdered, and his father - Old Elihu - pays the Op $10,000 to find his son's murderer and to clean up the town. (Elihu used to own the town, but during an IWW strike he had to call in several toughs to break it: problem is they never left, and now he can no longer control them.) The Op must then walk a thin line, trying to play the gangsters and crooks off on one another, and try to stay alive as the dead pile up.Hammett has a swift, taunt style, and even though the novel is written in the first-person, characterization is revealed mostly though dialogue and actions, and not through introspection. This is my first Hammett novel, and I really enjoyed it. I'll be sure to read more.
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Summary: The best of Hammett in one neat bundle...
Review: Hammett is a master of fast-paced narrative and snappy dialogue. He wastes neither his own time nor that of the reader's with unnecessary characterization or flowery descriptions. The intensity of his writing is most evident in "Red Harvest" with its numerous characters and non-stop action. The clever story builds, along with the levels of suspense and violence, to depict a savage world in the heartland of America. Far better than the jovial "The Thin Man" or the lingering "Maltese Falcon," "Red Harvest" showcases all that Hammett did best.
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Summary: A Hard-Boiled Bounty
Review: Hammett is the best and this is Hammett's best. In 200 pages Hammett creates a densely packed universe of vivid characters and breathtaking action. I've read very good 500 pages books with less characterization and less action. A thrill from start to finish. Everyone knows Hammett was the king of fast-paced action but the many, many, memorable characters who fill this book make it a masterpiece. There has never been anything like "Red Harvest" before or since.
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Summary: Tough, Bleak and Brilliant
Review: Hammett's Red Harvest is probably the most devastatingly brutal good novel you'll ever read. It's not like slasher movies -- all blood and gore and no content. It's a book about brutal people, both gangsters and politicians, who will do anything to keep their hands on the power that they've managed to get hold of. The Continental Op, Hamett's anonymous detective, finds that the only way to clean up Personville is to join the fray, and though his conscience bothers him, he fights fire with fire and matches the scummy crooks machiavellian move to machiavellian move. What makes the book tick is precisely the bleak, realistic, nihilism of its main characters, who remind one so much of real politicians and crooks, but without any of the spin-doctor sheen that covers their tracks in the media. Red Harvest is a book I read every couple of years to marvel again at fantastic writing and the no-nonsense view of humanity's common, unadorned, ugliness.
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Summary: I hate books on audio . . .
Review: I do despise the whole concept of books on audio, primarily because the reader almost never matches my concept of a book's narrative voice. (Elliott Gould's comatose renderings of Phillip Marlowe, as an extreme example, make me want to "hurl my lunch over the fence," to borrow a phrase from Raymond Chandler.) And so I was in no way prepared for William Dufris' reading of Hammett's grossly underrated "Red Harvest"; Dufris caught me completely by surprise with his sure sense of pacing as well as his deftness in shifting from character to character in his voicings without resorting to caricature. Most importantly, however, there's the sheer insightfulness he brings to his reading: For all the times I've reread this novel, I had never been quite able to figure out the Continental Op's true motivation behind his instigation of what leads to wholesale carnage. Dufris, in his delivery of one key line in the first third of the story, crystallizes the man's motive. (And no, I'm not going to tell you the line; listen to this superb reading for yourself.) So yes, I hate books on audio . . . but here's one I'll readily listen to time and again. I definitely recommend it, particularly to anyone who has previously read the novel. It's an eye (and ear) opener!
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Summary: one of the best
Review: I like to consider Dashiell Hammett part of the Lost Generation. True, he wasn't a member of the crew including Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, and Hemingway that concentrated in France following WWI, but Hammett does use many similar elements unique to this movement, and Red Harvest is the epitome of my observation. It is a fascinating book, taken from the point of view of Hammett's trendsetting Continental Op. He is sent to Personville and finds himself a solitary soul on a quest to clean the town of a corruption that is so ingrained that even he begins to querie whether or not he too is being corrupted. Red Harvest is a fast paced book that is also a profound study of society, and it is a book that I highly suggest.
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Summary: A Revolutionary "Novel"
Review: It's hard to overemphasize just how important this book is to modern literature. In one fell swoop, Dashiell Hammett forever upset the world of "nice" genteel adventure and mystery stories, flooding the world in a clipped, tight-lipped, ugly torrent of blood and violence -- and I ain't compaining! Just about all modern novels and films of savagery and violence can be traced back to this crazy-kilter detective story in the sin-burg of Poisonville. I give it four stars instead of the full five only because the narrative, composed of linked but separately published units, doesn't cohere in the same astonishing way that Hammett's follow-ups, "The Maltese Falcon" and "The Glass Key" do. Still a kinetic fix for those interested in the seamier side of classic American literature. Practically adapted lock stock n' barrell by Akira Kurosawa for his Samurai movie "Yojimbo" (which later became "Fistful of Dollars" and "La! st Man Standing" -- the latter coming the closest to Hammett's original setting, making this sequence a huge circle back to the origin of species).
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Summary: Red Harvest
Review: Not just a detective story. This is a true work of literary genius. The Continental Op's crusade to clean-up Poisonville is an exploration of ethics and morals in America. Hammett's lean, edgy style is as modern today as it must have seemed in 1929. A must read after reading all other Op stories, as well as a treat for the "reading ears" of anyone searching for inteligent prose.
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Summary: Red Harvest--Hardboiled Crime Prototype.
Review: Not only great Hammett, but also great Kurosawa and great Sergio Leone. Red Harvest is the story that inspired "Yojimbo" and "A Fistful of Dollars", and more recently "The Last Man Standing," starring Bruce Willis. Read Red Harvest and then view the films.
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Summary: Clearly Hammett's Best
Review: Of all the books written by the chronological trio of Hammett, Chandler, and MacDonald, only Red Harvest seems as honest and truthful now as I am sure it did in 1939. Although Hammett lacks Chandler's writing flare and sarcasm, his style makes for fast-paced, edge of the seat reading. As his Continental Op escapes harrowing situation after another, I was left with a disbelief, but this novel is not about whether the Op could ruin an entire town with merely a scratch. It is instead a commentary on society, and on the cutthroat nature still evident in us all. In so many ways, this novel reminds me of Shirley Jackson's haunting story "The Lottery" because the evil in our world is within the system, and in each person. Just as the Op confesses to wanting to join the killing spree, Hammett has made us want to read about more killing. He dupes us into playing the Op's game. This novel is so much deeper than what can be read in the text. In his own way, he tells us to look out for a system corrupted by greed and a quest for power. Much like Chandler, Hammett always has a message. Heed this one readers, but enjoy the enchantment of this amazing novel.
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