Rating: 
Summary: Solid hard-boiled detecive novel inspired 3 films
Review: Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett, is a tense, fast-paced well written tale of Hammett's hero, The Continental OP, cleaning up a criminal-ridden town by setting all the various factions againts each other. I enjoyed this novel, though I prefer Raymond Chandler's style to Hammett's. Hammett's is a little more sparse. However, if you searching for a good introduction to the genre, here's a good place to start.
Trivia note: This novel has inspred three movies (none credited the book as inspiration). Toshiro Mifune as a samurai in YOJIMBO; Clint Eastwood as the man with No Name in FISTFUL OF DOLLARS and more recently, Bruce Willis in LAST MAN STANDING.
Rating: 
Summary: "It was a tough job and a useless one."
Review: Red Harvest is less well-known than its more famous Hammett brothers, The Maltese Falcon and the Thin Man. It may well be my favorite, but it would be really hard to choose. Hammett is one of the greats of detective fiction and his work has both defined and exceeded the typical genre boundaries.
Red Harvest (1929), like many Hammett novels, is as much about the corruption of place as it is about a particular murder mystery. The mining town of Personville/Poisonville comes into the life of the Continental Op when he gets stood up by a potential client, and becomes the focus of his efforts to clean up corruption in the town when that client is killed. The book is actually structured as a series of linked smaller stories about the town, but instead of providing obvious divisions, this structure lends the book a complexity which compliments (rather than undermines) the unity of the whole.
Red Harvest is as tough and dark as a reader could want without falling into self-parody. Hammett has a distinctive crisp and clean writing style which makes the pages fly by faster than the reader would want them to. A must-read for fans of Noir and hard-boiled detectives, a should-read for pretty much everyone else.
Rating:
Summary: Quick, Sharp, and Still the Best
Review: The best thing about Dashiell Hammett books is that they are usually readable within 48 hours and yet still contain enough interesting content to prove satisfying. The Continental Op is in full force in Red Harvest, which often gets overlooked in favor of the Maltese Falcon or the Thin Man but which is still evidence of Hammett's eminent skill in crafting an intricate plot with interesting characters. Unlike the meandering prose of others in the genre, Hammett manages to combine a flowery descriptive style with a human quality that achieves a high level of suspense. When the Op is finally sucked into the machinations of Poisonville, you can't turn the pages fast enough to find out how it will turn out. That's the mark of a good book in any form.
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Summary: Both superior crime novel and incisive social commentary
Review: The Continental Op is, as far as I'm concerned, the most interesting of Dashell Hammett's characters. He's a middle aged fat man employed by a national detective agency similar to Pinkerton (which Hammett worked for before turning to writing). As such, he's nominally bound to rules which he generally follows, but breaks in this particular case.His client is murdered before he meets him, and hired by the client's father to find the murderer, finds himself in a totally corrupt community basically run by the mob. Though he easily finds the murderer, he stays on in the father's hire to clean up the town, spurred on by the actions of one of the corrupt law authorities. The story is engrossing, and the implications are even more so. The corruption is so deep that it affects even the main character. The theme common to most Contintinental Op stories is here: Everybody lies and the only way to get at the truth is to create your own lie. Every tough crime story needs its love interest, and this one is very believable in that you can see why she is drawn to this middle aged fat man and why he can find her acceptable. You also realize why he's withholding his feelings both from himself and from the reader. While not Hammett's most read novel, it's definitely expertly crafted and one quite rewarding to read.
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Summary: Murder, Mayhem, & Machiavellian Machinations
Review: The Continental Op, an anonymous agent of the Continental Detective Agency, comes to corrupt Personville (aka Poisonville) and investigates a series of murders. In succession he confronts the murder of the publisher of the local paper, the murder of the police chief's brother, and the murder of a beautiful woman. The publisher's father, convinced that local gangsters are responsible for his son's death, employs the Op to break up the organized crime stranglehold on Personville. The Continental Op determines that he cannot quickly destroy the crimelords by lawful means, so he decides to work outside the law to destroy them. The murder of the police chief's son provides him with a golden opportunity to maneuver the rival gangs into lethal conflict. During these investigations, peripheral characters drop like flies as rival gangs feud over turf. The Continental Op continues his investigations, stirs up strife among the gangs, and tries to elude arrest himself as the dance of death lumbers to its bloody denouement. It is near impossible to keep an accurate bodycount through the course of the novel. Despite the carnage, the detective work is excellent, the intrigue is gripping, and the mysteries are satisfying. This book inspired three movies: Akira Kurosawa's "Yojimbo," the Clint Eastwood oater "A Fistful of Dollars," and the Bruce Willis prohibition era epic "Last Man Standing." I haven't seen "Yojimbo," but the Eastwood and Willis movies hardly compare to "Red Harvest" for complexity and character development. They accentuate the bloodshed and virtually ignore everything else.
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Summary: Social History in a Nutshell
Review: The name "Personville" is a generic name for all the towns named after a company owner. "Red Harvest" is about a town where hired gunmen were brought in for strike-breaking. They then gained control of the town, going from servants to masters; but no one gang gained control. The company owner then used his newspaper to try to advocate a "civic reform" campaign to regain control. His newspaper publisher son hired the Continental Op, but was killed before they meet. (Was this similar to Robert F. Kennedy's prosecution of organized crime?) Machiavelli's Letter to the Prince of Florence (p.9) tells of the problems with a mercenary army: they can takeover the government that hired them. Only a citizen army is proper to a republic. Creating a militia by arming the cirtizens of "Personville" could have put an end to these gangs, but the political control of "Elihu Willsson" would have ended as well. The 1877 strike in Pittsburgh's coal and iron industry led to the abolishment of the traditional local militia and its replacement by a state-controlled militia. Newly powerful corporations now controlled the state government, and the new "National Guard" developed into a strike-breaking force with the power of law. The Continental Op purges "Personville" and leaves, but the book doesn't tell how quickly new gangs re-appear. The corporate control continues, with its need for strike-breaking gunmen; they pop up like teeth in a shark. Corporate control of politicians and government may only be possible with this corruption. The politics of this novel guarantees that it will never be faithfully filmed by Hollywood, unlike some of his other novels. But this made it a best sell in 1929 and afterwards.
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Summary: Last Man Writing, or the beginning of the genre is the end
Review: The posters for the Bruce Willis blood-fest Last Man Standing credit the original story to Akira Kurosawa's insanely funny destroying-the-town-to-save-it movie Yojimbo (AS IF Bruce Willis had an earthly of filing the blood-and-dust soaked waraji of Mifune). And there, for the majority of movie-goers, no doubt, the story begins and ends.
Unless you know Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest. Unless you've ripped through the pages in an agonizing frenzy of suspense and awe, desperate to find out WHAT HAPPENS NEXT but hanging on to each page a second longer to savor the impeccable use of words, the flawless balance between economy and imagery, the sheer perfection of the writing.
It's gang warfare in Poisonville, set in motion by the venomous old snake whose bite sickened the town in the first place. Poisonville is an oozing sore ripe for cleaning, and the Continental Op cleans it with a vengeance. Wolf this one down in one gulp the first time through and then start over again at the beginning and linger over the sweet taste of nastiness made delicious through the brilliance of a master word-chef.
Hammet perfected the hard-boiled private eye genre even as he invented it. The genre would have been complete had no-one ever written another word in it
Rating:
Summary: The Continental Op Cleans Up
Review: The story is told by an agent from the Continental Detective Agency. He has been called to the town of Personville or, as he explains, is more aptly named, Poisonville. His client is Donald Willsson, but Willsson is shot and killed before the Continental Op can meet him. He decides to visit Willson's father, Elihu, who until recently ran the town. Elihu Willson winds up hiring the Continental Op to clean up the town by getting rid of the town's 3 criminal bosses. In true gangster-style, the names of the criminals are Max "Whisper" Thaler, Lew Yard and Pete the Finn. The clean up job becomes the main focus of the rest of the book, although along the way, the Continental Op manages to solve the murder of his original client as well as most other minor crimes that spring up around him. The Continental Op is an interesting character, having no qualms about setting others up, knowingly placing them in mortal danger in order to uncover evidence or confirm his suspicions. He will lie, cheat and double-cross just about anyone. The deaths come thick and fast and are mentioned off-handedly, almost as an afterthought. Red Harvest is fast moving and entertaining and as hardboiled as they come.
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Summary: Yojimbo! After the Falcon, my favorite Hammett
Review: This book is the source for the movie Yojimbo and its American remakes. I did not like it over much the first time I read it, but when I reread all of Hammett I found I liked it more than any except the Maltese Falcon. It is much less violent than modern riffs on the theme -- and there are many -- but somehow Hammett captures a hardness and ruthlessness that no-one else (not Ellroy or Thompson or Vachss) quite can. And the prose is perfect.
Rating:
Summary: A plan emerges from the bloodshed
Review: This engrossing story will keep you hooked as the Continental Op slyly orchestrates a clean up of Poisonville by any means necessary. The plot of Red Harvest takes you through more action and mysteries than 10 other crime fiction novels, so if you solve one crime you've barely got the time to pat yourself on the back before the next one. Well paced, and very entertaining.
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