Rating: 
Summary: Blood, mayhem, and amorality in a mining town!
Review: This is a hard tale of a hard guy, a nameless private detective, who arrives in the western mining town of Personville (called "Poisonville" by many of its criminal denizens who hail from points east) to meet a client . . . only to learn that the client has been murdered on the very night of their scheduled meeting. The client was the son of the town's wealthiest citizen, an aging tycoon who, to beat back the unionization of the miners he employs, has invited all manner of gangsters and hard cases into town to break the unions.But, in breaking them for him, the gangsters have moved in for good and taken over running things, setting up their own rackets, controlling the police and sucking the old man into their schemes since they have so much "on him." The detective (known only as the Continental operative throughout) approaches the tycoon about the murder of his son and soon conceives the notion of cleaning the place up, whether the old man wants him to or not. Playing the various sides off against one another, the detective embarks on a cold-hearted, calculated odyssey to win the confidence of one gangster after another, in order to turn each against the other (shades of Yojimbo!). In the process, the detective, himself, gets drawn into the bloody maelstrom he has created through his various betrayals until, sinking into the same moral morass as all the others, he finds himself waist deep in murder with only the shakiest of alibis and a profound sense of his own moral surrender. The body count mounts as one gangster after another is betrayed by our apparently amoral "Continental op", until the very pegs on which the town has been hung are shaken loose. The real mystery here is less who killed the detective's original client than who killed the detective's own victim . . . and how will he manage to extricate himself from the violent and bloody depths he has plunged the town of Poisonville, and himself, into. Lots of blackmail and mayhem and bloodshed here and a real sense of lost moral bearings. This detective, for all his good intentions seems no better, in many ways, than the criminal element he has set out to undermine. In the end he does pull himself out of the fire and manages to see the job through, but we are left with a clear sense of amorality that makes this nameless detective little better than the crooks he has overthrown. In fact some of them, like Whisper Thaler, seem a hell of a lot more honorable . . . and likeable. SWM
Rating: 
Summary: another great Hammet book
Review: This is my favorite of the Continental Op stories. The basic conceit is quite clever and original. It has been much imitated in the movies, e.g. Yojimbo and one of the Sergio Leone movies.
Rating:
Summary: Yet another Hammett masterpiece
Review: This is not my favorite Dashiell Hammett book, but there is no such thing . . . well, I was going to say that there was no such thing as a bad Dashiell Hammett book, but then I remembered that the last couple of things he wrote, when he was trying to write "literature" instead of extraordinary hardboiled stories. There is, however, no such animal as a bad Continental Op story, and this is one of the Op's adventures. One of the most lamentable situations in contemporary publishing is the rather small number of Op stories in print. It is occasionally possible to turn up one of the old anthology of Op stories that Hammett published in BLACK MASK, but these are getting harder and harder to find (though several of them recently appeared in the new Library of America edition of Hammett's stories). BLACK MASK itself put out in the late forties, I believe, several issues collecting the otherwise uncollected stories. My understanding is that Lillian Hellman, who held the copyright on Hammett's books until her death, would not allow these stories to be reprinted. The copyright must be getting close to expiration, so perhaps all of Hammett's stories will once again be available. I was fortunate enough to read all the stories that Black Mask collected in their special issues. My access was through the marvelous holdings of the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University. I sat in the reading room where others were undoubtedly reading manuscripts of Boswell or Ezra Pound or Yeats, while I sat engrossed in Continental Op detective yarns. My best guess is that there may have been enough stories to produce one or two more collections to supplement the two collections we already possess, THE CONTINENTAL OP and THE BIG KNOCKOVER. I must admit that the quality of these stories were not overall up to the quality of those in the latter volume, which are in turn not quite up to the quality of the stories in the former volume. That volume is in my humble but most accurate opinion, the finest detective short stories ever written, along with "Red Wind" by Raymond Chandler. I feel that of the two founding fathers of the hardboiled detective genre, Hammett wrote better stories and Chandler wrote better novels.
RED HARVEST is very good Hammett, but is not quite up to the level of his very best work in THE CONTINENTAL OP and THE MALTESE FALCON. The story has been widely imitated in film. Akira Kurosawa borrowed heavily from it in making the movie YOJIMBO, which was in turn used by Sergio Leone in making A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS. More recently the story was mined for the semi-awful Bruce Willis vehicle LAST MAN STANDING--which had tons of wonderful period atmosphere to go along with tons of stupidity, and which provoked for the three thousandth time the perennial question of why bad guys are such dreadful shots while the good guys never miss. I must further add that the Vintage covers of all the Hammett books are both attractive and wonderfully evocative of the era. I don't know about others, but I always have a more satisfying reading experience if the books look inviting.
Rating:
Summary: Vintage Noir
Review: This is vintage noir and Hammet at his best. However, that being said, David Goodis still rules the nest in this genre form...for while Hammet created the form and excelled at it...Goodis took it a step farther, elevating the form from being about detection to the dark gravel that exists in the grime of the human spirit...
Rating:
Summary: An excellent book.
Review: This novel was an excellent change from the sweet innocence of Mrs. Marple or the cold calculations of Sherlock Holmes. The novel follows the attempts of a Continental Op to clean up Poisonville. He has accidentally gotten himself into something too large and complex for him to handle. The town sucks him in though, not letting go until he is done. There are times when the streetwise detective wonders if the town hasn't also corrupted him. I love the detective's bumbling attitude that sometimes lands him in more trouble than good but always helps him survive. Throughout the entire story our main character has no idea what's going on which is a change from our most famous detectives. This was an excellent book that I would recommend to anyone looking for a good detective story.
Rating:
Summary: Quick, Sharp, and Still the Best
Review: This was the first novel featuring Hammett's short story character, The Continental Op, and it's well worth reading. The Op is sent from his home in San Francisco to Personville, Montana on the request of a client. The fact that Personville is pronounced posionville by its residents will tell you the kind of town he enters. The violence is so bad that the Op never actually sees his client alive, but he sticks around to avenge his death. The deep plot is as convoluted as any detective novel, but the basic plot of a man playing two sides against each other proved to be important in the history of film even more so than literature. The Op was the original Man With No Name. Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Western borrows both the stranger concept and the plot from Red Harvest. Though the credit is usually given to Akira Kurosawa for his film Yojimbo, both films actually borrow their essence from Hammett. It's not necessary to have seen either film to enjoy this story. Overshadowed by the classic Maltese Falcon, Red Harvest deserves more ink than it gets. It's here with Hammett that the noir detective novel was born. The romantic notion of a poor detective who would rather live up to his own standards of justice than take a big payoff is a very American outlook. I can only figure that such a character comes from the many assignments that Hammett got working for the Pinkerton detective agency and the many times that Hammett wasn't allowed to do the right thing. Our detective is so virtuous under the standards of his own ethics that you admire him even when he is creating a bloodbath. The most surprising thing is how well the whole book flows and quickly I read it. Hammett has a great way of leaving each chapter with enough questions that you want to immediately read the next one. He'll leave you with the conclusion of a boxing match and with a fighter that falls over with a knife in his back. How can you go to sleep on a chapter like that? Any fan of detective novels and film noir should do themselves the justice of reading all the Hammett they can get. Red Harvest is a good start to that goal.
Rating:
Summary: Vastly Underrated!
Review: This was the first novel featuring Hammett's short story character, The Continental Op, and it's well worth reading. The Op is sent from his home in San Francisco to Personville, Montana on the request of a client. The fact that Personville is pronounced posionville by its residents will tell you the kind of town he enters. The violence is so bad that the Op never actually sees his client alive, but he sticks around to avenge his death. The deep plot is as convoluted as any detective novel, but the basic plot of a man playing two sides against each other proved to be important in the history of film even more so than literature. The Op was the original Man With No Name. Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Western borrows both the stranger concept and the plot from Red Harvest. Though the credit is usually given to Akira Kurosawa for his film Yojimbo, both films actually borrow their essence from Hammett. It's not necessary to have seen either film to enjoy this story. Overshadowed by the classic Maltese Falcon, Red Harvest deserves more ink than it gets. It's here with Hammett that the noir detective novel was born. The romantic notion of a poor detective who would rather live up to his own standards of justice than take a big payoff is a very American outlook. I can only figure that such a character comes from the many assignments that Hammett got working for the Pinkerton detective agency and the many times that Hammett wasn't allowed to do the right thing. Our detective is so virtuous under the standards of his own ethics that you admire him even when he is creating a bloodbath. The most surprising thing is how well the whole book flows and quickly I read it. Hammett has a great way of leaving each chapter with enough questions that you want to immediately read the next one. He'll leave you with the conclusion of a boxing match and with a fighter that falls over with a knife in his back. How can you go to sleep on a chapter like that? Any fan of detective novels and film noir should do themselves the justice of reading all the Hammett they can get. Red Harvest is a good start to that goal.
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