Red Harvest

For thirty years I’ve been enamored with Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest. For me crime novels started with Elmore Leonard’s Swag. I read all I could of Leonard and then worked my way back in the crime annals to the very beginning. The very beginning of modern American crime lit starts with Red Harvest.

Hemingway had written The Killers two years before Red Harvest and Hammett would credit Hemingway with opening a door for him, where writing could be tough and terse and clean. Better suited for a life he knew all too well. The life of crime in the twentieth century.

It’s well known that Hammett was a Pinkerton. A detective agency started here in Chicago in 1850. They foiled the Baltimore Plot, saving President Lincoln’s life and went on to be the biggest detective agency in the world in the 1870’s-80’s. By the turn of the century, they’d turned into hired muscle against organized labor.

This is the Pinkerton’s Hammett found himself working for. Red Harvest is set in fictitious town in Montana that is still reeling from the fallout of a copper mine strike. Organized labor has been beaten back and the only fools left standing are the crooks. And the crooks are too many to count as the Continental Op comes to find out.

We never learn the Continental Op’s name. We’re barely even given a description of what he looks like. Just that he may have a normal albeit chubby build. There’s nothing sexy about the man. He’s a nameless, faceless cog in the machine of law enforcement. An employee given a task that no matter how impossible it seems, he’s expected to complete it.

The Op is a stand in for Hammett as a Pinkerton Agent. Much of the things he writes of are things he experienced as an agent. He’s an everyman that can stand the hoisting of men’s projections for years to come. As we see in the many adaptions, homages and rip-offs in the years that follow the publication of Red Harvest.

But why am I so enamored with Red Harvest? Why am I even writing this in the first place? Well, we’ll get into that in my next post. The one thing I can leave you with is that I’ve tried my hand at homage to Red Harvest and have failed thus far. Kurosawa, Leone and Hill’s admiration alludes me thus far, and I want to work out why. Other than the fact that I may just be a bad writer.