My idea as a riff on Red Harvest was/is to make the Continental Op a woman. It seemed a novel (pun intended) idea at the time. This was six or seven years ago when I began to write it freehand on white legal pads. All I had was the idea of this Ronin as a woman coming to small town and playing criminals against one another.
I used my memory of the Hammett novel and the movies like Yojimbo and Last Man Standing to bully my way through a rough draft. I had no idea what I was doing. I was writing another novel at the time. Another crime novel on a laptop.
It’s more than one person can take, I’ll tell you, writing two novels at once. Two crime novels that may be connected by a major character. Well, maybe it’s not all that crazy. James Patterson must do it. With a little help.
But the rudimentary plotline went as such: Ronin comes to town and finds that there are warring gangs at play. In Red Harvest the Continental Op has a job to do. He’s being paid by the hour. So, he goes around quickly, very quickly, getting the lay of the land and then systematically pulling peoples chains to see what limbs come loose. Playing one outfit against the other.
In Yojimbo, Kurosawa has Mifune play a dirty, masterless Samurai who flips a stick at a crossroads and by chance ends up in a little village infested with two dueling gangs. Where in Red Harvest the Op is an almost robotic ticking id, Mifune’s Ronin is a dirty, slouching rogue with a heart of gold. He’s nothing like the Pinkertonesque operative who’s just doing a job.
No, Kurosawa imbues his Red Harvest story with a morality that Hammett might view as maudlin, but in subsequent film remakes sticks out as a redemption factor for the main character. The Op is a man lost needing not only to be put to work, but to right wrongs in the world.
Now, my problem is to always go back to the beginning. As you know. Back to Hammett and the robotic mechanics of the story. By flipping the gender of the Op I could say I was being subversive enough. If that’s what I wanted to be. If that is what I wanted to do. And that’s where the underlying problem lay for me in writing this story.
What was I really trying to say?
Josh Mayhall 