by Moe Zilla

Created on: February 14, 2008

"Red Harvest" is one of the most violent mysteries ever written. It was Dashiell Hammett's first detective novel in 1929, and shows a detective caught between two warring factions in a corrupt mining town. "Red Harvest" strikes powerful themes with its story of a lone hero standing against an evil town. Ultimately the novel has been loosely adapted for several movies, including "Yojimbo," a samurai tale by the great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa.

It's a great example of the "noir" style of crime writing, with prose that's both dark and tough - and Hammett makes that clear from the book's first line. ("I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte.") The narrator is the detective with no name - he's referred to only as "the continental op" - and he's headed to a new assignment as the solitary outsider in very dangerous town. Hammett conveys that through clever prose - the town is so violent, everybody already knows it, and they've even informally revoked its original name to replace it with something more suggestive.

The detective is also revealing bits of his character - he shares lots of details with the reader to paint a good picture, and some of them are irrelevant but entertaining. ("Mucker" is a slang word for "my friend," and Hammett devises a wonderfully outlandish name for his red-headed pal - Hickey Dewey.) Hammett's detective had appeared in a short stories throughout the 1920s, but this was Hammett's first novel using the character. He seems determined to fill up the pages with even more bloody crime than usual, and the title "Red Harvest" is well deserved.

The man who hired "the continental op" is murdered before the detective even arrives. He broadens his mission to eliminating the town's criminal gangs, and the book shows him encounter various layers of the underworld. There's the corrupt chief of police, the girlfriend of one gangster chief, the messengers from the other gangs, and eventually several gunfights. ("Bullets flew around us. Reno and I threw bullets around while the girl made a polo pony of the little Marmon...") The detective uses his wiles and intelligence to survive, and by the end of the novel, he's managed to come out on top.

Hammett's violent storyline continued through later adaptations of the film, including Sergio Leone's "A Fistful of Dollars" (starring Clint Eastwood), and "Last Man Standing," which starred Bruce Willis. But these movies only speak to the power of the original novel, which is a truly exciting story, told by one of detective fiction's great masters.

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