Book Review: Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

We never learn the name of the narrator in the book Red Harvest, yet, we quickly come to understand the personality of this individual simply by the e way he talks and the language he uses. The language is full of slang words and seems to come from a hard knocks side of life. The narrator speaks fast and it is clear from the story that he has found himself in a city with a reputation for trouble. The narrator seems to be a smart, professional man but perhaps skating on a fine line. The main theme of this story is that perhaps the only, or one of a very few, honest and decent residents of the city has been murdered. The narrator's role in the story is to work through the Continental Op to solve the mystery and shake up this shady city and change things for the better. The young newspaper publisher that was murders was planning to address the corruption and did not realize how deep his own father's involvement was. In the end the newspaper publisher lost his life trying to make the city a better place.

The unnamed detective of Continental Op seems to have no particular alliance one way or the other and sometimes it's hard to distinguish him as a detective, from the gangsters. He plots the demise of criminals. He uses dishonest tactic to accomplish his goal ("I dug out my card case and ran through the collection of credentials I had picked up here and there by one means or another"). And yet throughout, he stays focused on following the agency code, on at least certain things.

The narrator describes the police as being somewhat shabby and unkempt. The police and the mayor are corrupt as are the businesses. The city, Poisonville has plenty of gangsters. Though, the most important villains are those well to do people with influence that use the gangsters to accomplish what the want. The unnamed narrator pits all of them against each other.

The novel is cynical and set in a time when gangsters and crime were rampant. In this novel, business rules politics and power and the citizens are either directly involved or they are victims. It is common and acceptable for people to scam others for their own gain. It's a sad side of the human existence. There is not much room in this book for healthy relationship or examination of relationships by the characters. The pace is fast and the city is so entrenched in scam and corruption that it absorbs the entire life of the characters.

Because this novel was set in a time that accepted such behavior, one has to think that characters were simply coping with their environment. You can't really take anything at face value. These could be good people caught up in a bad situation, at least some of them anyway. This is a cynical novel that ends with the. reader sure that Poisoneville will sink even deeper into chaos and trouble even though the narrator describes the city as clean. The narrator seems aware of this reality. He knows that even though he cleaned it up to some degree, it is difficult to make a really change in the environment and culture or the city. He hires out both sides and plays them against each other. It seems that he has to learn to "play dirty" to out smart them or to make them conquer each other. In this way, he had to adjust or cope with the situation at hand by adjusting his usual manner of operating. He seems morally outrages, but yet stuck to respond in anyway except to carry out further criminal activity in a chain reaction. Written in 1929, Red Harvest has been named one of the best 100 books by Time Magazine.