Hammett narrates the violence in precise, clean prose. In his query letter to Knopf, Hammett termed the book an “action-detective novel,” but it was much more than that in describing the Continental Op’s attempts to clean out “Poisonville” of gangsters and corruption, he managed to capture something essential about how American entrepreneurism could bend to darker ends.Īs one (unnamed) man tasked with cleaning up an “ugly city of forty thousand people,” the Continental Op takes the only logical path, manipulating Poisonville’s powerful gangs into tearing each other apart. The glitter and rot of the Roaring Twenties had reached a crescendo by October, the Wall Street Crash would usher in a decade of privation so acute it threatened the foundations of Western capitalism. Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest was published in February 1929, an auspicious moment in American history.
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