Country: USA
Genre: Noir
Pages: 214
There’s no questioning of Dashiell Hammett’s role in the development of hardboiled fiction. Tough guy detectives, femme fatales, convoluted conspiracies and violent retribution were elements he brought to a wider readership, if he didn’t father them himself. He wrote five novels and the first one, Red Harvest, was by far the bleakest and most violent. Cinema scholars are still debating today whether or not it influenced the legendary Akira Kurosawa into shooting the samurai classic Yojimbo. The similarities sure are there. Hammett’s first novel is a maze of crime and violence with no exits. It’s arguably the first noir novel.
The protagonist of Red Harvest is a nameless operative of the Continental Detective Agency that was baptized Continental Op by posterity. It’s narrated at the first person, hence the good job he does at keeping his name from the reader. He receives a wire and five thousand dollars from a man named Donald Willsson, from Personville (often referred to as “Poisonville” by the characters themselves) , a city most likely situated in California (or close) since the Continental Agency is in San Francisco. The only problem is that Willsson eats lead before the Op has a chance to meet him. Figuring out he owes to his client a little work for all this money, he stays in town and investigates. But he only gets involved in more violence and stumbles upon more money. And that pisses him off. Bad.
Many factor made Red Harvest an amazing novel. First, the Continental Op is a great character. He’s a detective, he’s supposed to represent the law, but he is completely amoral, sadistic and unforgiving. Yet he is the only character with a clear goal. The destruction of Personville’s corrupted political scene. The players in that scene: Max Thaler, Dinah Brad, Elihuh Willsson (Donald’s father and city’s patriarch) and the chief of Police, Noonan are after nothing else than personal gain, leaving their city a no man’s land of terrified citizens. It’s by involving them together, by making them fight over the same pieces of the pie that the Op will drive them to an epic chaos.
Red Harvest is about the concept of gain. Whether it is money, reputation or retribution, characters are walking into mine fields on shady promises of a better tomorrow. It’s a collision of inflated selves, unaware that their egos are grotesquely deformed. The bad guys of Red Harvest are blindly destructive. They are all somewhat aware that they are walking into a set trap, but they are so motivated by their gain that they oblige. The Op is the only character without a proper “self” and it seem to shelter him from any need and trouble. He is his job and even if he takes a vicious pleasure at working, he keeps his passions entrenched by the two payments he received in the exercise of his functions. That said, it’s a dark account of professional responsibility also, but it’s also fucking sweet to have a character who’s bound by professionalism and justice.
I’m still unsure if Red Harvest was the original template for Yojimbo and For A Fistful Of Dollars. Probably. There’s a saying that there’s no fire without smoke. Even if there are noticeable differences, I think it’s been “loosely based on”. Samurai, cowboys and private eyes are eerily similar figures. They walk to their own drums. One thing sure, it’s one hell of a novel. As dark and sadistic as it might be, it’s a novel that still cast a shine of dying hope. To Hammett, there is hope for those who can assume a set place without preying on everything around and who are ready to take responsibility for the lives of others. There is hope in selflessness and sacrifice and yet it’s not very Christian. Because there’s also a vicious satisfaction into bringing hell to the blindly greedy.