Novel
Red Harvest
Dashiell Hammett · 1929
Opening lines
I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit.
Text quoted from archive.org
Synopsis
An agent of the Continental Detective Agency, never named, is summoned to Personville, which everyone calls Poisonville, by Donald Willsson, publisher of the town's newspapers, who is shot before their appointment. The victim's father, Elihu, master of the mines and the bank, had brought in gunmen to break a strike and has not been able to get rid of them since: three gangsters and the chief of police run the town. Elihu hires the agent to clean it up, then wants to back out; the agent stays, and makes each of them believe that the others are betraying him.
Context
The novel first appeared in the magazine Black Mask, in four instalments under different titles, from November 1927 to February 1928, then from Knopf in 1929. Hammett had worked for an agency that also broke strikes; the town is inspired by Butte, in Montana, where he said he had been sent. Its dry language, in which one knows of the characters only what they do and say, made its hero the prototype of the hard-boiled detective. The book has been compared, with no established filiation, to a samurai film by Akira Kurosawa, from which Sergio Leone made a western.
Who it is for
A novel in twenty-seven chapters, with a tight plot and many betrayals. Translated in 1950, then in full in 2009 by Natalie Beunat and Pierre Bondil.
Prizes and reception
Selected in 2005 by Time magazine among the hundred best English-language novels published since 1923.
Sources for this page 10
The pages consulted to check this page.