Red Harvest

They say you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but what you see above is more or less what you get for 200 pages if you pop on in. Red Harvest is arguably the most famous and enduring work from Dashiell Hammet, a crime fiction author from the late 1920s and early 1930s. It's a gritty, hard-boiled mystery thriller that pits a cynical detective against a city full of crime and corruption. It's the type of fiction where men in suits and fedoras fire guns at one another across dimly lit streets at two in the morning. It's told with an economy of words, and entire bar fights can happen within a paragraph or two. I would call it a stereotype example of early 20th century mystery fiction.

I liked it! It was a quick, easy, and engaging read that just made me want to stand around on a rainy street corner with a trilby pulled down low over my eyes and a trench coat collar popped up to hide the rest of my face. Maybe I'm smoking a cigarette. More likely, I've just crushed one out underfoot on the sidewalk. I'm either giving or receiving a vague threat to a gentleman dressed just like me before one of us gets into a car and drives off, head on a swivel. Obviously I've got my tommy gun and I'm ready to use it like I so often do. But first I've got to take my dame out to throw back some cheap hooch at a jazz club. I don't trust her farther than I can throw her, but have you seen the gams on that tomato? Anyway...

There's not much about Red Harvest that felt overwhelmingly important, but it's a damn fun read that seems to have held all of its charm over the years, perhaps even improving with age. "A bullet kissed a hole in the door-frame close to my noodle," writes Hammett, for instance, in a sentence just casually dropped into the story to describe the beginning of a massive firefight. Fittingly, the nameless protagonist isn't himself an especially intelligent, attractive, or ethical man. He's just an outside agent in a corrupt little town, and he's stirring up trouble because, hey, why not?

The book's simplicity, brevity, and charm have me pining for some more Hammett, but I'm not ready to dump the rest of his repertoire into my backlog just yet. Check him out for some old-fashioned easy entertainment