Red Harvest: One of the Greatest Openings a Novel Ever Had

Here is one of the greatest openings for a novel ever written. If you’ve read the book you’ll remember it instantly, even if you read it a long time ago:

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. I didn't think anything of what he had done to the city's name. Later I heard men who could manage their r's give it the same pronunciation. I still didn’t see anything in it but the meaningless sort of humor that used to make richardsnary the thieves' word for dictionary. A few years later I went to Personville and learned better.

That’s right: Dashiell Hammett's first novel Red Harvest (1929), which reads as though Hammett dictated the entire manuscript out of the side of his mouth. Even though we don't know the narrator's name — we never do learn it — we know he's a well-traveled guy, a man acquainted with the lower levels of life, and probably pretty tough in the bargain. He uses enough now-obscure slang to give the writing flavor, but doesn't stop to explain anything — he figures you're smart enough to keep up, and if you're not, who cares anyway? We also learn that the city this guy is about to visit is known all over the country as a pretty bad place. For a writer like Hammett, who made a fetish of terseness and economy in his writing, this passage is a home run.

The setting of Red Harvest is a mining town that has seen the last of its prosperity. The narrator sums it up as "an ugly city of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining. Spread over this was a grimy sky that looked as if it had come out of the smelters' stacks." Hammett spent three years as a private detective with the Pinkerton agency — he was a strikebreaker during the brutal mining strike in Butte, Montana, that resulted in the murder of labor leader Frank Little, an experience that fueled his lifelong radicalism. So it makes sense that the first thing his private eye hero does, upon entering a new city, is gauge the quality of the local police:

The first policeman I saw needed a shave. The second had a couple of buttons off his shabby uniform. The third stood in the center of the city's main intersection — Broadway and Union Street — directing traffic, with a cigar in one corner of his mouth. After that I stopped checking them up.

The rest of the novel doesn't live up to its opening — how could it? — but there's plenty of good stuff in Hammett's story, which combines white-hot pacing with a singularly chilly point of view. Creative writing types who insist that a story must have someone the reader can like and identify with aren't going to find much to work with in Red Harvest. Personville is a city with a crooked mayor, crooked cops, crooked business interests and several gangsters of varying degrees of murderousness — all arrayed in power blocs held in almost perfect balance. The only straight man in Personville — a reform-minded newspaper publisher — is lying on a mortuary slab when the narrator arrives.

Article Author: Steven Hart

Steven Hart is a freelance writer based in New Jersey. He blogs about politics and popular culture at The Opinion Mill. He also blogs about writing and more personal matters at StevenHartSite.

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