Red Harvest: One of the Greatest Openings a Novel Ever Had - Page 2

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.

With his only client murdered, the private eye literally has no dog in the fight. Despite this, he decides to stick around and stir things up. He makes sure a fixed boxing match gets re-fixed, he drops rumors that are just close enough to reality to be believable and in general does everything he can to disrupt the city's immoral equilibrium. That's when the killings start — such a rush that by the chapter headed "The Thirteenth Murder," just about every reader has to go back and count in order to see which ones slipped past. That's when the detective passes his judgment: Everyone in Personville is "blood simple," or unable to think of any answer to events beyond more violence. It even infects the detective, who at one point awakens from a laudanum-induced sleep to find himself an apparent murderer. There's just enough of a tremor in Hammett's hardboiled style to let us know the man is shaken up, but that doesn't stop him from doctoring the crime scene to remove all evidence of his presence.

Though it violates the likability rule at every turn, Red Harvest is so briskly paced and so clever in its setups that it has been adapted for the movies several times, almost always without acknowledgement. Akira Kurosawa had the grace to acknowledge Hammett's detective as the inspiration for the wandering samurai anti-hero of Yojimbo, but Joel and Ethan Coen have yet to own up to their Hammett obsession: not only did they call their first feature film Blood Simple, but they used Red Harvest (with a couple of touches from The Glass Key, Hammett's third novel) for their own gangster drama, Miller's Crossing.

But it all comes from that opening page. That's something detectives, journalists and writers have in common: they all make their living from good leads.

*****

Originally posted at StevenHartSite.

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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