Red Harvested

This was my first time reading a Dashiell Hammett novel, and I enjoyed it greatly. I can see why this book began a trend of hard-boiled detective stories, full of wise-cracking smart guys and aggressive femme fatals.

I thought the pacing and structure of the book was very tight, and very well thought out. I loved that he solved the initial murder at the end of the first Act and then set himself up for the motion of the rest of the book. That the original story ties in with the climax of the final story is wonderfully done.

The character of the Continental Op is fascinating. I realize that his character doesn't have much of an arc, and Hammett doesn't care to tell a character-driven story here, but I think the nature of the character is very revealing. He is like a street-saavy Sherlock Holmes, one who notices everything and knows how to put it together. Both he and Holmes know how to process data, but the Op's game is really, in the end, a social one. He knows how to play all sides off each other. He seems remarkably in control until he gets himself full of laudanum. Until that point, he tangles with all the major players, he interacts with them, he exchanges information with them, but he doesn't get dirty with them. But you can't look into the blackness of this social world without the blackness looking back into you. He feels himself going "blood-simple" as he realizes all the deaths that his monkeying around with the social order has caused. He has been poisoned by Poisonville. To escape it and who he is becoming, he takes the laudanum, and with the laudanum, he takes the final decent to becoming a native: it looks like he killed Dinah. And he appears to be pinched pretty good too, becoming dependent on Reno for an alibi. His final struggle is to prove his own innocence to himself (if indeed he can be innocent of this death, even if it was not his hand that plunged the ice pick into Dinah's heart), and extricate himself from this poison.

Again we are dealing with a post War society, one that has the materiality of a thriving society with the missing morality of a dying one. There is no real center of power, no natural order. Elihu lost control to a democracy of workers and he called in help that took control. So Elihu called in more help in the form of our narrator, and that help also took control. No one in this novel is blameless or innocent. Everyone can be bought and sold. And our hero is motivated by anything but righteousness. People have tried to kill him and he takes that personally.

Of course, that motive is to keep the sentimental out of the narrative. We can't have a dudley do-right in this world. But the Continental Op is as close as we come. He claims to follow the rules of the Agency as best he can, but he will step beyond them to get the job done. What a man.

As a final note, I find it interesting that the Op is 40 years old and is not in ideal shape. He is not a ladies man. He is old enough to have served in the war, and while it never states that he is a veteran, I assume he was. His masculinity is defined by the way he interacts with other men, not by the way ladies respond to him. Discuss.

On to book No. 10 . . .