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language: English
country: USA
year: 1929
form: novel
genre(s): mystery
dates read: 25.4.23-30.4.23
Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest was an engaging read. I’ve been feeling in a pulpy mood and this was, as a result extremely satisfying — I wanted fiction that was unapologetically timeful without trying to be deep or transcend that (altough certainly this had political preoccupations, if not necessarily strong literary-theoretical ones), and also that was of its own time, rather than pretending it belonged to someone else’s.
the story follows a nameless operative of the Continental Detective Agency, who’s called to the ambiguously Californian town of Personville, alias “Poisonville”, for reasons that are not entirely clear. he ends up drawn into a web of rampant corruption (political and personal), crime, and cover-ups, beginning his first night in town, when the man he’s supposed to meet is murdered just when he’s supposed to be meeting him. the cast of characters he interacts with while attempting, first, to solve the mystery and, later, to break the overlapping rings of organized crime and corrupt law enforcement that control Poisonville is a colorful but fairly homogenous bunch; the only ones who felt meaningfully distinct were the gambling den boss Whisper and the police chief Noonan (a relatively early victim of the Continental Op’s machinations). the pacing is brisk, or perhaps efficient, but it rarely feels rushed, and the atmosphere is well-captured if not especially deep.
I enjoyed it! the highlights for me are probably, first, the conceit that the narrator is nameless and, second, the fact that he never quite seems to know what he’s going on, even when he does clearly know what’s going on.
the former point is fun because nameless, identity-less protagonists are fun and interesting in general (identity is of course always a persona, a persona always still the φersu, and “under the mask a void / everywhere with us everywhere with us, [even] under a name”), and in this case specifically it adds to the impression that he’s telling us the story — of course he doesn’t need to mention his own name to his audience, because we already know him, our close personal friend who’s telling us about his last job!
watching Murder by Death many years ago has left me with the understanding that the management of the reader’s access to information about the mystery is one of the central problems of the genre (and a potentially contentious one). in this case, the Continental Op is overflowing with theories, and many of them do rest on information or guesswork that the reader has not been fully privy to. but, crucially, he’s wrong! a lot of the time! he’s working from incomplete information and he jumps to conclusions that seem plausible, and he’s wrong! but, on top of that, part of what the book is playing with is a deep and (I think intentionally) troubling pragmatism about “truth”: the question Red Harvest dances around is, does it matter what’s true if the story gets the job done? certainly the cops and criminals of Poisonville don’t think so — but neither does the Continental Op, who lies and bullshits and guesses and half-truths his way through the entire book. does it get the job done well? not particularly. a ton of people die, and not just the crime bosses and the corrupt police chief. does it get the job done efficiently? yes, and the Continental Op is all about efficiency. the ends, here, justify any means.
this also neatly circumvents the problem of the genius detective, because half the time when he’s talking to people he openly tells the reader that he’s either straight-up lying to them or making educated guesses (in which case we usually get the reasoning) or simply taking wild shots in the dark and hoping that by some chance he’s right. he’s wrong a reasonable portion of the time! sometimes his interlocutor calls him on it, and sometimes we (all) only find out much later. mainly the impression we get is not of a genius detective (certainly he’s very good at reading people and situations and generating plausible narratives, but, again, “plausible” isn’t always “correct”) but rather of someone who’s incredibly good at adapting to rapidly changing circumstances on the fly and taking everything in stride.
it was, however, a bummer that Hammett killed off one of the two interesting female characters and just…never returned to the other one after like chapter three. ultimately, though, I think only like five named characters actually, you know, survive the book, so I guess it’s not a surprise.
moods: dark, grimy, lighthearted, mysterious