“Play with murder enough and it gets you one of two ways. It makes you sick, or you get to like it.”
Dashiell Hammett’s hard-boiled detective fiction with lean
and concise prose style emphasizes less on crime-solving and rather deals with
the heavy atmosphere of crime. Beneath the pulpy action, witticisms, and
escalating body count, Mr. Hammett’s stories exhibits how crime is at the heart
of bureaucratism and politics (or one could say the author treats,
‘politics-as-crime’). The backstory of Dashiell Hammett may be all too familiar
for aficionados of hard-boiled literary style: the diverse jobs he did to be
the ‘breadwinner’; his military service in the first and second World Wars; his
stint as an operative in the Baltimore office of the Pinkerton National
Detective Agency; the association with communist party that eventually led him to be one
of the victim of McCarthy era.
The history behind Hammett’s 1929 novel Red Harvest was also
equally fascinating. Hammett, the Pinkerton operative, was allegedly asked to off a union
organizer but refused to do it. The author, refusing to murder somebody despite
the lure of economic gain and nevertheless staying with Pinkerton (which is
known for hiring strike-breaking goons), is said to have set off an inner conflict. An
intriguing ‘Guardian’ article hints the author has transformed his personal
conflict to design his ambiguous ‘Continental Op’ detective protagonist in Red
Harvest. Never mind that the backstory relating to union organizer is more or less
disproved and declared ‘mythic’. Though supposedly false, this story offers
something to understand Hammett’s sardonic and morally chaotic nameless hero.
Originally serialized in ‘Black Mask’ magazine, the
Continental Op first appeared in a 1923 story. Despite making appearance in
numerous serialized stories, novels, and heralded as one of the first major
fictional hard-boiled detectives, the Continental Op wasn’t as much popular with
Hollywood like Raymond Chandler’s no-nonsense dick Philip Marlowe. Red Harvest
also didn’t enjoy a major Hollywood adaptation (unlike Howard Hawks’ adaptation
of Chandler’s The Big Sleep), but it was cited as the chief influence behind
Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961) –
movies that were powerful in their own right [Kurosawa, however, has supposedly
cited 1942 adaptation of Hammett’s another great novel ‘The Glass Key’ as his influence]. Red
Harvest does contain one of those labyrinthine, prototype stories that pit cops
against crooks, in which the lines dividing the good and bad blurs.
The book opens with one of unforgettable Dashiell Hammett lines:
“I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named
Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte…….. I 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.” The
tough, American Midwest mining town is like any other urban jungle that’s caught in
the quagmire of corruption. The private detective arrives there from San
Francisco branch of the Continental Detective agency. He is summoned by the
town’s newspaper mogul, Donald Willsson, and the reasons for it are not yet known. Unfortunately,
Donald gets murdered before keeping up his appointment with the Op. Narrated in
the first-person, we tag-along as the detective navigates through the power corridors
of the town to find clues to the murder. He discovers that Donald’s father Elihu Willsson, the brazen
industrialist don, has once solely controlled the town, but now forced to share his
powers with a quartet of dangerous bootleggers, gun-runners, and gangsters
whose violent expertise were once sought out to break the unions and strikers. The implacable,
cool, and the morally ambiguous Continental Op not only solves Donald’s murder,
but also smartly stirs up the conflict between the ‘powers-that-be’. And of
course this self-destructive path is paved with booze, gun-fights, and callous
women.
Published in the year of Great Depression, the bloodbath and
deep-rooted corruption in Red Harvest now seems like a prophecy of what’s to
come (the Anaconda Copper wars is particularly mentioned as the root for this tight and
lucid story). Red Harvest is all about politics and bloodshed, and how one
becomes synonymous for the other. The darkly humorous, eminently quotable, and
street-smart authenticity of Hammett’s writing keeps us enthralled throughout
(and the book is short and addictive enough to finish in one sitting). The
Continental Op is a very interesting protagonist, later championed by the
film-noir masterworks. He is a relentless pursuer of truth, not to right the wrongs,
but it’s merely an obsession. The first-person narrative may obscure his
motivations, but allows us to find psychological depth in what the Op details
to perfection (the crime scene and gun fights) and what he omits (his true feelings). He occupies a grey area and often straddles between the
official powers and underworld kingpins, plucking out the links between them
(which nevertheless may get reinstated one way or another). Altogether, it’s great
fun reading the tricks of one audacious individual in order to tear down the whole
rotten and damned sociopolitical structure of a town.
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