Dashiell Hammett - Red Harvest

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 shroit. I didn't think anything of what he'd 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. (p. 3)

Dashiell Hammett's ground breaking Red Harvest is the first book by one of the grandmasters of Noir, and it might surprise you to learn that the iconic opening paragraph quoted above is probably the book's wordiest section. Hammett writes chaos and crime with all surplus and emotion excised, and the power that slips in through the spaces is awe inspiring. The book may have come out in 1929, but its every sentence hits with incredible strength today, and the picture it paints is no less relevant and no less terrifying than it ever was.

Our opening is a rather standard crime beginning: our detective – the unnamed Continental Op – goes to the home of the man who hired him. The man's not home, so the wife greets out protagonist, but she's called out. When she returns, her lift slipper is dark and damp with something that could be blood. (p. 8) Unfazed, she tells the Continental Op that her husband "won't be home tonight." (p. 8) Within only a few pages, that initial murder is almost lost in an explosion of corruption and violence. Personville is not plagued by a single problem but is, rather, an entire town of avarice, a cesspit incapable of viewing order as anything but oppression from a new source.

The Continental Op strides into this urban hell and burns it to the ground. Well, okay, no – the town's still standing at the end of the book. But you'd be forgiven for doubting that at more than a few of the book's apocalyptic gunfights and revelations. Much of noir seems to focus on understatement and small scale conflict. David Goodis's The Wounded and the Slain, for instance, shows the inherent corruption and malleability of humanity through a single nobody's accidental misadventure in the backstreets of Jamaica, an episode unlikely to so much as make the local paper. Hammett approaches the same thematic stomping ground from the opposite direction. Red Harvest is larger than life and archetypical, a tale of amoral justice writ in blood across the streets of a city boasting "some forty thousand inhabitants." (p. 70)

In terms of stark brutality, Red Harvest is on par with modern classics like Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. Reading the book, it's not hard to see how French existentialists and others view the novel as an allegory for order first coming to mankind. Such biblical aspirations, amusingly enough, fit perfectly with Hammett's terseness, and comparisons abound: the Continental Op is bringing law to the citizens of Personville at the behest of the far off but all powerful "Old Man" while the citizens desperately cling to their decadent lawlessness.

That being said, such black and white readings have trouble in the face of the humanity and ambiguity of Hammett's characters. Though Hammett's narration never leaves the Continental Op's perspective, we're never allowed inside his head, and the characters actions are as much a mystery to us as they are to the townspeople until he chooses to explain himself. The benefits of this – competently executed – on a mechanical level are obvious, allowing the Continental Op to surprise the reader as much as his adversaries with his deductions and actions. On a thematic level, however, things get even more interesting.

Corruption in Personville is not something that can be fought with law or morals. As the Continental Op says to a fellow operative: Anybody that brings any ethics to Poisonville is going to get them all rusty (p. 117). But death becomes seductive, and the Continental Op soon seems to pursue chaos for its own sake, preferring the grace of a bullet to the difficulties of the courtroom. The crux of Personville's corruption of him, however, comes near the end of the book.

[Note: skip to the next paragraph to aovid SPOILERS] After a series of traumatizing and horrific dreams, the Continental Op finds himself abed with a murdered woman, and it's his hand upon the ice pick. Did he kill her? Even the Continental Op cannot answer that question, but he's forced to proceed under the assumption – one that the world around him wholly believes – that he was, in fact, the murderer. In the end, it turns out that one of the book's many villains was the true culprit, but the message is still clear. We're all skirting corruption; we've all got our hands on the handle of the ice pick. And the only thing that decides who shoves it in deep is mere happenstance.

Red Harvest functions as a laconic fever dream. Short chapters and shorter sentences, an absence of description and inner monologues, and characters forced to survive day after day on fortifying alcohol instead of sleep all contribute to a book and a life impossible to escape. Amidst all the grimness, the Continental Op's sense of humor is so bald faced you might not notice the joke until a second glance. As he says to one foe: Be still while I get up or I'll make an opening in your head for brains to leak in. (p. 97)

Detective fiction is an inherently goal oriented genre, and Hammett makes use of small story arcs to build his big picture. Having the Continental Op battle all of Personville at once would be impossible from the perspective of the reader's comprehension as well as narrative coherence, so Hammett breaks the Continental Op's war down into increasingly large scale chunks as the operative goes after one or two of the city's villains at a time amidst a network of shifting alliances.

Hammett's tautness can, at times, cause problems. The central characters are never deep in the traditional sense, but they each grow fascinating as the novel progresses. Those in the periphery, however, aren't given this chance, which leaves Lew Yard and Pete the Finn, among others, as nothing but names and vague outlines. There is also the occasional passage where the prose misses vividness and instead falls into uninvolving summary. At one point, for instance, a climactic fight scene is described as:

Noise and fire came out under a window sill.

The gray mustached detective fell down, hiding the axe under his corpse.

The rest of us ran away. (p. 121)

Red Harvest is a Crime classic that roars from the first page to the last. I started the book in an idle five minutes and finished it in the early morning hours of the next day – horrified, disgusted, and too charged with energy to sleep for hours yet. If you're a Noir devotee or have yet to read so much as a page of the genre, Red Harvest is an absolutely essential novel.

Reading in January

[Note: I decreased the cover size because the post felt far long, and I don't want this blog to become an endless succession of cover art. If this new format's grotesque, please say so, and I'll change it back.]

Player of Games is Banks at the height of his powers. This novel's deeply intelligent and carefully constructed, but it's also a thrilling book that's consistently amusing throughout. Highly recommended for science fiction fans. Review coming.

The Westeros book of the month.  Beat the Reaper is one of the greatest page turners that I can ever remember reading. The prose drags you on with all the force of a hurricane and the attitude of…well, a Mafioso-cum-doctor, I guess. The book is jam packed with digressions that are generally quite amusing, though occasionally a bit too out there (the holocaust thread feels unnecessary and too disconnected from the rest), but there's not a single moment in the book where the spell is truly broken, and that's a definite accomplishment for an author that goes so gleefully over the top as Bazell does so often here.

The Postman Always Rings Twice is one of the three novels that I've been repeatedly told (since starting this whole Crime thing) started noir. The novel is brutal and bare bones, with the only sympathetic character cast as the antagonist and the amount of descriptive prose throughout the whole thing not being quite enough to properly fill a tea cup.

Goodis's classic crime novel is digressive, character focused, and bleak as can be. Review coming.

This issue of F&SF has actually been in my possession for a while. I got it when I was first considering reading some genre magazines, back when this was the current F&SF issue, and then promptly forgot about that goal – and this issue – until just now. The contents – and especially the longish Paradiso Lost by Cowdrey – were good enough to make me take out a subscription, which led to…

…my first sent-in-the-post issue of F&SF. As can be expected when going into a publication with various authors, there are a few stories more and a few less to my taste, but the magazine is quite powerful throughout and even the weaker tales boast impressive prose and ideas. My favorite story was probably Mathew Corradi's The Ghilish Blade, an engrossing and beautiful fantasy tale. Cowdrey's contribution to this issue, The Bogle, was also high quality and surprising in its genre (compared to his SF Paradiso Falls from the above issue), though the content itself wasn't particularly twisty.

This was the second of the three noir-cornerstone novels mentioned above (the third being The Big Sleep, which I read back in December). The Maltese Falcon is the kind of classic that's still a page turner decades after its initial publication, and the stark and declarative prose has lost none of its impact. This is a novel of complex twists and turns, with numerous characters each with separate agendas, but the plot never feels unfocused or artificial. When it comes to morality and characterization, Hammet is perhaps the least outspoken of the noir authors that I've read so far. We never come to understand Spade, and even at the end there's the question of just what his motives throughout were. It's a testament to Hammet's skills that, upon finishing the book, I was really saddened to learn that Spade, unlike Chandler's Marlowe, does not get his own series.

My thoughts after reading the first few pages of The Scarlet Letter were that Hawthorne could write very good prose. After another few pages, I amended that to good but wordy prose. By the end of the book, my opinion had distilled down to wordy. Hawthorne's writing seems enjoyable in small doses, but this novel is a piece of obviously plotted flash fiction stretched out to an agonizing (though objectively moderate) length. I think it says something that Hawthorne's introduction is forty-five pages of nothing, literally a third of the novel's text.

Under Heaven is a tightly focused and beautifully written epic fantasy. The main characters are immensely sympathetic, the oriental-esque setting is vivid and rich, and the book is impossible to put down. If I'd read this when it was released, I can guarantee that it would have made my list of best 2010 releases.

 Crampton is the screenplay that Ligotti penned with Brandon Trenz to try and get onto the X Files, which was later redone into a longer, un-X files-related version. (I read the original.) Though the themes are familiar to longtime Ligotti fans, this is, by necessity, a different style, with the author's traditionally dense and layered prose replaced with stage directions and dialogue. Different, however, does not always mean bad, and the rhythm that Ligotti manages to establish as the tale builds to its conclusion is extremely powerful – even if the ending itself did not really live up to what preceded it.

My Work is Not Yet Done consists of two short stories and a novella, the latter being the longest continuous piece of fiction that the author has yet created. Though the supernatural is a decided part of the work, My Work is Not Yet Done is far more human-focused than much of the author's output. Review coming.

The Crucible was a powerful play that, in my eyes, deserves its legendary status. The various characters grow sympathetic as the scenes pass, and the town's descent into insanity is both believable and frightening.

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman was a sort of odd read for me. The fact that I named After Dark as one of my favorite reads of last year is probably enough to show that I'm a huge fan of Murakami's prose, and this collection of twenty-four stories is as deliciously smooth and thought provoking as always. That being said, many of the collection's pieces, especially towards the beginning, were more beautiful than sympathetic, and, though some of the later tales did succeed to draw me in emotionally, many of the early stories feel more like fascinating displays than immersing experiences. If you're a fan of Murakami's writing, you're unlikely to be disappointed here, but I'd recommend experiencing his novels first.

The concluding volume of K.J. Parker's Engineer Trilogy was a powerful read that made the most of the promises established in earlier volumes. Review coming.

Shock Totem was actually the magazine that kicked off my magazine-reading quest,and the first issue didn't disappoint. Review here.

The second issue of Shock Totem didn't feel as even as the first, but its heights were even higher, cementing the magazine as essential reading in my opinion. Review coming.

The Y series seems to be getting better and better with each volume. I found the ultimate fate of the astronauts a bit of a cop out here, but that's a relatively minor thing when compared with how gripping I found the rest. The characters are continuing to develop, and I'm looking forward to the fourth volume.

(I'll point out here that my review of the first Y was taken down from the list. Looking back over it, I didn't feel like it was up to snuff, and I'd prefer to review the series as a whole once I've finished it. Sorry if you were waiting for the review.)

Snake Agent was a gripping and inventive read, a mixture of bizarre imagination and carefully orchestrated suspense. The occasional twist was too easy to see coming – something not helped by the spoiler-filled back cover blurb – but the novel was enjoyable enough to render any such issues trivial. Recommended.