Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald -- my three personal gods of hardboiled crime literature. While I've read Chandler over and over, and am still working my way through Macdonald's greater output, I haven't revisited Hammett in a very long time. I'd almost forgotten what a rough elegance he brought to the tough language of hardboiled fiction. RED HARVEST is one of his most cherished novels by crime-story aficionados, though it's not nearly as well known to the general public as his more famous MALTESE FALCON and THIN MAN novels. The story of an anonymous private dick who comes to Montana town known as "Poisonville," gets caught up in a murder, and winds up taking on all comers in a rodeo of wrongdoers is ostensibly the source material for several well-known films. (Akira Kurosawa's YOJIMBO is, according to many opinions, an unacknowledged rip-off of RED HARVEST, though I see only the barest of similarity in plot and almost none in tone. But YOJIMBO is definitely the inspiration for A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS and LAST MAN STANDING, and thus RED HARVEST is seen by some as the progenitor of those films, too.)

At any rate, RED HARVEST stands on its own as a superb, dark, bloody, and raw detective story, though mystery and detection are much less prominent parts of the stew than they are in the FALCON and THIN MAN stories. Nobody wrote wordplay like Hammett. Chandler's was more poetic, even in its knuckle-hardness. Chandler may have been the Fitzgerald of hardboiled. If so, Hammett was the Hemingway. ( )

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 shoit. I didn't think anything of what he had 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.

3,5 ( )

I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Dewey Hickey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit.

How’s that for an opening? No way you stop reading until the end. (Check out the laudanum dreams in chapter 21. Hammett would have made a great surrealist.)

Red Harvest (1929!) is the proto-hardboiled gumshoe mystery/crime novel. An out-of-towner mucks up the local criminal combine and all hell breaks loose. Hammett was good at conjuring characters with a few short lines about disarranged facial features and narrating action scenes punctuated by sharpcrack dialogue.

I put the muzzle of my gun in his left eye and said: “You’re making a fine pair of clowns of us. Be still while I get up or I’ll make an opening in your head for brains to leak in.”

It may not be high literary art, but it's enough to know that Hammett practically invented the pulp-gritty depiction of corruption and violence as bedrock Americana. ( )

I enjoyed the guns, cigars, and the rivers of gin flowing on every page. I like Hammett’s wordplay a lot. He turns phrases with an awkward fun-ness. One of the key characteristics of The Continental Op is his nonchalant manner. In the middle of gunfights his character is written as if everything is no big deal and he takes nothing seriously. He comes across as a man who is bored by anyone without a severe economy of words. He even gets bored with himself when he has to explain things and usually just truncates his own speech. He is all of our definitions of hardboiled. ( )