Red Harvest

I was in a conversation the other day about the best detective/mystery novels ever.

Of course, it's pretty much impossible to list a single "best ever" because there is so much variety within the genre. There's the traditional whodunit, the American hard-boiled detective, historical mysteries, amatuer detectives and so on and so one. Every single one of these sub-genres has produced some excellent stuff.

So that gave me an idea for a new blog series, covering a sample book from each of these sub-genres. Each book will be, in my humble opinion at least, one of the best of its type.

We'll take a slug of bourbon from the bottle in our desk drawer and start with the hard-boiled detective.

Born in the pages of Black Mask magazine in the 1920s, the hard-boiled style of writing is sparse and powerful, telling often complex stories in a relatively few pages. The hard-boiled detective is a tough man in a tough world, surrounded by violence and corruption. But he himself must have a strong sense of honor--a set of personal ethics that he holds inviolate. As Raymond Chandler writes in his essay "The Simple Art of Murder "...down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid."

Dashiell Hammett did not publish the very first hard-boiled story, but he's still pretty much the father of the genre because he did it so darn good. Many people consider The Maltese Falcon to be his best novel (and with good reason), but I always lean towards Red Harvest as being my personal favorite. Originally serialized in Black Mask, it was later re-written slightly and published as a novel.

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Red Harvest's protagonist is an unnamed detective referred to by fans as the Continental Op, a character who starred in many of Hammett's stories. (He works as an operative for the Continental Detective Agency--hense the nickname.)

The Op is a coldly professional P.I. who seems to live only for his job. In an earlier story, a character referred to him as "A monster. A nice one, an especially nice one to have around when you're in trouble, but a monster just the same, without any human foolishness like love in him, and - What's the matter? Have I said something I shouldn't?"

In Red Harvest, the Op travels to Personville, a small town more commonly referred to as Poisonville because of the rampant corruption. The newspaper editor who hired the Op to clean up the town in murdered before the two can meet. The Op does some investigating, learns what he can about the different mobs based in the town, then uses a campaign of lies and half-truths to turn them all against one another. Basically, he cleans up the town by getting the bad guys to wipe each other out.

It's great storytelling, with crackling, straight-forward prose that carries the plot along at a fast pace. It's not a long novel, but an awful lot of stuff goes down before the climax. It's packed to the brim with believable characters and more than its share of pure suspense.

Thus, Red Harvest stands out as a great example of just how good hard-boiled fiction can be.