Day 15--15/501General Musings: My MBA is full swing and I am learning a great deal about financial accounting. At first I was scared stupid about it. Now, I'm scared stupid and totally confounded by it! It is actually a lot of fun and I take all the challenges as a game--or dare I say a mystery? Leaving me with the perfect segue for today's review.
Running Page Count: 4,459
Today's title (Thriller): Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest
Preface: Hard boiled detective fiction and literature noir are simply my favourite genres. I fell in love with film noir when I was young--Blade Runner, The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Le Samurai, etc and later I realized the splendor of the originals. There is something very pleasing about a genre that deals with the ambiguity of right and wrong in relative circumstances. Being a good person isn't about being a saint but a selective sinner--Travis McGee is my ideal of the modern knight errant and I'd rather read John D McDonald pulp than Joyce any day.
Hammett single handily invented the hard boiled detective story and although he only wrote five novels his books are archetypal of all such stories. Hammett was born on a farm, dropped out of middle school, and became a Pinkerton detective in his teens. Red Harvest is semi-autobiographical and the events depicted (believe it or not) closely follow his own final case in Butte for the Pinkerton Agency.
Red Harvest was one of Time Magazine's All Time 100 English language novels. It was Hammett's first novel and today one of his least known titles but best known story.
The Book: The story is of a murder in a town beset by pervasive corruption by unions, police, criminal gangs, and mining magnates. The protagonist, simply known as the Continental Operative (or Op) plays all sides against the middle in an attempt to implode the Dantesque town of Personville better known to denizens as Poisonville (I would die for a Poisonville High School team jacket).
Grade: A+
Observations: A great book that is equal parts cynicism, terse dialogue, violence, and pragmatic killing. By the time it's done you'll be ready to take a roll of nickels in your fist and beat down a dirty cop (or a dirty cop communications person--don't get me started). Usually stories like this are set up for a wholly different pay-off but this one is very dark and very satisfying for the Eumenides-like justice that rains down on them.
Full disclosure: I am a bigger fan of Hammett's Maltese Falcon, the restraint of Spade and the influence of the Huston film make it a firmer if less violent story. But I believe my preference is a matter of taste and not quality.
Segues: You've seen the story before in films like Roadhouse Nights, Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars, and Last Man Standing. Moreover, the Coen brothers' (my favourite film director fraternity) first film Blood Simple owes the title to a neat snatch of dialogue from Red Harvest.
Tomorrow's Book (Children's Fiction): Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are 16/501
