Red Harvest is told in the first person, something which became fairly standard with PI and hard-boiled fiction. Both are excellent introductions to the hard-boiled detective genre and to an unforgettable, if nameless protagonist. Red Harvest is the first of the Op novels, the other being The Dain Curse. As a Pinkerton operative, Hammett played some small part in Pinkerton’s War on Labor, something which troubled Hammett, who was left politically.
The Op was based on operatives Hammett himself knew, when he had worked for the Pinkerton Agency. We never learn the detective’s name – he is referred to simply as the Continental Op. Most of Hammett’s early stories featured a balding, middle-aged detective working for the Continental Detective Agency. Hammett started his literary career writing short stories for the very pulps he would ultimately transcend. Hammett is credited with taking the private investigator story out of the popular pulp magazines and transforming the genre into something of literary value. It’s harvest time again, so what better time to look back at Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest.
0 kommentar(er)
