Happy Birthday Dashiell Hammett

Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett

The first-person narrator of this violent crime novel from 1929 is an anonymous operative of the San Francisco branch of the Continental Detective Agency. It seems to me our Nameless Narrator is not a protagonist with a code or sense of purpose or impulse to protect harmless villagers or retired plutocrats.

Nameless takes up a risky challenge to clean up Personville, a corrupt town in Montana, because do something or do nothing, death, that remedy of all ills and payer of all debts, will come out of nowhere. So we may as well play a no-limit game:

“…Poisonville is ripe for the harvest. It’s a job I like, and I’m going to it.”

“While you last,” the gambler said.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “I was reading in the paper this morning about a fellow choking to death eating a chocolate eclair in bed.”

“That may be good,” said Dinah Brand, her big body sprawled in an armchair, “but it wasn’t in this morning’s paper.”

This calls to mind in The Maltese Falcon Sam Spade’s story of the man who escapes death when a beam falls to the ground just yards behind him.* Realizing the abyss is always yawning, the man leaves his family and starts a new life.

No one has tasked the Nameless Narrator with the civic reform that he is willing to carry out. Robber baron and tinpot potentate Elihu Willson had only hinted that he wanted his town back. But Nameless seizes the opportunity to unleash a bloodbath by setting the hard cases of Personville against each other. Nameless is an ace Machiavellian, mixing lies and truth for civic order if not truth and justice. We can see where Akira Kurosawa got the inspiration for Yojimbo and Sergio Leone for A Fistful of Dollars (the Coen Brothers got the phrase “blood simple” from this novel).

Writing for serialization in a pulp magazine, Hammett packs this short novel full of episodes and flat characters, often introduced by a physical description with grotesque details (this was a pulp convention, making heavies appear repulsive). No other characters are as round as the shabby femme fatale Dinah Brand. Her brazen greed is a caricature of any crafty and calculating American climber in thrall to hankering for wealth. Ultimately, the main character is Poisonville – Butte? Helena? - the mining town on which Hammett vents his anger with violence and corruption American-style, as if disgusted by our sinister decadence in accepting strong-arm gangsterism and trails of blood in murders and massacres as normal.

Often called the first hard-boiled novel, Red Harvest tells a dark grisly story and does so in an exceptional way, with a raw, concise and unvarnished style, but at the same time always ironic, fresh and high-spirited. All the noir elements are in place: rival gangs, corrupt policemen, femme fatales, fixed boxing matches, score settling in ambushes and shoot-outs, and Prohibition-era speakeasies and rum-running.

In this cauldron of booze, deception, and blood our Nameless Narrator sidestrokes with ease, playing the anonymous detective with an anti-heroic beer belly and low-down enough for his colleagues to think he could be a murderer. But he’s blessed with a quick mind, glib tongue and ready gun so he always ready to solve the thorniest issues. The archetypal American hero: help yourself and help others if your help avails because talent, wit, fame, wealth, security, property, health we have only on loan, all are subject to Fortune waving a wand and poof-it’s-gone.

 

* From 1994 to 1997 I lived in Riga, Latvia. During thaws, chunks of ice would slide off the roofs of the five- and six-story Art Nouveau buildings. A couple of times I walked on sidewalks spattered by the blood of unlucky pedestrians who were hit by chunks of ice. Once time about a block from my apartment on Chaka-iela, I heard a thump behind me. I looked back and saw a chunk of ice the size of a medium-sized pumpkin. I didn’t have any hard-boiled epiphanies but I swallowed pretty hard. And clearly I’ve not forgotten my close shave. More recently I was walking in my neighborhood after jogging, cooling down. A car pulled up and a teenage girl jumped out. She let me have it with a super soaker water blaster. It felt good but it could just as easily have been an AK-15, yes?