784 pages
English language
Published Feb. 19, 1982 by Picador.
Red Harvest (1929) is a novel by Dashiell Hammett. The story is narrated by the Continental Op, a frequent character in Hammett's fiction, much of which is drawn from his own experiences as an operative of the Pinkerton Detective Agency (fictionalized as the Continental Detective Agency). The plot follows the Op's investigation of several murders amid a labor dispute in a corrupt Montana mining town. Some of the novel was inspired by the Anaconda Road massacre, a 1920 labor dispute in the mining town of Butte, Montana.Time included Red Harvest in its 100 Best English-Language Novels from 1923 to 2005, noting that, in the Continental Op, Hammett "created the prototype for every sleuth who would ever be called 'hard-boiled.'" The Nobel Prize-winning author André Gide called the book "a remarkable achievement, the last word in atrocity, cynicism, and horror."
I had asked for a recommendation of a novel about labour so this wasn't really what I expected. I had wanted to read a Dashiell Hammett novel and this is a probably the only hard boiled crime novel I will read. It was true to form and as hard bitten as I expected. I was surprised at some of criminal behaviour of the "good guy" protagonist, I hadn't understood that element of the genre.
