Red Harvest (Annotated)

The First Hard-Boiled Novel — the Complete 1929 Text, with a Critical Study and a Life of Dashiell Hammett

De: Dashiell Hammett

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

This annotated edition of Red Harvest includes:

• A critical study of the first hard-boiled novel
• On Poisonville — Hammett's Butte, Montana, and the mine wars
• How Red Harvest fathered Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars
• On the Continental Op, the detective with no name
• A note on the 1929 first-edition text and its public-domain status

Before Sam Spade, before the falcon, before noir even had a name, there was a nameless detective, a town called Poisonville, and about two dozen corpses.

In 1929 Dashiell Hammett published his first novel and invented the hard-boiled crime story in a single savage stroke. The Continental Op — fat, middle-aged, nameless — is hired into a Western mining town so rotten its own people call it Poisonville, and cleans it up the only way that will work: by setting its crooked police, its bootleggers, and its rival gangs against one another and letting them kill each other off. By the end he has lost count of the bodies, and nearly lost himself — "going blood-simple," in the phrase this novel gave the language.

Red Harvest is the origin point of American noir, more truly than any book that followed it: the first, the fastest, the most violent, and the most radical. Hammett built Poisonville out of his own years as a Pinkerton strike-breaker in Butte, Montana, and the corruption he draws is not a metaphor — it is capitalism as open gang war. The template he invented here, a lone stranger playing two gangs against each other in a lawless town, was lifted uncredited for Kurosawa's Yojimbo, and from there for A Fistful of Dollars and a hundred films since.

This Erato Press edition presents the complete 1929 first-edition text and surrounds it with a substantial critical study — of Poisonville and the real Butte, of the Op as a new kind of hero, of the body count as a moral argument, and of the novel's long uncredited shadow over cinema — with a life of Dashiell Hammett, from Pinkerton operative to blacklisted silence.

Offered for sale in the United States and other public-domain territories only.