In the Library
Red Harvest
Dashiell Hammett, 1929
- Form
- Form Novel
- Reading time
- Reading time 4.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 27
- Length
- Length 61k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
In the public domain in the United States only: this edition is sold and read there and nowhere else.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
About the book
They call it Poisonville, the miners who worked here before the copper bosses handed it to gangsters, and Dashiell Hammett takes the joke literally: by the time his detective is done, its streets run with blood he arranged himself. Hired to solve one murder, the Continental Op stays to dismantle an entire criminal machine, feeding each gang boss a lie about the others until Personville does his killing for him. Hammett had worked Pinkerton jobs guarding strikebreakers in a town very like this one, and he wrote exactly what that work does to a man: not heroism, but a slow, awful hunger. "Play with murder enough," the Op admits, "and it gets you one of two ways. It makes you sick, or you get to like it." Red Harvest is the coldest, hardest prose in American crime fiction, sentences stripped down until only the necessary verb remains, and its real subject isn't the thirty-odd corpses but the question underneath them: what happens to a man sent to clean up a town once he finds out he likes the killing.