"Red Harvest" by Dashiell Hammett

I have no memory of this book.  I KNOW I read all of Hammett's novels about twenty years ago.  But the title is the only familiar part about it.  I didn't even remember that the main character is the Continental Op.  Weird.  Or maybe not weird -- I read all of Hammett's novels in a row, in a big anthology I got from the library, and they did kinda smush together in my brain.  So that's probably why it didn't feel familiar.

Anyway!  I thought at first this book was going to be about fighting Communists because it actually involves a Communist agitator at the beginning, but it turns out to be about a whole lot of gangsters battling it out over control of a town.  So the titular "red harvest" really refers to all the blood that's spilled by the end, not harvesting Commies.  Or being harvested by Commies.

The Continental Op shows up in Personville for a meeting with a man who wants to hire the Continental Detective Agency for an unnamed job.  That man then dies, and it turns out he was basically the last decent, law-abiding citizen of Personville, which is nicknamed Poisonville for a good reason.  The bulk of the book is about the Op setting various gangsters and crime bosses against each other so they will take each other down and he won't have to get his hands dirty.  Except, by the end, he has to anyway.

An unpleasant book about unpleasant people?  Yes, but also... wow, so satisfying by the end when all the baddies have come to bad ends.  It was just the sort of hard, no-nonsense, smooth read I have been craving in these last, unending days of summer.  I don't love Hammett's prose the way I love Chandler's, but he has a straight-forward and slyly humorous style I enjoy anyway.

Particularly Good Bits:

"Plans are all right sometimes," I said.  "And sometimes just stirring things up is all right -- if you're tough enough to survive, and keep your eyes open so you'll see what you want when it comes to the top" (p. 85).

The machine-gun settled down to business, grinding out metal like the busy little death factory it was (p. 122).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-16 for a lot of violence and blood that somehow manages not to get excessively gory, plus some cussing, lots of alcohol and tobacco use, some laudanum use, and a lot of innuendo about why one woman is so terribly popular around town.

This is my 43rd book read from my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2023.