From the All-TIME 100 Novels list – Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett https://entertainment.time.com/2005/10/16/all-time-100-novels/slide/all/ Nine out of 10

 From the All-TIME 100 Novels list – Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett https://entertainment.time.com/2005/10/16/all-time-100-novels/slide/all/

Nine out of 10

 

 

The undersigned does not read crime stories on a regular basis, albeit seeing that some of them have been included on prestigious lists of the best works ever written, there needs to be a discerning decision and include them in the cornucopia of books on offer, selectively, as in choose from the 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read compilation https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jan/23/bestbooks-fiction

 

Dashiell Hammett is in fact the author of some of the best known, popular and appreciated detective stories, perhaps first among them being The Maltese Falcon http://realini.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-maltese-falcon-by-dashiell-hammett.html adapted for the big screen, with the memorable, legendary Humphrey Bogart in the leading role…there is also The Thin Man http://realini.blogspot.com/2020/08/the-thin-man-by-dashiell-hammett-10-out.html and The Glass Key

I have read The Glass Room recently, and one character from it, Viktor Landauer, the one who has a superb, modern house built in the ‘functional, minimalist’ style introduced by Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe (the latter is famous for saying ‘less is more’ and applying it to the spectacular architecture he has designed in Chicago, Berlin) which includes the Glass Room from the title and he says to his wife, Liesle, that if she reads Dashiell Hammett, she will speak English like a gangster…Landauer is Jewish and thus he has to escape the Nazis and from Switzerland, he will try to reach America, through Cuba…

 

in the beginning of the Red Harvest, it is interesting to read about California and think of some of the myths we believe in…as the narrator and main character, the Op, arrives in Personville aka Poisonville, he is unhappy with the town, but that made yours truly think of Stumbling on Happiness http://realini.blogspot.com/2013/06/stumbling-on-happiness-by-david-gilbert.html by Harvard Professor (he may not be there now, but used to be a professor there) Daniel Gilbert, in which we learn about the wrong concepts we have, such as The California myth…people think that they would be happy, if only they were to live in California, a Pacific, Caribbean island (though not Cuba, Haiti and the like)

Nevertheless, studies show that there is a phenomenon called Hedonic Adaptation, and once we move to one of these places, we adapt to the things we desired, palm trees, white sand, gorgeous beaches, and start getting annoyed, infuriated even with the aspects of life that are aggregious there, such as the raging wild fires, a severe draught, the threat of disappearance for some islands, due to Climate Change (which is in fact responsible for the other calamities mentioned, the price of electricity and power cuts, the list is long…

 

The city of Personville had been plagued by misfortune, before the Op is asked to come, invited by Donald Willsson, because there had been a strike, inspired by the real Butte Anaconda Road massacre, and the local maharajah, Elihu Willsson, Donald’s father, had brought in gangsters to end the labor dispute, only to see that with the end of the strike, he could not take the town back from the gangs, who took over and would not give back control to the older Willsson, and they end up clashing with each other…

Donald Willsson is killed before the Op has a chance to meet with him, and the father is sure that the wife has done the murder…she is indeed a suspect, for she is called on the phone, leaves and then returns with what looks like blood on one of her shoes, only to say that Donald Willsson will not be seeing anyone soon…well, not in these words, but something like that and this is because he went to the scene of the crime…

 

One man and one woman are seen near the dead body of Donald Willsson, though they are not close, visible enough for witnesses to identify them and besides, in the not so simple process of finding the killer (or killers) we see that there is more than we initially suspect (as it happens so often) and the wife saw something, but she is not the one to use a gun on her spouse…there is a check for five thousand dollars, written so that one person can cash it, which indicates another suspect in the equation…

There is blackmail, insider trading – for if you know when a strike will start and the time of the end, you can speculate on the shares and make a bundle, ostensibly – and quite a few other crimes, with the police involved…indeed, there seems to be no character that is clean and good, except the hero aka narrator and a couple of other personages…’The Czar of Poisonville’ aka Elihu Willsson issues a check for ten thousand dollars…

 

Determined to find who killed his son and ‘clean the town’ he offers it to the Op, only to change his mind, once the killer is known, but the hero would have none of that…which makes him the almost perfect Role Model, brave, honest – he refuses the invitation to keep it as a reward, and therefore hide it from the Continental Detective Agency where he is an employee, which is against the rules as he points out

We could say that apart from his courage and his integrity, the main character has a spirit of self-sacrifice, since he is also very intelligent and understands very well the risks he is taking, staying in a town which is captured by gangs, in conflict with each other, and cleaning up the place as he states that he will do, even when the man who pays the check says more or less ‘you keep the money, never mind the cleaning, I do not want any of that anymore’…so this is a unique example of selflessness…

This is also a love for justice, a moral attitude, albeit the personage is also detached, modest and self-deprecating, he does not think in terms of self-aggrandizing, exaggerating his merits, being arrogant…he wants to do a good job, no matter what it takes…at least this is what this reader takes from the story


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