****
Hammett's first novel, featuring the Continental Op, a detective with the San Francisco-based Continental Detective Agency. Called to the town of Personville, the Op finds his client murdered and the town, known locally as Poisonville, in the grip of rampant crime and corruption. He decides to clean it up, by pitting the various factions against each other. A labyrinthine plot and a body count that quickly rises to obscene proportion pull the reader into a nightmare world of murder and mayhem that even the Op finds difficult to resist. Hammet is "so hardboiled," Dorothy Parker wrote in The New Yorker, "you could roll him on the White House lawn.” Red Harvest is Exhibit #1. Based on four linked stories from 1927 and 1928, originally published in Black Mask.
Hammett's first novel, featuring the Continental Op, a detective with the San Francisco-based Continental Detective Agency. Called to the town of Personville, the Op finds his client murdered and the town, known locally as Poisonville, in the grip of rampant crime and corruption. He decides to clean it up, by pitting the various factions against each other. A labyrinthine plot and a body count that quickly rises to obscene proportion pull the reader into a nightmare world of murder and mayhem that even the Op finds difficult to resist. Hammet is "so hardboiled," Dorothy Parker wrote in The New Yorker, "you could roll him on the White House lawn.” Red Harvest is Exhibit #1. Based on four linked stories from 1927 and 1928, originally published in Black Mask.
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