Mario wonders, "Has anybody been doing their _Red Harvest_
homework?"
Actually, I have, and since this list, uh, tolerates first
impressions by those of us who have never read a given
novel...
Going back to this Hammett after reading contemporary stuff
is like a step back in time. More like gangster stuff than
PI. Blast away all complexities,bullets everywhere, people
drop all around you, but not you. Dunno--more believeable in
fast-paced movies than a slow read across the page.
Remember that several have named this book as a
probable/possible inspiraton for Yojimbo/Fistful of Dollars,
and I see the similarities. The most strikingly similar scene
is when Reno tells several men to come on out of a burning
building with their hands up and then kills them. Seems to me
that such cold dealing could itself have come from one of the
actual gang wars of the 20s. Anyone?
The idea of turning a town against itself at least goes back
to 19th century tall tale or confidence man fiction--King and
Duke in Huckleberry Finn, or Twain's Mysterious Stranger or
The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg
(or Faulkner's Spotted Horses). What's in common is that the
sharpies in town can't win against the professional sharpies.
What's different is that instead of having the hypocrasy or
stupidity of ostensibly solid citizens exposed, minor league
sinners brought to their moral senses, we have the darker
vision of a community exposed as rotten to the core. Loss of
faith in even ostensible goodness, as happens later in High
Noon, marking (some say) the beginning of the "adult
western." More likely the noir world coming into the
western...which brings us round to the world of the spaghetti
Westerns. Did appreciate Hammett's social history, from union
troubles to rival gangs, to show the source of such poisoning
of community.
Patterns or scenes that resonate include the many posed
"solutions" to particular crimes--some posed for effect, some
sprung as surprises (Op on the chief to set him up). All
these solutions reminded me of conventional mystery
writing--"Col. Mustard did it in the green room with the
knife." And then there are the scenes where Op confronts his
employer and unlike Marlowe in The Big Sleep, not only goes
further than he was supposed to, but forces his employer to
finish the job in town. His reason? Not so much a code (that
I can figure out), as a desire to spread mayhem ("blood
simple") as a sort of revenge for being shot at. And in all
this incited gunfire, apparently no innocent pedestrians or
neighbors catch a bullet. Yeah, right.
As one who reveres The Maltese Falcon, I seem to find earlier
Hammetts, like Red Harvest, involve a lot of suspension of
disbelief. Sort of like going back to action comics.
Bill Hagen
<
billha@ionet.net>
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