Red Harvest

"Red Harvest is one of two serialised novels featuring the Continental Op. Hammett wrote 24 Op stories and two novels, Red Harvest and The Dain Curse . The Op is a nameless PI who works for a Pinkerton -type agency called the Continental Detective Agency. He’s a short, stocky, middle-aged, balding guy who is just very dogged in his pursuit of the answers. He will do some pretty morally ambiguous stuff to get the job done. One of the great lines in any detective short story is from Hammett’s ‘ The Gutting of Couffignal ,’ in which the Op has been sent to guard the gifts of a very wealthy family during a wedding that is taking place on an island. A gang of criminals are trying to rob the wedding. The Op hurts his leg and, hobbling around, sees a guy on crutches, calls him over, takes one of the crutches and sends him to the ground. At the end of that story, he discovers the mastermind of this business is a beautiful woman. As she’s walking away, he shouts, ‘Stop or I’ll shoot!’ She doesn’t believe him, but he shoots her in the calf. He says: ‘You ought to have known I’d do it! Didn’t I steal a crutch from a cripple?’ That kind of sums up the Op. In Red Harvest, he does far worse. He is brought into this town called Personville, which he calls ‘Poisonville.’ There are lots of different criminal elements working there. The Op is sent to meet with the one honest person in this town—the newspaper publisher—who is then killed. Then he’s hired by the newspaper publisher’s father, the wealthiest guy in town, to find out who killed his son. He figures that out pretty quickly, but decides that’s not enough. He wants to clean up this town. He’ll do whatever it takes to flush out all the criminal activity, hitting one gang after another, manipulating them to kill each other, which is how you get the title. There are lots of deaths in Red Harvest."