Red Harvest

⚖The case for it

Poisonville is a Montana mining town run by the gangs an owner hired during a labour war and never got rid of. The Op does not solve a crime; he sets the crooked factions on each other and stands back, which readers find a better engine than a whodunit. Hammett “didn’t waste any words here, but didn’t leave any out,” and even gunmen who last a page “strut and fret their few lines across the page.” Partway through, the Op admits privately that he has started to enjoy it, which is the quietly worst moment in the book. “A maze of crime and violence with no exits.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

The “myriad of double, triple and quadruple crosses” is genuinely hard to track rather than artfully disorienting, and readers lose which hood belongs to which faction. Bodies accumulate without anybody registering grief, so “there doesn’t seem to be a genuine emotion in the entire book,” and the Op’s flatness reads as inhuman rather than professional. It began as four magazine stories and still shows the seams: “not quite a novel, more a series of overlapping vignettes,” with a lawyer subplot that kills the pace. Chandler partisans say he “would have made this readable and entertaining.”

— the honest librarian

4h

honest hours

6

sittings