Red Harvest

⚖The case for it

Personville does something to the Op, and he half-admits it: the town is remaking him into something he won't like. A neater writer might have trimmed that confession. Don't bother charting who sold out whom, since the alliances shuffle quicker than you can track them. The treachery-accounting isn't why you keep reading. Stay for the sight of one hired gun setting a rotten town's bosses at each other's throats, and for how openly he savors the wreckage. Hammett cut the short, hard sentences that Chandler and generations of crime writers lifted straight. Come for that.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Bodies stack so fast in Personville that around the fifteenth murder you stop keeping score, which is partly Hammett's point and partly his problem. The factions blur, the double-crosses require diagrams, and the Op tells you almost nothing about himself while narrating everything. The politics land; the whodunit dissolves into gleeful, lurid chaos.

— the honest librarian