I'm not sure Red Harvest is the greatest crime novel of all time, though I'd insist it make the shortlist, but it surely must be the most important. This is the fulcrum on which the entire balance of detective fiction begins to tilt toward the American, hardboiled, cynical story of a corrupt world which remains unchanged despite the detective's efforts, as opposed to the English cosy optimistic stories of crime as a momentary disruption in a world which the detective then returns to its well-ordered place. This is the book with which Hammett, to paraphrase Raymond Chandler, returned crime to the people who actually committed and benefited from it. The world in which Hammett's nameless Continental Detective Agency operative operates is one in which a man very much has to do what a man has to do. Your client may be dead, but he's still your client. But it's a world where money talks, and you can just as easily be hired to break strikes and railroad the innocent as track down the guilty. Not for nothing is the mining town where Red Harvest takes place called Poisonville. More importantly, Hammett found a way to make his storytelling echo the action of the story itself, form following function. The spare neutrality of the prose not only makes the story flow, it requires you to make your own moral judgements about what is happening. This is complicated by the fact, as one critic pointed out, that no one in the book ever tells the truth. Even the Op is willing to lie, although he remains the one character with a moral compass, maintained by his professional detachment. To me, this book is about what it is to be human, to be a man in the days when being a man implied something more than David Beckham letting his wife dress him up and paint his nails. It implied responsibilities which people in today's world don't want to accept. This is the theme of Hammett's other great novels, The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key, and it is a factor in the others as well. But Red Harvest remains his finest achievement. If you haven't read it, do so now. Kudos to Orion for brining it back into print, but, as ever, this entry in the Masterworks series deserved an introduction for the benefit of its new audience.
