![]() ![]() “If I don’t get away soon,” our man says, “I’ll be going blood-simple like the natives.” It’s a lesson in how any place or day can become a hell-trap. Another morning, another body, another hang-over. ![]() He wakes up with another dead body on his hands. He gets drunk, takes some laudanum, and for an instant feels the rosiness of the world. “A dozen and half murders since I’ve been here.” He lists the dead and says, “That’s sixteen of them in less than a week, and more coming up.” The Continental Op copes the way they all used to. ![]() “There’s been what?” he asks the devious dame Dinah Brand. Halfway through, our man The Continental Op does a body count. It’s at this point where the novel switches from being a regular tale of intrigue and personal conflict and turns into a masterful portrait of political corruption and violence. There’s a point when Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest stops being a detective story and turns into a blood bath. It’s a novel that reminds you how unpleasant politics has always been. While it might be nice to escape into something delightful, something by Eric Kraft or an imaginative dance like Italo Calvino’s The Baron In The Trees, if you want to read a book that stabs into the thick of the American political scene, then Dashiell Hammett’s first novel is what you need to get your claws on asap. For months we’ve been overrun by the expected crap, the lies, corruption, false promises, and general deception. We’re finished with another election cycle and it’s all same old, same old. ![]()
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