Michelle F's Reviews > Red Harvest

"He stood at the foot of the bed and looked at me with solemn eyes. I sat on the side of the bed and looked at him with whatever kind of eyes I had at the time. We did this for nearly three minutes."

I have to admit that modern versions of Organised Crime stories are not my, er, flask of Scotch. These gritty, hard-boiled pulps, though. The language and the atmosphere are just so damn swell.
Hammett is one of the progenitors of the noir genre, and I can't possibly love his writing more. The story itself is good, but it's all about the style, for me.

I love that the Continental Op has no name. The main character has no name. He's just The Continental Op.

I love that if you are reading Red Harvest in the internal accent that you should, Personville becomes Poisonville almost automatically.

I love that 1920's and 1930's small-city America seems (in these types of novels) to be almost equally populated with innocents and no-goodniks, and everybody's workin' an angle, see?

And I absolutely adore that everyone was more linguistically interesting. Like seriously, check this out:

" 'I'm busted, flat. I know you're a Continental Op, and I got a pretty good hunch what you're up to here. I'm close to a lot that's going on on both sides of things in this burg. There's things I could do for you, being an ex-dick, know the ropes both ways.'
'You want to stool pigeon for me?'
He looked me straight in the eye and said evenly:
'There's no sense in a man picking out the worst name he can find for everything!'"

One of the top reviewers for this book, Stephen, said Red Harvest gave him an Noirgasm, and I think that the term is just to apropos to not appropriate it for myself. Such a fun read!