Red Harvest (1929) is a novel by American writer Dashiell Hammett. The story is narrated by the Continental Op, a frequent character in Hammett's fiction, much of which is drawn from his own experiences as an operative of the Pinkerton Detective Agency (fictionalized as the Continental Detective Agency).[2] The plot follows the Op's investigation of several murders amid a labor dispute in a corrupt Montana mining town. Some of the novel was inspired by the Anaconda Road massacre, a 1920 labor dispute in the mining town of Butte, Montana.[3]
Time included Red Harvest in its 100 Best English-Language Novels from 1923 to 2005, noting that, in the Continental Op, Hammett "created the prototype for every sleuth who would ever be called 'hard-boiled.'"[4] The Nobel Prize-winning author André Gide called the book "a remarkable achievement, the last word in atrocity, cynicism, and horror."[5]
The Continental Op is called to Personville (known as "Poisonville" to the locals) by the newspaper publisher Donald Willsson, who is murdered before the Op has a chance to meet with him. The Op begins to investigate Willsson's murder and meets with Willsson's father, Elihu Willsson, a local industrialist who has found his control of the city threatened by several competing gangs. Elihu had originally invited those gangs into Personville to help him impose and then enforce the end of a labor dispute.
The Op extracts a promise and a signed letter from Elihu that pays the Continental Detective Agency, the Op's employer, $10,000 in exchange for cleaning up the city and ridding it of the gangs. When the Op solves Donald's murder, Elihu tries to renege on the deal, but the Op will not allow him to do so.
In the meantime, the Op is spending time with Dinah Brand, a possible love interest of the late Donald Willsson and a moll for Max "Whisper" Thaler, a local gangster. Using information from Brand and Personville's crooked chief of police, Noonan, the Op manages to extract and spread incriminating information to all of the warring parties. When the Op reveals that a bank robbery was staged by the cops and one of the mobs to discredit another mob, a gang war erupts.
The Op wakes up the next morning, though, to find Brand stabbed to death with the ice pick the Op handled the previous evening. No signs of forced entry are visible. The Op becomes a suspect sought by the police for Brand's murder, and one of his fellow operatives, Dick Foley, leaves Personville because he is uncertain of the Op's innocence.