Red Harvest

Zusatztext "An acknowledged literary landmark."  -- NY Times Book Review . "Dashiell Hammett is an original. He is a master of the detective novel! yes! but also one hell of a writer." -- Boston Globe "Hammett's prose [is] clean and entirely unique. His characters [are] as sharply and economically defined as any in American fiction." -- The New York Times Informationen zum Autor Dashiell Samuel Hammett was born in St. Mary’s County, Maryland. He grew up in Philadelphia and Baltimore. Hammett left school at the age of fourteen and held several kinds of jobs thereafter—messenger boy, newsboy, clerk, operator, and stevedore, finally becoming an operative for Pinkerton’s Detective Agency. Sleuthing suited young Hammett, but World War I intervened, interrupting his work and injuring his health. When Sergeant Hammett was discharged from the last of several hospitals, he resumed detective work. He soon turned to writing, and in the late 1920s Hammett became the unquestioned master of detective-story fiction in America. In The Maltese Falcon (1930) he first introduced his famous private eye, Sam Spade. The Thin Man (1932) offered another immortal sleuth, Nick Charles. Red Harvest (1929), The Dain Curse (1929), and The Glass Key (1931) are among his most successful novels. During World War II, Hammett again served as sergeant in the Army, this time for more than two years, most of which he spent in the Aleutians. Hammett’s later life was marked in part by ill health, alcoholism, a period of imprisonment related to his alleged membership in the Communist Party, and by his long-time companion, the author Lillian Hellman, with whom he had a very volatile relationship. His attempt at autobiographical fiction survives in the story “Tulip,” which is contained in the posthumous collection The Big Knockover (1966, edited by Lillian Hellman). Another volume of his stories, The Continental Op (1974, edited by Stephen Marcus), introduced the final Hammett character: the “Op,” a nameless detective (or “operative”) who displays little of his personality, making him a classic tough guy in the hard-boiled mold—a bit like Hammett himself. Klappentext Detective-story master Dashiell Hammett gives us yet another unforgettable read in Red Harvest : When the last honest citizen of Poisonville was murdered! the Continental Op stayed on to punish the guilty--even if that meant taking on an entire town. Red Harvest is more than a superb crime novel: it is a classic exploration of corruption and violence in the American grain. Leseprobe A WOMAN IN GREEN AND A MAN IN GRAY I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit. I didn't think anything of what he had done to the city's name. Later I heard men who could manage their r's give it the same pronunciation. I still didn't see anything in it but the meaningless sort of humor that used to make richardsnary the thieves' word for dictionary. A few years later I went to Personville and learned better. Using one of the phones in that station, I called the Herald, asked for Donald Willsson, and told him I had arrived. "Will you come out to my house at ten this evening?" He had a pleansantly crisp voice. "It's 2101 Mountain Boulevard. Take a Broadway car, get off at Laurel Avenue, and walk two blocks west." I promised to do that. Then I rode up to the Great Western Hotel, dumped my bags, and went out to look at the city. The city wasn't pretty. Most of its builders had gone in for gaudiness. Maybe they had been successful at first. Since then the smelters whose brick stacks stuck up tall against a gloomy mountain to the south had yellow-smoked everything into uniform dinginess. The result was an ugly city of forty th...

Product details

• Authors: Dashiell Hammett
• Publisher: Vintage USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 17.07.1989
• EAN: 9780679722618
• ISBN: 978-0-679-72261-8
• No. of pages: 224
• Dimensions: 132 mm x 202 mm x 18 mm
• Series: Vintage Paperbacks; VINTAGE BOOKS; Vintage crime/Black Lizard
• Subject: Fiction > Suspense