Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett

FilmClub: 24 d'octubre a les 19 h a la Biblioteca Mestra Maria Antònia.

BookClub: 25 d'octubre a les 19 h a la Biblioteca Mestra Maria Antònia.

(Extracte del punt de lectura.)

About the book

Red Harvest is one of the most violent mysteries ever written. It was Dashiell Hammett's first detective novel in 1929, and shows a detective caught between two warring factions in a corrupt mining town. Red Harvest strikes powerful themes with its story of a lone hero standing against an evil town. Ultimately the novel has been loosely adapted for several movies, including Yojimbo (用心棒), a samurai tale by the great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa.

It's a great example of the noir style of crime writing, with prose that's both dark and tough –and Hammett makes that clear from the book's first line: "I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte". The narrator is the detective with no name –he's referred to only as "the continental op"– and he's headed to a new assignment as the solitary outsider in very dangerous town. Hammett conveys that through clever prose –the town is so violent, everybody already knows it, and they've even informally revoked its original name to replace it with something more suggestive.

Hammett's detective had appeared in short stories throughout the 1920s, but this was Hammett's first novel using the character. He seems determined to fill up the pages with even more bloody crime than usual, and the title Red Harvest is well deserved.

The Film

Title: Miller's Crossing

Director: Joel & Ethan Coen

Cast

• Gabriel Byrne as Tom Reagan
• Marcia Gay Harden as Verna Bernbaum
• Albert Finney as Leo O'Bannon
• John Turturro as Bernie Bernbaum
• Jon Polito as Johnny Caspar
• J. E. Freeman as Eddie Dane

Other books by the same author that you can find in English at the Public Libraries of Catalonia (link):

• The Dain Curse
• The Thin Man