Five books in five days (6)

NewMexiKen finished Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest this morning. That’s five books in just less than five full days.

I chose Red Harvest because I had previously decided it would be worthwhile to try and read as many of Time’s 100 best English-language novels as possible. (The list was mentioned on NewMexiKen in October.) At first I thought I would tackle the 100 in roughly chronological order — it provided structure to the project and seemed an interesting way to watch the progression of styles and genres. Something in me began to balk, however, at the prospect of getting through 10 novels from the 1920s, 14 from the 1930s, and so on. Reading one from each decade, then cycling back somehow seemed like a better plan.

Among the ten 1920s novels on the Time list were nine I’ve never read. Hammett’s Red Harvest seemed a good beginning.

Where did we first hear the voice of the world-weary American tough guy in its purest distillation? In Dashiell Hammett, a former Pinkerton detective, and in this book, his first novel. Though less famous than The Maltese Falcon or The Thin Man, which both have the advantage of their pitch-perfect movie adaptations, this tale of omnidirectional treachery is the man at his deadly best. … Here the Op finds himself in a corrupt western town where there’s a power struggle among contending factions. Virtually all of them, the hoods, the lawmen, the lowlifes, the local grandees, are lying and corrupt. Short, overweight, often a little drunk, the Op is no movie star. He’s a hero all the same, a man on his own, maneuvering among the crocodiles, frequently with fists and firepower, always with a brutal and amusing efficiency.

“He wasn’t the sort of man whose pocket you’d try to pick unless you had a lot of confidence in your fingers.”

“‘You’re making a fine pair of clowns of us. Be still while I get up or I’ll make an opening in your head for brains to leak in.'”

“She watched him with a face hard as a silver dollar.”

“The Agency wits said he could spit icicles in July.”

Great reading.

3 thoughts on “Five books in five days (6)”

  1. At last something I disagree on with you. I’ve read a few of Hammett’s short stories, and The Maltese Falcon, and found him to be good in places, but lot’s of rough patches. I think he was getting paid by the word and his writing often showed that. There are flashes of light, and he was certainly original and influential, but his best imitators outshone him. In this genre, I think I’ll stick with Raymond Chandler or one of Parker’s early Spenser novels. They’re good all the way through.

    Thanks for being such an examplary reader. Imagine, reading something that is bound and not on a computer screen! The web tends to pull one through snippets and slide shows of other parts of the world, but a good book can pull you completely out of your present reality and completely into another.

    And thus, whether it is at present on your list, I am bold to recommend to you Haruki Murakami’s “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” which begins:

    “When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along to an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.???

    Reading that pulled me through looking glass into a tale of compelling ordinariness, forgotten history, and heightened reality. It’s one of the few books that kept me up too late, and I found myself stealing time to read, usually for longer than I intended.

    End of essay… if I’m going to go on long this, maybe I’ll have to start my own blog, eh?

  2. I agree with Muddy. I’ve tried hard to really enjoy Hammett (I would’ve been named Nick had I been born a boy, so I consider it an obligation), but I much prefer those who succeeded him. Chandler is excellent, though I also enjoy Ross MacDonald, Rex Stout, and even John MacDonald’s Travis McGee series. This isn’t to say that Hammett isn’t fun to read, because he is, but I happen to share Muddy’s preference of the later mystery authors.

Comments are closed.