Books like Red Harvest

I’ll give you three good reasons—from least to most—why you should read Red Harvest: 1) it made possible the fine Leone film A Fistful of Dollars, 2) it inspired the Kurosawa masterpiece Iojimbo which influenced A Fistful of Dollars, and 3) it is an old school hard boiled, hardcore novel, with a detective as tough as Spade, Marlowe and Hammer put together, written in hard-as-nails prose, and set in a small West Coast city, a city with a heart of stone.The City is Personville, and people call it “Poisonville,” but not because they are speaking with an accent. A few years before the book opens, mining tycoon and city boss Elihu Wilsson called in some thugs and goons to break a mining strike. Oh they broke it alright, but now these gangsters—with names like Lew Yard, “Whispers,” Pete the Finn—have carved Elihu’s little city into fiefdoms, and Boss Wilsson is not the boss anymore. Our detective, the nameless “Continental Op”--employed by the Continental Detective Agency—soon begins systematically destroying the rival gangs by sowing lies and discord among them. Sure, there is a murder the Op has to solve, but soon, in addition, we have stabbings, ambushes, furtive late night shootings and afternoon gun battles. And a good looking but slatternly gold digger too. Everything a reader could want.At least you’d think so, wouldn’t you, and it would be enough for your average hard-boiled novel. But three-quarters of the way through, the Op begins to realize he likes all this killing, and after drinking too many laudanum-and-gins and dreaming some stone-crazy dope-head dreams, he wakes up to find a bloody ice pick in his hand. Now the Op has one last murder to solve, and he can't exclude himself as a suspect.Red Harvest (1927) is certainly a genre classic, but it is also a great book on any terms. The prose is spare, the metaphors are crisp, and, although the narrative is often crowded with incident, the plot remains simple and clear and close to the bone.