Red Harvest

Dashiell Hammett was for many years a short story writer for the pulp magazine Black Mask. In the late 1920s his editor asked him to expand his stories featuring a nameless private eye (dubbed the Continental Op) into longer works. The result was Red Harvest, originally a four-part Black Mask serial and later a full-length novel. In the story, the Op goes to Personville, Montana (“an ugly city of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining”) and discovers a cesspool of corruption. The plot is confusing (and somewhat unimportant), but the book is raw, vivid, cynical, and gruesome — with an unforgettable setting in a corrupt Montana mining town. (Hammett himself previously worked for 8 years as a Pinkerton detective, which included an assignment in Butte, Montana for a miners’ strike. Here is a very good 1923 article from Hammett about his experiences.)