Red Harvest

Dashiell Hammett’s first novel, published in 1929, sends his nameless Continental Op to Personville, a Montana mining town so rotten that locals call it Poisonville. Hired by a newspaper publisher who is murdered before the two can meet, the Op stays on and resolves to clean the place out, pitting its warring gangsters, crooked police, and corrupt bosses against one another until the bodies pile up. As the killing spreads, he begins to worry that the slaughter has gone to his own head. Built from Hammett’s Black Mask stories and shadowed by real labor wars he had witnessed as a detective, it set the template for the hard-boiled crime novel. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available.