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Welcome to the Tea, Tonic & Toxin book club and podcast! Our focus is the history of mystery. We’re reading and discussing the best mysteries, detective stories, and thrillers ever written.

Time Magazine included Red Harvest as one of the 100 Best English-Language Novels from 1923-2005, noting Dashiell Hammett created the prototype for the hard-boiled sleuth.

The book surely belongs on any list of the best crime fiction ever written. The morally ambiguous Continental Op and the self-serving Dinah Brand are amazing characters, to boot.

Read: Buy it used or on Amazon. (Reading time: ~4 hours)

Reflect: Check out the conversation starters below.

Language, Voice, and Tone

• Hammett had worked as an operative for Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency. The narrator is an operative (PI) of the Continental Detective Agency’s San Francisco office. He’s one of the first hardboiled detectives, followed by Hammett’s Sam Spade, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, and many others.
• “Poisonville’s prize fighting was done in a big wooden ex-casino in what had once been an amusement park on the edge of town. When I got there at eight-thirty, most of the population seemed to be on hand, packed tight in close rows of folding chairs on the main floor, packed tighter on benches in two dinky balconies. Smoke. Stink. Heat. Noise.”
• In an Atlantic essay, Ted Gioia talks about the transition from an Anglocentric to an American world. “No one told stories in that crisp, uncluttered way before 1926 [publication year of The Sun Also Rises]. But soon, other ways of pushing a narrative forward would seem slow-paced and old-fashioned.”

Booze and Blood

Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett is set during Prohibition (1919-1933), which banned the manufacture, transport, and sale of alcohol. This ban led to unprecedented levels of organized crime. Racketeering and bootlegging became widespread problems across the US.

Characters drink constantly, including the Op, who always carries a flask of Scotch. The entire town revolves around the black market. The Op also drinks laudanum (opium tincture) with Dinah the night after the big meeting with all the local gangsters.

In 1921, “To beat the miners [and end a labor strike], [Elihu] had to let his hired thugs run wild. … They took the city for their spoils.” Personville becomes Poisonville when lives are expendable. “[S]warthy foreign-looking men in laborers’ clothes” are used as decoys, and they’re all killed. Home isn’t a sanctuary. No one is safe indoors or out.

In Personville, Honest Man → Cop → Criminal

What is it about being in Personville that turns a cop into a criminal? Do they see too much corruption and become disillusioned? Is the lust for power contagious? Is it possible for a code of ethics to exist in a place as corrupt as Personville?

Dinah says: “I knew the dick—MacSwain. […] He had been a pretty good guy, straight as ace-deuce-trey-four-five, till he got on the force. Then he went the way of the rest of them. (11)

The Perfect Guy for the Cleanup Job

In Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett, Elihu Willsson hires the Op to clean up Personville. The Op agrees so long as he can “have a free hand—no favors to anybody—run the job as I pleased.” Only a stranger like the Op has no motives tied to the town. The Op is the only person in Poisonville who can rid the city of its crime.

What’s his attitude

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