Greg Swan wrote:
> Anyone know for
> sure if Hammett wrote Red Harvest as a series of 4
shorts?
RED HARVEST was based on four linked novelets published in
Black Mask:
"The Cleansing of Poisonville" (this was originally to be the
title of the novel; Knopf went with RED HARVEST, a much
better choice); "Crime Wanted - Male or Female"; "Dynamite";
"The 19th Murder" (but who, really, could keep an accurate
count of all the murders in this book?)
Like a lot of writers, Hamnmett gradually worked his way up
from shorts to novels, by way of increasingly longer stories.
Two earlier linked novelets, "The Big Knockover" and
"$106,000 Blood Money" were published as the novel $106,000
BLOOD MONEY. Both were later reprinted in Lillian Hellman's
cornerstone collection of Hammett stories, THE BIG
KNOCKOVER.
THE DAIN CURSE was also assembled from four linked novelets.
THE MALTESE FALCON, THE GLASS KEY and THE THIN MAN were true
novels.
> Red Harvest was also plot heavy without much in the
way of description or
> atmosphere, which is another hallmark of fiction
from the pulp period. I
> wonder if part of that was because newspaper men so
dominated the pulps?
> And was Hammett a newspaperman? Sure seems like
it.
He was a private detective. His lean style, considerably more
direct than most of the newspaper or pulp writing of the day,
probably comes out of the case reports he wrote for the
Pinkerton agency.
You suggest Lawrence Block's Matt Scudder novels would be
better for introducing someone to hardboiled fiction than RED
HARVEST, but I think Hammett's book is the real thing and the
Scudders, good as they may be, are a distant echo. Scudder is
too -- nice. Let me put it this way: if someone doesn't dig
Hammett, they're probably not going to dig hardboiled in
general, because Hammett was the best.
BobT
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