《Red Harvest》 - 免费有声读物

Red Harvest was Dashiell Hammett's first novel, serialised in the pulp magazine Black Mask in 1927 and 1928 and published as a book in 1929. Its narrator is the Continental Op, the unnamed, unglamorous operative of a San Francisco detective agency who had already appeared in many of Hammett's short stories.

The Op is summoned to Personville, a western mining city that locals call "Poisonville," by a newspaper publisher, Donald Willsson. Before they can meet, Willsson is murdered. His father, Elihu, an old industrialist who once owned the town, had brought in hired gangsters to break a strike, and those men have since taken it over along with a compliant police force. Elihu hires the Op to clean up Personville, and the detective decides the quickest way is to set the rival factions against one another. As the violence escalates, he begins to worry about what the job is doing to him.

The book is a founding work of American hard-boiled fiction, with terse dialogue, a cynical view of power and a fast pace. It influenced later crime writers and filmmakers, and its plot of a stranger playing gangs against each other has been echoed many times. It suits readers who enjoy noir, gangster stories and crime fiction with a political edge.