If You Want to Clean Up a Mess, You’re Going to Get Your Hands Dirty:
Personal Honor and Social Corruption in Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest
Like most literary movements, the literature of the early twentieth century seems to
owe a great deal to the developments that came before it, namely the realism and
naturalism of the nineteenth century. By the nineteen twenties, that first and perhaps most
quintessentially modern and American decade, writers were looking into their own society
in an attempt to not only discover what our national identity is, but also what makes it and
shapes it and controls it. No previous generation of American writers, not Hawthorne or
Melville, not even Twain, seemed as interested in the details of common American life
while being so detached from its traditional values. The decade after the First World War
ushered in era of remarkably swift change. The images, of course, are legendary: the jazz
bands that provided the soundtrack to the roaring twenties, flappers sipping on bathroom
gin while dancing the Charleston, Babe Ruth with a cigar and Al Capone with a Tommy
gun, shiny new household appliances and colossal New York skyscrapers. But as much as
it was a time of success, it was also one of excess and disillusionment. This is, after all, the
decade of Theodore Dreiser whose An American Tragedy told of the collapse of the
American dream; these are the years when Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby falls victim to the
decaying moral and social fabric around him. While Dreiser’s and Fitzgerald’s respective
masterpieces both reveal our shared national dream to be slightly more nightmarish, or at
the very least more disappointing than we feared, perhaps the greatest representation of the
era’s anxieties is found in the pages of the pulp crime writers. Of these, Dashiell Hammett,
the genre’s earliest true master, offers not only gritty realism but also the naturalist’s
concern about the corrupting nature of society and urban life. In his first novel, Red
Harvest, Hammett’s Continental Op, the hard-boiled private investigator narrator, finds
himself battling the greed and materialism of his age while trying desperately to maintain
his own personal code of professionalism.
Hammett, writing in late twenties, takes one of the central tenets of naturalism, the
idea that there are underlying forces that are responsible for the actions and decisions of
characters, as the basis of his novel. For Hammett, his setting, a mid sized Western mining
town, becomes the living embodiment of societal ill. It is not merely a symbol; it is an
acting force of corruption. Personville becomes, as the local denizens mockingly dub it,
Poisonville. The dismal dirtiness is evident in the Op’s first description of his
surroundings: “The city wasn’t pretty…the smelters whose brick stacks struck up tall
against a gloomy mountain to the south had yellow-smoked everything into uniform
dinginess. The result was an ugly city of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch
between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied by mining” (3-4). The Op quickly
learns that the physical decay of the city is matched by a moral decay of its citizens; his
first night in town he learns his client, Don Willsson, has been murdered, that the town is
populated by crooks, con men, liars, petty gangsters, cheap women, and that the whole
place is evenly divided by a bootlegger named Pete the Finn, a loan shark called Lew Yard,
a crooked cop called Noonan, a gambler known as the Whisper, and the wealthy magnate
Elihu Willsson. It seems like everyone is part of the problem. The system is broken.
Justice is a risible concept, laughed at by men who want money and power. This is not the
tragedy of Gatsby, where the American dream is shown to be hollow for the nouveau
riche. No, Poisonville’s tragedy is the perversion American dream, one where the promise
of success is consumed by the hunger of avarice. Crass materialism creates a culture of
crime.
The fact that the story is set during Prohibition and the rise of American
gangsterism cannot be underplayed. The social and historical context of the time no doubt
shapes the characters’ actions and decisions. It also sets up Hammett’s chief concern: that
a corrupted city can in fact become a corrupting force on its citizens. The city of
Personville is not just a physical location but, as Poisonville, it becomes an agent of vice
that actively decays the structures of law and order. The Op, who first gets a hint of the
bankrupt social institutions when he sees cops walking their beat, observes: “The first
policemen I saw needed a shave. The second had a couple of buttons off his shabby
uniform. The third stood in the center of the city’s main intersection…with a cigar in one
corner of his mouth. After that I stopped checking them up”(4). Actually, after that, he
encounters cops on the payroll of gamblers, cops who sneak crooks out of hideouts (and
away from harm), and a chief, Noonan, who is worse than most of the criminals he is
supposedly working against. The irony of a lawless police office is not meant to be merely
incongruous; it is the clearest symptom of widespread criminality. “Hammett’s novel
shows businessmen-like gangsters who have gained an important role in their society: they
have removed older institutions—in this case the police and Elihu Willsson—from
leadership, and achieved power over the whole city”( Nyman 78-79). Corruption was
endemic, but now it has become simply a way of life.
Standing in opposition to the corrupt society is the individual, in this case the
Continental Operative. A stranger and outsider, the Op enters town on an assignment and
it is this sense of duty and purpose that marks all his actions in the novel. While the
Poisonville natives are motivated by greed and self-interest, the Op is governed by a code
of professionalism and a complicated system of ethics. This is not to say that the Op is
simply good or merely heroic; rather, his morality, while steadfast and, for the most part
consistent, is murkily ambiguous. He drinks, he manipulates, he even kills, but at his core
there is a strength. Raymond Chandler, the great heir to Hammett’s crime fiction tradition,
observed these qualities, saying:
[D]own these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither
tarnished nor afraid…. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of
honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without
saying it…He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence
without a due and dispassionate revenge. (59)
The Op won’t take money, or power, and in the case of Dinah Brand, the slovenly
seductress of Poisonville, the Op won’t take sex. Unlike the locals, the Op is not
motivated by materialism, avarice, or appetite. When the first section of the novel
concludes with the arrest of Robert Albury for the murder of Donald Willsson, Old Elihu
offers the Op a personal payment. The Op, never one to focus on money, dismisses the
offer saying: “The Continental’s got rules against taking bonuses or rewards” before he
divulges his new sense of mission: “I’ll give you nothing but a good job of city-cleaning.
That’s what you bargained for, and that’s what you’re going to get…Now I’m going to
have my fun. I’ve got ten thousand dollars of your money to play with. I’m going to use it
opening Poisonville up from Adam’s apple to ankles” (63-64). In this short exchange we
see clear examples of the Op’s complex moral code. On one hand, he declares his
allegiance to his organization while turning down an opportunity for financial reward; on
the other, the Op reveals a dangerously zealous attitude toward working above the law, a
mixture that borders on both vigilantism and revenge. This sentiment is reiterated when
the Op tells Max “The Whisper” Thaler,
I don’t like the way Poisonville has treated me. I’ve got my chance now, and I’m
going to even it up…I wasn’t let alone by that fat Noonan. He’s had two tries at
my scalp in two days. That’s plenty. Now it’s my turn to run him ragged, and
that’s exactly what I am going to do. Poisonville is ripe for the harvest. It’s a job I
like, and I’m going to do it. (67-68)
The Op is making his intentions clear: he has a personal score to settle and he is willing to
do it whatever it takes, even if that means battling Noonan and his police. In fact, in
Poisonville, where the police force is just another gang of criminals, he looks forward to
flouting the law. As Jopi Nyman suggests, the Op “fulfills his duty but only by the use of
unlawful means”(84). In Poisonville, those are the only means available.
Through the remainder of the novel, the Op attempts a tight wire walk as he
navigates through the seedy streets, penetrates the gangs, wins their trust, and tries to bring
them down—all while trying to maintain a clarity of mission and a foundation of integrity.
The difficulty, he learns, is that the environment he is immersing himself in is deceptively
corrosive. In his attempts to ensnare the lawbreakers, he has had to indulge in extralegal
maneuvers himself. Here, then, is the crisis of character. The Op, in trying to eradicate the
corruption of a town, has, by necessity, succumbed to that very corruption. In order to stop
blackmailers, murderers, and back stabbers, the Op has been forced to become one of
them. After the Op succeeded in bringing down Noonan, he begins to take stock of his
progress. Instead of finding satisfaction in beating an enemy, the Op comes to the
terrifying realization that sixteen people have died since he arrived in town. This moment
of lucidity confirms the book’s central truth—the corruption of society leads to the
corruption of the individual—as it seems the Op too has fallen victim. But it is at this
moment, where the Op realizes his transformation, that his strength is most apparent.
Unwilling to give in, the Op, fighting what feels like a sickness, declares:
This damned burg is getting to me. If I don’t get away soon I’ll be going bloodsimple like the natives…I’ve arranged a killing or two in my time, when they were
necessary. But this is the first time I ever got the fever. It’s this damned burg.
You can’t go straight here… Play with murder enough and it gets you one of two
ways. It makes you sick or you get to like it. (154-155)
That’s the problem; the Op started to like it. The opening section of the novel had the Op
trying to solve a murder, to create resolution for an unsolved crime, but as the story
progressed, the Op was forced to enter into Poisonville and become like one of its citizens.
The Op, who was once calm, detached, dispassionate, and removed from his work, got
involved, got personal, got emotional, got dirty. He tells Dinah Brand:
[I]t’s easier to have them killed off, easier and surer, and, now that I’m felling this
way, more satisfying…It’s this damned town. Poisonville is right. It’s poisoned
me… [When I found out about Noonan] I laughed, and felt warn and happy inside.
That’s not me. I’ve got hard skin all over what’s left of my soul…But this getting a
rear out of planning deaths is not natural to me. It’s what this place has done to me.
(157)
What to do when you’ve discovered that you’ve become somebody else? Dinah Brand’s
advice is “to get plastered” and indeed, the only succor for the Op is a self-medicating
blend of gin and laudanum. Sometimes, the Op has discovered, the only thing you can do
with a nagging conscience is drink it away.
The end of the novel comes fast and furiously; the Op wakes from a drug induced
dream state to find himself holding the handle to an ice pick buried in Dinah’s left breast
while the last of the gangsters, Thaler and Pete the Finn, end up in the morgue. The Op,
having confronted his conscience, is not as concerned with finding Dinah’s murderer (or
even of clearing his own name) as he is with settling up with his old client Elihu Willsson
and leaving Poisonville once and for all. When he arrives at Willsson’s home in the final
pages of Red Harvest, there is a strange reversal of power. Willsson has never really
controlled in the Op in any sense, even if he was, in name, the client, but in this final
exchange, the Op is clearly in the position of authority. With a handful of Willsson’s love
letters to Dinah and swearing blackmail, the Op demands that the national guard come in
and take over the city. Convinced that the only way to save Poisonville is to take it apart,
the Op says, “Then you’ll have your city back, all nice and clean and ready to go to the
dogs again”(209). At first this statement seems like one of completion, but the Op
curiously admits that the city will be ready to be overrun with corruption again. The Op
hits upon a tragic sense of disillusionment inherent in modern cities. The problem
encountered by the Op, a failed society, cannot be cleaned up—not in one day, obviously,
but also, not by one man, and maybe, most distressingly, not at all. Jopi Nyman argues
that “In the Red Harvest the reader confronts things as they are: all official social
institutions of the state are shown to be ruined and powerless, unable to control criminals
and guard citizens against mob rule”(88). For all the murders, all the blackmail and deceit,
all the double-crossing and triple-dealing, there is no single bad guy, no villain; the
antagonist is not a man, but a force—modernity, urban living, the twentieth century city—
that takes the American dream and trades it in for short cuts, quick bucks, illusory power,
and empty consumption.