Red Harvest

Dashiell Hammett

4 ideas

1. Elihu Willsson's gangs outgrow their master

   Mine owner Elihu Willsson imported gunmen and bootleggers to break the 1921 strike in Personville ('Poisonville'), then found they would not leave and now ran the city through police chief Noonan, gambler Max 'Whisper' Thaler, bootlegger Pete the Finn, and loan shark Lew Yard. After his son Donald, the reforming newspaper publisher, is murdered, Elihu hires the Continental Op to clean up the town. The Op does it by playing the factions against each other until they kill one another off, leaving the town under martial law and Elihu back in charge.

2. Hired force becomes an independent power

   When an owner uses private violence to settle a labor dispute, the enforcers learn that the owner depends on them. They turn that dependence into their own share of rule. Force you hire to protect your power does not stay an instrument, because it is a competing claim on the same territory.

3. Destabilize a closed system by provoking it

   When a corrupt equilibrium cannot be attacked through legal channels because the channels are captured, the Op stirs things up instead. He feeds true and false information to each faction so that their mutual suspicion becomes open war. Rival power holders who keep a truce only because each fears the others can be made to destroy each other once that fear turns into certainty of betrayal.

4. The investigator corrupted by his method

   Pursuing justice through manipulation and engineered killing turns the pursuer into a participant: the Op admits he is going 'blood-simple' and wakes up unable to prove he did not murder Dinah Brand. Read this way, the detective is not an outside agent of order but another operator whose means erase the moral distance between him and the gangsters he is fighting.

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