Red Harvest [Paperback]

Detective-story master Dashiell Hammett gives us yet another unforgettable read inRed Harvest: When the last honest citizen of Poisonville was murdered, the Continental Op stayed on to punish the guilty--even if that meant taking on an entire town.Red Harvestis more than a superb crime novel: it is a classic exploration of corruption and violence in the American grain."An acknowledged literary landmark."  --NY Times Book Review.

"Dashiell Hammett is an original. He is a master of the detective novel, yes, but also one hell of a writer." --Boston Globe

"Hammett's prose [is] clean and entirely unique. His characters [are] as sharply and economically defined as any in American fiction."

--The New York TimesDashiell Samuel Hammett was born in St. Mary’s County, Maryland. He grew up in Philadelphia and Baltimore. Hammett left school at the age of fourteen and held several kinds of jobs thereafter—messenger boy, newsboy, clerk, operator, and stevedore, finally becoming an operative for Pinkerton’s Detective Agency. Sleuthing suited young Hammett, but World War I intervened, interrupting his work and injuring his health. When Sergeant Hammett was discharged from the last of several hospitals, he resumed detective work. He soon turned to writing, and in the late 1920s Hammett became the unquestioned master of detective-story fiction in America. InThe Maltese Falcon(1930) he first introduced his famous private eye, Sam Spade.The Thin Man(1932) offered another immortal sleuth, Nick Charles.Red Harvest(1929),The Dain Curse(1929), andThe Glass Key(1931) are among his most successful novels. During World War II, Hammett again served as sergeant in the Army, this time for more than two years, most of which he spent in the Aleutians. Hammett’s later life was marked in part by ill health, alcoholism, a pl#£