Two-Fisted Tales: Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett (Pocket Books, third printing 1961)

I have mixed feelings about the cover to this late ‘50s/early ‘60s U.S. paperback edition of ‘Red Harvest’. On the one hand, Harry Bennett’s illustration is clearly a great piece of pulp cover artwork, no question. The manner in which it is presented however clearly leaves a lot to be desired. With the painting apparently sliced out by hand and stuck against a decidedly unflattering white and red background, the whole thing is in fact a bit of a disaster area from the design point of view, and doesn’t look terribly appealing.

Furthermore, if you compare the front cover to the tinted detail from the illustration blown up on the back, you’ll get an idea of how brutally Bennett’s art has been squashed down here, and how much detail has been lost in the process of printing it at reduced scale. That great “huh?!” expression on the male figure’s face for instance is totally gone, along with who knows how much else.

(I would also complain that that expression seems entirely out of keeping with the stoic manner in which Hammett’s Continental Op greets the novel’s ever-increasing pile of corpses, but then the scene and characters depicted here by Bennett don’t actually seem to match anything in the book very well at all, so what the hey, right?)

It’s also interesting I think to observe how little Pocket Books chose to play up the fame and importance of this book and its author in their cover copy here. We’re over three decades away from ‘Red Harvest’s initial publication in 1929 at this point, and this edition was in fact printed in the very month of Hammett’s death (January ’61), but there’s still no “..the classic first novel from the celebrated author of ‘The Maltese Falcon’..” type blurb here, and no pull quotes from critics or noteworthy admirers.

Instead, they’ve just stuck a summary of the book’s most lurid and violent moment on the back, bluntly re-worded by an anonymous copy editor - basically treating the storied originator of the hard-boiled idiom in much the same manner as they would some random mug who just sent in an unsolicited manuscript hoping for the best. Which is fine, don’t get me wrong - in fact it’s entirely in keeping with the no nonsense / straight-down-to-business tone of the novel. It’s just… interesting, that’s all.

Could it be, that in the hey-day of more shamelessly populist detective writers like Spillane and Prather, Hammett’s vintage and reputation might have been seen to count against him in the marketplace? As in, perhaps this genre was pointedly NOT being sold to an audience who cared to read an old book that a bunch of fuddy-duddys at the newspapers liked, at this particular point in time?

Be that as it may, it’s fair to say that this hypothetical audience of uncultured brutes would surely not have been disappointed by ‘Red Harvest’, a book which still sparks with barbaric, ill-mannered energy over ninety years after it first hit the streets.

One thing I will say for the presentation of this “perma-book” is that it still remains readable after sixty years and at least one ocean crossing, and having ploughed through it this week, I’m happy to report that ‘Red Harvest’ remains my favourite of Hammett’s novels, half a lifetime since I first gave it a whirl as a teenager.

As violent, action-packed and callously cynical as anything those aforementioned later writers could have come up with, it stands above them not so much through any sense of refinement or literary pretention, but simply because it’s wittier, more stylish, more tightly constructed and more insightful in its unpacking of the ways in which corruption and back-room power games devalue life in America than pretty much any of its author’s subsequent competitors. Essential reading, needless to say.

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For the record, minimal online research reveals that Harry Bennett produced a full set of Hammett covers for Pocket Books in 1961. Most of them fared a lot better than his ‘Red Harvest’ illustration, and the blurb on a few of them at least makes an effort to sell Hammett on his ‘classic’ rep. Other people’s scans can be seen below. 

Unfortunately, I can’t find a decent jpg of his cover for ‘The Glass Key’, but it’s pretty great too. (Apropos of nothing, Bennett also produced an equally nifty set of covers for Chester Himes’ books, which can be enjoyed via Pulp International here.)

Penguin Crime Time / Weird Tales: The Dain Curse by Dashiell Hammett (Penguin, 1966 / originally published 1929)

In general, I feel that the design policy on Penguin Crime paperbacks became far less aesthetically interesting when they began moving toward photo covers from the mid ‘60s onwards. Anyone who has spent time pulling green spines off shelves in British bookshops over the years will no doubt be familiar with those woeful ‘70s editions that just feature ‘still life’ arrangements of handguns, wedding rings, wrist watches and so on posed on somebody’s bedside table.

(Just personal preference I suppose, but god, I hate those covers so much - just looking at them makes me drift into a state of utter boredom, despairing at the tiresome litany of stock detective story props. Such a total contrast to the thrill and mystery generated by the earlier, more modernist / abstract artwork covers I’ve previously shared on this blog…)

Before that nadir though, some of the earlier forerunners of the photo cover were extremely good. William Haggard’s Slow Burner is one of my all-time favourites, and I’ll also make an exception for this startlingly lurid presentation of Dashiell Hammett’s ‘The Dain Curse’, wherein Penguin quite uncharacteristically seem to be going all out to sell it as a horror story, complete with bloody knife, thinly veiled boobs and the kind of frothing-at-the-mouth back cover copy you’d be more likely to find on a New English Library horror cheapie from a decade later.

For whatever reason, I skipped over ‘The Dain Curse’ when I made my way through Hammett’s novels in my youth, so when I picked up this edition and learned that it allegedly features the father of hard-boiled fiction mixing up “slaughter” and “hoodoo” in “bizarre, cult-riddled shapes”, I had no choice but to drop everything and read it straight away. Mission accomplished for the ’66 Penguin design team then, And I mean, even if the promises of the cover turn out to be complete hooey, Hammett is always worth reading, right?

And, well… what a peculiar book this is. I was unaware of its episodic publication history when I began reading, so I’ll admit that it came as something of a surprise when the story boiled over into a blood-curdling melodramatic conclusion on about page 45, then promptly started again from scratch in the next chapter following a dry, expositional wrap-up. After this, it swiftly became obvious that, though presented as a continuous novel, ‘The Dain Curse’ actually consists of a number of interlinked short stories, following the same group of core characters through a series of black-hearted capers and genre exercises, with the bad-ass first person narration of Hammett’s nameless Continental Op character holding things together whenever the inter-story continuity gets a bit frayed around the edges (because when that guy tells you what’s what, you tend to believe him, if you want your jaw to remain intact).

Thus, it proves no surprise therefore to discover that ‘The Dain Curse’ was originally published in four monthly instalments in Black Mask magazine, from November 1928 to February 1929. The earlier ‘Red Harvest’ was also published this way of course, but whereas that story functioned well as a self-contained novel (insofar as I remember anyway – it’s been a while since I read it), the connecting tissue linking the stories in ‘The Dain Curse’ is much sketchier, leading to a rather rambling, uneven feel, with a pulpier tone than that found in Hammett’s other full length works.

Heading straight for the index in my long unread copy of Diane Johnson’s ‘The Life of Dashiell Hammett’ (Hogarth Press, 1984), I learn that Hammett himself didn’t seem to hold a high opinion of ‘The Dain Curse’, later describing it as his “silly story”, and losing interest in it almost immediately when he began working concurrently on what became ‘The Maltese Falcon’. It also seems that the book only saw print as a stand-alone volume after editor Harry C. Block had repeatedly pleaded with Hammett to further revise his manuscript, politely presenting the author with a list of ‘recommendations’ that included increasing coherence between the different episodes, eliminating minor characters and digressions entirely and significantly reworking the character of the heroine. To be honest, all of these issues remain pretty problematic in the version that was eventually published, so god knows what kind of a mess things must have been in when Hammett initially submitted his manuscript three revisions earlier.

This all goes some way toward explaining why ‘The Dain Curse’ is by far the least celebrated and least widely read of Hammett’s five novels, I suppose, but it also goes without saying that the book’s awkward narrative flow, which renders it quite hap-hazard and unsatisfying as a detective story, still allows for frequent outbursts of exceptional writing and sheer strangeness that led me to enjoy it quite a bit.

Predictably enough, my favourite part of the book was the second quarter, originally published in Black Mask in December 1928 as ‘The Hollow Temple’. To my surprise, this segment, which seems to have inspired the entirety of Penguin’s design for the book, does indeed see Hammett taking a detour into full-blown horror territory, delivering on the promise of the back cover copy in spades (if only for the space of twenty-something pages).

So, simply put, pages 63 to 98 of ‘The Dain Curse’ represent the most awe-inspiring chunk of weird/pulp prose I’ve read in years, incorporating a reclusive religious cult who pump narcotics through the air-con in their guests’ rooms, secret passages and encounters in the darkness with both sap-wielding thugs and terrifying spectres, a bullet-proof Satanic messiah presiding over a sacrificial altar, and yes, a hypnotised, bloody knife-cradling heroine in a diaphanous nightgown.

Despite the more esoteric subject matter, Hammett’s prose is, as ever, full-blooded and razor-sharp (more literally so here than usual), and the fact that he suddenly begins ploughing through all this in the midst of what is ostensibly a detective story makes it all the more remarkable and unexpected. The passage in which the Continental Op finds himself apparently wrestling with an amorphous, shape-shifting ghost, taking chunks out of the fucker ‘til it *bleeds*, is absolutely staggering – as perfect a realisation of somebody’s “hey, imagine if Dashiell Hammett wrote for ‘Weird Tales’” daydream as could be wished for, rendered with a James/Blackwood-esque descriptive power that no amount of “it was all just knock-out drops and a light show” back-pedalling can sufficiently account for.

It is intriguing to realise that Hammett was clearly an admirer of the genre he is wading into here – he even throws in a cheeky name-check for Arthur Machen - and not even ‘The Hollow Temple’s concluding chapter, in which the rational explanation for everything that transpired is rather awkwardly and tediously outlined, can dampen the memory of the blood-splattered, opium-frazzled power of these pages.

Whilst I’ve always been a fan of Hammett’s work, not to mention the brave stands he took on his beliefs in later life, discovering this full strength detour into weirdsville increases my admiration for him even further. So if, like me, you’ve previously skipped ‘The Dain Curse’ on the basis that it sounds like some kind of fuddy-duddy missing jewels stately home whodunit that nobody seems to rate as much as his other books, now might be as good a time as any to correct that omission, especially if you can track it down with one of the numerous great covers it has inspired over the years.

To that end, let’s conclude with a few I grabbed off the internet; apologies for the low res of some of the images – apparently the standing of this novel remains so low that no one has even much bothered with any decent cover scans. (And yes, James Coburn played the Op in a 1978 TV version – good casting.)