Using Dinah Brand, a popular prostitute, as his main information source, the Op plays the police chief and criminals against each other until, twenty-five deaths later and disgusted with his own blood lust, he has completed his job. The targets of this purge include the town's police chief and a group of competing criminals who were initially brought to Personville to fight the miners' union. The slain editor's father, local kingpin and mining magnate Elihu Willsson, then hires the Op to find his son's murderer and clean up the town. The Op is summoned to Personville, a corrupt mining town, by a local newspaper editor who is killed shortly after the protagonist's arrival. The novel's plot begins simply enough but becomes increasingly involved as the story progresses. Packed with graphic violence and gritty dialogue, and featuring a nameless, anti-heroic sleuth called simply "The Op" (for Continental Operative), Hammett's book would become a classic in the genre of hard-boiled detective fiction and a model for other writers. The year 1929 is usually remembered for a stock market crash that precipitated the Great Depression, but it is also memorable for an event that had great significance for detective fiction-the publication of Dashiell Hammett's first novel, Red Harvest, which had previously appeared piecemeal in the magazine Black Mask.
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