And a good looking but slatternly gold digger too. Sure, there is a murder the Op has to solve, but soon, in addition, we have stabbings, ambushes, furtive late night shootings and afternoon gun battles. Our detective, the nameless “Continental Op”-employed by the Continental Detective Agency-soon begins systematically destroying the rival gangs by sowing lies and discord among them. Oh they broke it alright, but now these gangsters-with names like Lew Yard, “Whispers,” Pete the Finn-have carved Elihu’s little city into fiefdoms, and Boss Wilsson is not the boss anymore. A few years before the book opens, mining tycoon and city boss Elihu Wilsson called in some thugs and goons to break a mining strike. The City is Personville, and people call it “Poisonville,” but not because they are speaking with an accent. I’ll give you three good reasons-from least to most-why you should read Red Harvest: 1) it made possible the fine Leone film A Fistful of Dollars, 2) it inspired the Kurosawa masterpiece Iojimbo which influenced A Fistful of Dollars, and 3) it is an old school hard boiled, hardcore novel, with a detective as tough as Spade, Marlowe and Hammer put together, written in hard-as-nails prose, and set in a small West Coast city, a city with a heart of stone.
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