American Carnage: Hammett’s Red Harvest and Mass Violence in the United States

American Carnage: Hammett’s Red Harvest and Mass Violence in the United States

In 1929-30 Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, along with the author’s two other novels, The Dain Curse and The Maltese Falcon, which quickly followed it, struck the landscape of classic mystery like a fistful of dynamite. “Hammett is the man who set out for himself the task of raising the detective story to literature,” one syndicated newspaper reviewer breathlessly pronounced of the new author (just like English author Dorothy L. Sayers was The Wo…