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Forms of Labor in Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Carl Freedman  and
Christopher Kendrick
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Abstract

Hammett's 1929 novel Red Harvest ranks as one of the first and one of the greatest examples of hard-boiled detective fiction, a category that broke sharply with the older, ratiocinative variety. Our reading of the novel (which is in part a reading of the genre of detective fiction itself) focuses on productive work and finds that the novel's narrative structure is based on several distinguishable forms of labor, each autonomous and yet complexly interrelated with the others. Our primary stress is on the linguistic or dialogic work of Hammett's protagonist, the Continental Op, who is in many ways a paradigmatic private detective. We conclude by considering not only the generic composition of the novel but also its political character as an unusually powerful and complex response to capitalist reification.

Type
Cluster on Modern Fiction
Information
PMLA , Volume 106 , Issue 2 , March 1991 , pp. 209 - 221
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1991

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References

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