Dashiell Hammett’s first novel, Red Harvest, and an earlier series called, “The Cleansing of Poisonville,” published in the pulp magazine Black Mask, are the same story.
Both tell how the Continental Op – Hammett’s unnamed operative for the fictional Continental Detective Agency – comes to a small Western city called Personville (nicknamed “Poisonville”) to help rid it of gangsters, crooked cops and corrupt politicians.
In Poisonville, the young publisher of the city’s local paper is waging a campaign to clean up the town. The publisher’s father owns the paper, the mine, and several other prominent businesses. The father also has the leading citizens and top officials in his pocket. But the father is old and losing his grip. Racketeers have moved in and divided up the city.
Unwilling to side with any one group the Op sets about turning the gangs against one another so they will destroy themselves.
It is a complicated story filled with violence and double crosses.
The four Black Mask stories – “The Cleansing of Poisonville” (November 1927); “Crime Wanted – Male or Female” (December 1927); “Dynamite” (January 1928); and “The 19th Murder” (February 1928) – are included in their original form in The Big Book of the Continental Op (2017) compiled by Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett.
When the stories appeared in Black Mask, they caught the attention of a book editor who approached Hammett with the idea of publishing them as a novel. But first the editor wanted Hammett to make some changes. He suggested cutting some of the violence to make the story more believable, according to Layman and Rivett.
The book, called Red Harvest after Hammett submitted a page of alternate titles, was published in February, 1929, by Alfred A. Knopf.
Reading the stories and the book at the same time shows interesting changes made by Hammett in his transition from pulp writer to novelist.
Key cuts were the dynamiting of police headquarters and the bomb killing of one of the three gang leaders. The Op’s escape over the rooftops from an ambush was also cut. And the shootout at the Silver Arrow Club was streamlined and in the book.
There are small changes on almost every page of the novel. Often they are as simple as a word choice or a rewritten sentence. Most of these changes tightened the writing, eliminating repetitions in dialogue, but they also took away some of the flavor.
Hammett was always good at creating realistic dialogue. In his pulp stories, he used a good deal of the underworld slang of his era. The amount of slang was reduced in the book, or altered to clarify a point. The book editor may have felt that readers of the novel would be less familiar with the slang than the readers of Black Mask.
The changes made the writing a little less colorful and took some of the rough edge off the tale, but did not damage the storytelling. Hammett was still Hammett, and the tough, lean writing style was still there. Even Hammett’s earliest stories showed this talent.
For the slang that remained, Layman and Rivett, the editors of The Big Book..., found some of the words and phrases needed footnotes for current readers to understand them.
Future readers of Hammett may need even more annotations. The time may come when a Hammett story will require as many footnotes as a Shakespeare play.
But with our without the explanations, Hammett’s work is always a pleasure to read.
There is a massive paperback called The Big Book of the Continental Op with all (or most of) Dashiell Hammett’s short stories featuring his investigator for the fictional Continental Detective Agency. Hammett never tells the reader the Op's name.
Editors Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett collected all the Op stories Hammett published from October 1923 to November 1930 in the pulp magazine Black Mask. The book includes the original, serialized stories Hammett later rewrote, edited, and published as the novels, Red Harvest and The Dain Curse. Aside from correcting typos and adding footnotes to explain the slang Hammett used, the editors presented each story as it first appeared nearly a century ago.
The first yarns I read (reread, actually) in the collection were two early linked stories published in 1924, “The House in Turk Street” and “The Girl with the Silver Eyes.” Unlike the ones that became the novels, these two do not have to be read in order. I know, because I read them out of order decades ago, and again this summer.
Chronologically, “The House in Turk Street” comes first. In it, the Op, a 35-year-old, heavy set (he called himself fat in his first person narration of the stories), detective is doing the legwork for a case by going door to door, asking residents of Turk Street if they have seen a certain man reported to be in the neighborhood.
At one door, an old couple invite him into their house and fritter away his time in a scene that is almost comic until a man with a gun enters. It is not the man the Op is searching for, but is the leader of a small band of thieves who are hiding out in the house. The man, along with an ugly thug, a beautiful young woman, and the old couple, have pulled a heist of bonds.
The bonds are in a bag and each of the gang members wants the bag for himself. Each is willing to deceive, double cross, and even kill the others to get it. While their greed occupies them, the Op is able to free himself and get away, but not before guns go off, people get shot, and the bonds go from hand to hand.
While the plotting and the amount of violence in the story may have been what Black Mask required, Hammett through his life experience and his ear for natural sounding dialogue, elevates the story.
“The Girl with the Silver Eyes” is a much longer and less confined story which Black Mask promoted as a novelette.
In it, the son of a rich man wants the Op to find his girlfriend who has disappeared. The Op gets to work and soon learns the beautiful woman skipped out with $20,000 the young man gave her. The guy does not care about the money – which was not all his – he just wants the woman he loves to come back.
The Op does his job, and Hammett lets the reader in on some of the techniques detectives used to track people. For instance, the Op walks over a newspaper office, looks up the weather reports for the last month, notes the days it rained, goes to the taxicab companies and asks them to look for any record of fares on those days going to or from the woman’s apartment building.
“The Girl with the Silver Eyes” is a story with a lot of local color as the Op works his way around town winding up at a night club and gambling joint. Hammett’s observations of the gamblers, the club owner, the cheats, snitches and other assorted creeps, is great fun to read.
My only complaint with it was the use of a corny device to allow the baddies to escape and plunge the Op into a rip-roaring car chase near the end.
The realism of Hammett’s Continental Op stories comes out of the author’s experience working for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. While the stories stand up pretty well, they were the training ground for one of the best detective novels ever written, Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon.
Dashiell Hammett’s first novel, Red Harvest, and an earlier series called, “The Cleansing of Poisonville,” published in the pulp magazine Black Mask, are the same story. 
