Re: Reading List
Here is my examination of Red Harvest.
<blockquote>Red Harvest
Dashiell Hammett
1-A Woman in Green and a Man in Gray
I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte.</blockquote>
We start right off talking about a place: Personville. And I don't know what a "mucker" is, but it sounds like a guy who mucks out stables. Also, "red-haired" makes me think of the proverbial stepchild. By the casual way he mentions Butte, I think the narrator travels often, and not in the highest social circles.
<blockquote>He also called his shirt a shoit. </blockquote>
A little humor, and it reinforces the low social circles idea.
<blockquote>I didn't think anything of what he had done to the city's name. Later I heard men who could manage their r's give it the same pronunciation. I still didn't see anything in it but the meaningless sort of humor that used to make richardsnary the thieves' word for dictionary. </blockquote>
More humor. And Hammett throws the word "thieves" in there. Not only does the narrator move among the working class, he knows the underclass, too.
<blockquote>A few years later I went to Personville and learned better. </blockquote>
There's the hook: What's the deal with Personville?
<blockquote>Using one of the phones in the station, I called the *Herald,* asked for Donald Willsson, and told him I had arrived.
"Will you come out to my house at ten this evening?" He had a pleasantly crisp voice. "It's 2101 Mountain Boulevard. Take a Broadway car, get off at Laurel Avenue, and walk two blocks west."</blockquote>
Mr. Willsson is some kind of newspaper man, and he's immediately likable. He's even conscientious enough to give careful directions. And whatever Mr. Willsson needs the narrator for, he wants it handled at home. It's our first hint that the narrator is a private investigator.
<blockquote>I promised to do that. Then I rode up to the Great Western Hotel, dumped my bags, and went out to look at the city.
The city wasn't pretty. Most of its builders had gone in for gaudiness. Maybe they had been successful at first. Since then the smelters whose brick stacks stuck up tall against a gloomy mountain to the south had yellow-smoked everything into uniform dinginess. The result was an ugly city of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining. Spread over this was a grimy sky that looked as if it had come out of the smelters' stacks. </blockquote>
Our first view of "Poisonville." The mines have not only ruined the city, but the natural environment around it, reinforcing the poison motif.
<blockquote>The first policeman I saw needed a shave. The second had a couple of buttons off his shabby uniform. The third stood in the center of the city's main intersection--Broadway and Union Street--directing traffic, with a cigar in one corner of his mouth. </blockquote>
I like how this is done. The officers here go from one sloppy guy, to a second, more careless officer, to a third cop who openly contemptuous of his uniform
<blockquote>After that I stopped checking them up.</blockquote>
Our narrator is decisive.
<blockquote>At nine-thirty I caught a Broadway car and followed the direction Donald Willsson had given me. They brought me to a house set in a hedged grassplot on a corner.
The maid who opened the door told me Mr. Willsson was not home.</blockquote>
Mr. Willsson has money. Not a beat reporter, then.
<blockquote>While I was explaining that I had an appointment with him a slender blonde woman of something less than thirty in green crepe came to the door. When she smiled her blue eyes didn't lose their stoniness. I repeated my explanation to her. </blockquote>
The unfriendliness of the city is reflected in her.
<blockquote>"My husband isn't in now." A barely noticeable accent slurred her s's. "But if he's expecting you he'll probably be home shortly."
She took me upstairs to a room on the Laurel Avenue side of the house, a brown and red room with a lot of books in it. We sat in leather chairs, half facing each other, half facing a burning coal grate, and she set about learning my business with her husband. </blockquote>
More evidence that they have money. And maybe this is my prejudice, but they have books. That means I like them.
But Mrs. Willsson is going to pry, and I'm ready to learn something about our mysterious narrator.
<blockquote>"Do you live in Personville?" she asked first.
"No. San Francisco."
"But this isn't your first visit?"
"Yes." </blockquote>
We aren't learning anything about our narrator, and I'm already suspecting that we won't.
<blockquote>"Really? How do you like our city?"
"I haven't seen enough of it to know." That was a lie. I had. "I got in only this afternoon."
Her shiny eyes stopped prying while she said:
"You'll find it a dreary place." </blockquote>
Back to Poisonville again. The city and the kind of city it is keeps coming up in the text. It's going to play a major part in the book.
<blockquote>She returned to her digging with: "I suppose all mining towns are like this. Are you engaged in mining?"
"Not just now."
She looked at the clock on the mantel and said:
"It's inconsiderate of Donald to bring you out here and then keep you waiting, at this time of night, long after business hours."
I said it was all right.
"Though perhaps it isn't a business matter," she suggested.
I didn't say anything.
She laughed--a short laugh with something sharp in it.
"I'm not ordinarily so much of a busybody as you probably think," she said gaily. "But you're so excessively secretive that I can't help being curious. You aren't a bootlegger, are you? Donald changes them so often."
I let her get whatever she could out of a grin.</blockquote>
After trying several different tactics, Mrs. Willsson hasn't managed to extract any information from the narrator. She has managed to reveal that the Willssons are not without their underworld connections.
<blockquote>A telephone bell rand downstairs. Mrs. Willsson stretched her green-slippered feet out toward the burning coal and pretended she hadn't heard the bell. I didn't know why she thought that necessary. </blockquote>
Anytime a narrator notices something strange going on, it catches our attention.
<blockquote>She began: "I'm afraid I'll ha--" and stopped to look at the maid in the doorway.
The maid said Mrs. Willsson was wanted at the phone. She excused herself and followed the maid out. She didn't go downstairs, but spoke over an extension within earshot. </blockquote>
Combined with "I didn't know why she thought that was necessary" I suspect Mrs. Willsson is putting on a performance. But then:
<blockquote>I heard: "Mrs. Willsson speaking....Yes....I beg your pardon?....Who?....Can't you speak a little louder?...*What?*... Yes....Yes....Who is this?...Hello! Hello!"
The telephone hook rattled. Her steps sounded down the hallway--rapid steps.</blockquote>
The word "rattled" works nicely here, using the sound to suggest a character state that the narrator can't see.
But is Mrs. Willsson putting on a performance? I'm not so certain anymore. Or if it was a performance, something has changed.
<blockquote>I set fire to a cigarette and stared it it until I heard her going down the steps. Then I went to a window, lifted an edge of the blind, and looked out at Laurel Avenue, and at the square white garage that stood in the rear of the house on that side. </blockquote>
Character stuff about our narrator. Notice that there's no expression of concern from him. He calmly spies on her from her own house.
<blockquote>Presently, a slender woman in dark coat and hat came into sight hurrying from house to garage. It was Mrs. Willsson. She drove away in a Buick coupe. I went back to my chair and waited.</blockquote>
He's even cooler here, sitting in someone else's house when they aren't home.
And Hammett is building suspense. What could the caller have told Mrs. Willsson that she'd run off and leave a stranger--a secretive stranger at that--in her house?
<blockquote>Three-quarters of an hour went by. At five minutes after eleven, automobile brakes screeched outside. Two minutes later Mrs. Willsson came into the room. She had taken off hat and coat. Her face was white, her eyes almost black.
"I'm awfully sorry," She said, her tight-lipped mouth moving jerkily, "but you've had all this waiting for nothing. My husband won't be home tonight." </blockquote>
He's still analytical and aloof. She's trying to retain her manners, but she's obviously shattered.
<blockquote>I said I would be in touch with him at the *Herald* in the morning.
I went away wondering why the green toe of her left slipper was dark and damp with something that could have been blood.</blockquote>
To answer Uncle Jim's question--I want to read further.