Dennis Porter

Hammett's Poisonville resembles the cityscape of American naturalism, which
is also that of the "valley of ashes" in The Great Gatsby. That is to say, it
appears as the typical environment of an unregulated industrial capitalism, which
acknowledges no limits to the pursuit of private wealth. Both detective hero and
reader are, therefore, faced with the alienated product of human labor on the
level of a total environment. Moreover, Hammett's example in this became a
model for the hard-boiled genre, whether subsequent writers shared his radical
tendencies or not. The cityscapes of his early writings are represented as
perverted fiefdoms of the owners of capital and of those strong-arm men who
support them and live off their greed. And the victims are ordinary citizens who
have recourse neither to their political leaders nor to the law because both
politics and law enforcement are part of the corrupt system. [Yale UP 1981: 198]

Richard Layman

After Hammett became active in leftist politics in the mid- 1930s, it became
fashionable to read Red Harvest as a Marxist statement on political corruption
and the abuse of power by governmental officials who have no concern for their
democratic responsibilities. That is an imaginative approach to Hammett's
novel--or, in fact, to any of his writings--but a misguided one. Bill Quint, the
IWW leader in Personville, is a hollow idealist whose arguments are
unpersuasive. When he had an affair with Dinah Brand, she used information
she got from him about planned IWW disruptions to play the stock market.

-4-