Red Harvest

⚖The case for it

The Continental Op arrives in a corrupt mining town and systematically destroys every faction fighting for control, playing them against each other. Hammett's most politically radical novel, an explicit critique of capitalism and corporate power. Kurosawa adapted it as Yojimbo; Leone made it A Fistful of Dollars. The template for the "lone agent in a corrupt system" story.

— the canon

✕The case against

Bodies stack so fast in Personville that around the fifteenth murder you stop keeping score, which is partly Hammett's point and partly his problem. The factions blur, the double-crosses require diagrams, and the Op tells you almost nothing about himself while narrating everything. The politics land; the whodunit dissolves into gleeful, lurid chaos.

— the honest librarian