Will I love Red Harvest?

It would be obscene to read this on a Kindle. This early Dashiell Hammett novel has to be read in paperback, the older a copy you can find, the better.

It has everything a great pulp novel should have; murder, crooked cops, gangs, and a rumpled too-honest-for-his-own-good hero. What I love about this book is how Hammett uses his own experience working for the Pinkerton Detective Agency (who were basically hired thugs) and a real historical event (a labor dispute in Montana that resulted in several deaths) to weave a solid crime novel.

The plot grabs you and will not let go. An operative of the Continental Detective Agency is sent to a small town to meet with the editor of the local newspaper; when he arrives, the editor has been murdered the night before. The detective's investigations stir up rivalries between two criminal gangs, leading to a full-out gang war. The plot is intense and has been adapted to film three times, in three film genres: as samurai classic Yojimbo [1961] by Akira Kurosawa, as 'spaghetti Western' A Fistful of Dollars [1964] directed by Sergio Leone and starring Clint Eastwood, and as… show more.