Blood Simple

“Red Harvest,” by Dashiell Hammett, 1929

The ‘hard-boiled’ detective genre is a staple of U.S. culture.  It is beyond me why, but I’ll take a stab at it.  Hammett was a sergeant in both World War I and II, and between that, a thug for the Pinkertons.  This book reads like a combat novel, with 3 gangs of mugs fighting a group of crooked coppers for control of a city.  The book was ostensibly somewhat “Marxist” because it depicts the wholesale corruption in Personville – a place that is based on the sad 1929 copper-mining town of Butte, Montana.  It is still the period of ‘primitive accumulation’ when theft and crime make initial fortunes and the unions have been crushed.  The corruption involves the owner of the biggest mine, a chubby, pink-faced muckademuck who hires our 190 pound, tough-guy private dick to clean up “Poisonville” even more.   Even though this capitalist is a lousy fish-eater himself, with his fingers in every poisoned pie.

The 'Black Hands'

No one works in Poisonville except a bunch of croakers who run illegal booze, gamble, blackmail, handle protection rackets and prostitutes or kill for a lot of coin.  The only ‘working man’ is a Wobbly who is completely extraneous to the story and for no reason at all is later suspected of croaking a former flame with an ice-pick.  Drinking whiskey and gin is constant, so ice-picks are useful to the duffers and dinguses guzzling the hooch. Only one bird is in the story, a greedy boozer and hop-head who monkeys with every criminal and lunger in town.  Everyone talks like they are spitting icicles in July, and they love to drive their jalopies, heaps and boats at high speed while shooting their gatts.  It seems no one thinks they will get shot in return.

Hammett is really a conservative authoritarian whose only vision of the world is violence, death and corruption.  If you don’t have a rod spitting pills in a crush-out, you’re a gimp who should go hide in the hoosegow. This is perhaps why detective ‘noir’ is so revered in popular culture, given our society has to romanticize and normalize military-style violence and macho.   The book ends with the National Guard being sent into Poisonville to restore ‘order,’ end the rumpus and put the town back in the mitts of the mine owner, who also plays the politicians in the state.   Not really Marxist, but certainly a right-wing bull’s fantasy.

So this book is really the bunk, not the hunk it might have been.  The macho dick spends his time setting one group of mugs against the other, and the bodies fall like a 24 hour blood waterfall.  The trope that ‘heroes’ or anti-heroes never get killed no matter how much mayhem matriculates around them is de rigueur here, a template for every war movie, cop saga, CIA fantasy, sword epic or super-hero sham since.  The plot is so convoluted you won’t know who is who.  The absurdity is such that you will be rolling your eyes harder than the day the hogs ate your kid brother.  So now that I’ve given you the dirt on this tired rumpus, maybe you’ll get your dogs off the Chesterfield and take your lying eyes and paste them on something that really tumbles and not this shite.

Right-oh and ta-ta!  
P.S. – Slang ages, but not completely.  Most terms taken from the book.

AN ASIDE:

Thomas Pynchon’s “Inherent Vice” and even the Cohen’s film the “Big Lebowski” make fun of this genre.  But then both were based on the weedy 1970s when the dick shtick was coming apart at the seams.  The moody 1970s film “Chinatown” is LA noir too, but there’s no resolution at all in normal channels, nor does it have such high levels of unreality – so it is actually somewhat subversive. Red Harvest is the basis of two films:  “Blood Simple” and “Millers Crossing,” both by the Cohens, who now seem to be the inheritors of some noir cross between Alfred Hitchcock and Sam Peckipah or Quentin Tarantino.  Their most recent Netflix retro-cowboy fantasy, “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” is another stupid and nihilistic take on the genre.  A clever and morbid death film. I just have to wonder what the point is anymore.

Other reviews on this topic of crime and genre:  “Deadwood,” “Redbreast,” “Blood Lake,” “Polar Star” “Gone Girl,” “Prudence Can’t Swim” “The Meta-Meaning of Ridiculous Cop Shows” “Sycamore Row” "Red Gas" "Fargo" and “Hells Kitchen.”

And I got it at the library!

The Kulture Kommissar

November 20, 2018