Red Harvest

About “Red Harvest”

Red Harvest is a 1929 novel by Dashiell Hammett. The story is told from the perspective of the Continental Op, a character who appears in several of Hammett's works. Hammett based much of his writing on his time working for the Pinkerton Detective Agency. The novel follows the Op as he investigates multiple murders in a mining town in Montana. The town has been taken over by gangs after a labor dispute. Some parts of the story were inspired by the Anaconda Road massacre, a real event from 1920 involving a labor conflict in Butte, Montana. (Summary adapted from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.)