Brooks (author of the Freddie the Pig books) highlights the qualities lacking in The Dain Curse: Where Red Harvest is tight, fleet and bracingly visceral, has genuine detection which is worthy of the name and, while incredibly violent, is as real and true a piece of twisted Americana as you likely ever will encounter in crime lit., The Dain Curse is.a farrago of utter nonsense, even by the rather generous standards of the Golden Age of detective fiction.Ī contemporary rave of Red Harvest penned by children's author Walter R. How could one author write one book that is so good and the other so bad in the same year? Now that is an unsolved mystery! Time constraint, perhaps?
The odd part is, Hammett's debut novel Red Harvest, which he published just a few months earlier in the year 1929, is one of my favorite works in the genre. I found I disliked it just as much as I did the first time, if not more so. Now, a decade a later (how time flies), I decided to take another look at Hammett's second novel, considered to be his weakest. I originally reviewed Dashiell Hammett's The Dain Curse, quite negatively, over at the website Mystery*File back in 2011 (SPOILERS in the linked review). When really in doubt, make it a pineapple !
"When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand." author Owen Fitzstephan to the Continental Op in The Dain Curse "Nobody's mysteries ought to be as tiresome as you're making this one."
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