Red Harvest
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929.
First edition, first printing of Dashiell Hammett’s first novel. Signed by the author on the fly-leaf and inscribed to the Arizona bookseller Billy Greer Hobson: "Keep a notebook and pencil — the story of the other fellows' crime pays. Dashiell Hammett." Hobson's bookplate on paste down.
[viii], 270, [1] pp. Bound in publisher's red cloth decorated in black and yellow; lacking the scarce dust jacket. Very Good+ with sunned spine, moderate wear and several small faint stains to covers and upper textblock edge. Offsetting from bookplate to front free endpaper, San Francisco bookseller ticket to back pastedown; overopened in several places. Housed in a custom red cloth clamshell case, paper title label to spine. Layman A1.1.a.
Dashiell Hammett turned to writing after tuberculosis forced him to resign from his mostly enjoyable job as a Pinkerton detective. He put his experience to good use, breaking with the Golden Age convention of the gentleman detective and introducing the hardboiled man who uses grit and legwork to get the job done. As his successor Raymond Chandler famously put it, “Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley.”
Hammett published his first short story in October 1922. “The Parthian Shot” was featured in the prestigious magazine The Smart Set: A Magazine of Cleverness, edited by H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. Luckily for Hammett, the two editors had also founded a pulp magazine called Black Mask in order to support their more highbrow publication, which operated at a loss. Black Mask was the perfect outlet for Hammett’s stories, and in 1927 it serialized his first novel.
The novel was then called Poisonville. Drawing on his experience working for Pinkerton in Montana, Hammett sends his unnamed Continental Op into a Montana mining town called Personville to face a man whose iron grip on the city has been weakened by the gangsters he himself brought in to break a strike. The Op violates every rule of his agency to bleed the city of its poison, double-crossing everyone he comes across in the name of the greater good. Jaded but not hopeless, masterful but not infallible, the Op instigates chaos and accepts responsibility for the body count.
After the novel finished its run in Black Mask, Hammett sent the typescript to Blanche and Alfred Knopf’s publishing house in New York. Blanche immediately accepted it, though she told him that the title was “hopeless” and selected Red Harvest from the list of alternatives Hammett reluctantly supplied. Knopf was known as a literary publisher, but the decision to dabble in crime fiction paid off. Red Harvest was published in February 1929, the same year as Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms, and reviewers compared the dialogue of the two authors in terms complimentary to Hammett. Within a year Hammett had published two more novels and cemented his reputation as the greatest of all noir writers.
William Greer Hobson was a small child when Red Harvest was first published. As a bookseller and son of a bookseller, he would have had ample opportunity to acquire this first edition, which was originally sold by the department store The White House in Hammett’s adopted hometown of San Francisco. Hobson’s own hometown was Phoenix, Arizona, where he briefly ran the publishing firm Hobson & Herr. Where the bookseller met the author is unknown, but they must have hit it off, since Hammett gave Hobson more than his usual good wishes in this humorous inscription.
Price: $60,000