Overview

A seminal work of the hard-boiled detective genre, Red Harvest (1929) sees the introduction of the Continental Op, a frequent character in the Dashiell Hammett's fiction and a clear precursor to the morally ambiguous detectives of later works. This gritty and chaotic story is a masterpiece of action and moral conflict, exploring how the detective himself can become tainted by the pervasive corruption of the world he seeks to fix. The narrative is set in the fictional Personville, which locals have dubbed ""Poisonville"" due to its pervasive corruption and control by rival gangs. When the Op arrives to meet a newspaper publisher who is murdered before their meeting, he takes on the mission of cleaning up the city. Rejecting traditional detective work, the Op employs a ruthless and unconventional strategy: he orchestrates a full-scale gang war, stirring up chaos and violence to force the truth to the surface. Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book. With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

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Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961) was an American writer whose eight years as an operative for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, beginning in 1915, grounded his fiction in gritty realism and informed his pioneering role in hard-boiled detective stories. His breakthrough came with Red Harvest (1929), followed by The Maltese Falcon (1930). The novels introduced Sam Spade and became the foundation for the film noir tradition, with its terse prose, morally ambiguous characters, and urban settings. Drawing directly from his Pinkerton experiences, including shadowing strikebreakers and monitoring union activity, Hammett elevated detective fiction into literary modernism, favoring realistic dialogue, intricate plotting, and flawed protagonists. Beyond novels, he wrote for Hollywood and later became active in left-wing politics, enduring imprisonment in the 1950s for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which led to his blacklisting. Today, Hammett is celebrated as the father of the genre, with his enduring legacy seen in iconic characters like Sam Spade and Nick and Nora Charles and in the countless noir films and authors he inspired.

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