It has become commonplace to explain the rise of the detective novel in the context of the consolidation of the modern, bureaucratic state.Footnote 1 In part, this claim constitutes the jumping-off point for my arguments about Dashiell Hammett's 1929 novel Red Harvest, but I would like to add three caveats, both general and particular, at the outset. First, it should not be assumed that the detective novel in Britain or the United States has functioned to uncritically bolster the burgeoning power of the state, or that the genre, from its historical origins in the tales of the Newgate Calendars, has simply supported, and even advocated, the repressive ideology of the state. Second, it has always been the case that crime writing is shot through with an uneasy mixture of conflicting ideological inflections, and that the politics of the US hard-boiled crime novel in particular have always been deeply ambivalent. Third, Hammett's Red Harvest constitutes one of the richest examples of this ambivalence. It is a novel that points to the coercive potential of the US state in the aftermath of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, while simultaneously hinting at its structural weaknesses and hence at the need to solicit the consent of the populace; what Gramsci famously called “hegemony protected by the armour of coercion.”Footnote 2 My central argument, therefore, is that Red Harvest needs to be understood in the particular context of the consolidation and expansion of the US state that took place in the first three decades of the twentieth century – specifically the efforts by different state agencies and institutions such as the Department of Justice, fearful of the spread of communist influence and trade union muscle, to coerce and pacify potentially unruly working-class communities.Footnote 3 But in making such an argument, and effectively suggesting that the novel exhibits Marxist sympathies, I do not mean to suggest that Red Harvest offers a simplified account of the relationship between base and superstructure or that it is simply reducible to a general critique of state coercion. Rather I want to claim that Hammett's novel constitutes a provocative, if a little contradictory, articulation of theoretical debates about the nature of political authority in the modern era; one that speaks both about the transition of one state formation to another and about the complex relationship between coercive and ethical tendencies in this new system of rule.
To claim that Red Harvest needs to be understood in the particular context of the expansion and consolidation of the US state is not entirely original. Thomas Heise argues that just as the hard-boiled novel “emerges in the midst of a profound shift in the study and prosecution of urban crime” – evidenced first and foremost by the emergence of a new national law-enforcement system in the 1920s and 1930s – Red Harvest both “dramatizes the massive bureaucratic intervention to monitor the poor and working-class terrain” and “embodies the explosive aggression that inheres not in crime but in the operation of law itself.”Footnote 4 Meanwhile, Sean McCann argues that Hammett's novel, like other hard-boiled fiction, emerged in response to “the rise of organized capitalism and the evident failure of the unfettered market to deliver a just society gave rise to the first serious challenge to liberalism” in the US.Footnote 5 Both Heise and McCann, then, use Red Harvest to critique what McCann calls “a fundamental premise of liberal theory – the rule of law”; that is to say, they are interested in the ways in which the novel's apparent preference for radical individualism (i.e. as opposed to all communitarian imperatives) reveals a commitment to bourgeois legal norms while at the same time problematizing this commitment “by foregrounding the fundamental explosive violence that is produced by the law's repression of working-class life.”Footnote 6 Heise and McCann are right to examine the profoundly ambivalent politics of Hammett's novel, exploring the way in which it negotiates the rise of monopoly capitalism and political efforts to both consolidate capitalism's advances and ameliorate its worst excesses, but by overlooking the significance of a Marxist reading of the novel, they miss its challenging ethical claims and its radical critique of the state. Indeed, by arguing about the failures of what he terms New Deal liberalism in the US from within a liberal framework, McCann presupposes that the law and the state have, at one time or another, functioned as the basis for a society's ethical claims (even if the law and the state in hard-boiled crime fiction are also shown to be skewed by private interests). It is my intention to argue that Red Harvest aligns itself with the modes of operation by which the state reproduces power structures, but that it does so unwillingly and in the final analysis refuses to wholeheartedly endorse the interests of the state and its ideology. It is this reservation, moreover, that suggests the basis for an ethical critique. In other words, while McCann argues, initially at least, from the basis of the law's and the state's ethical foundation and moves to acknowledge its partiality and limitations in particular circumstances, I want to suggest that Hammett's novel characterizes the state as exploitative and coercive from the outset and then moves, in albeit partial ways, to critique its provisions for law.
Intriguingly, other critics have sought to explain the nature of political authority, or the absence of political authority, in Red Harvest by drawing on much older theoretical precedents. Freedman and Kendrick, for example, suggest that the central features of the world Hammett sets out to describe – “the relative absence of strong, central, universalizing State power; the prominence of private and semi-private armies; the corresponding importance of personal loyalty between master and dependent and above all the ways in which this highly visible, dynamic polity can overshadow economy” – are, or would appear to be, “pre-capitalist and classically feudal.”Footnote 7 Hobbes's account of the state of nature, too, is often cited to describe the internecine feuding that takes place between rival criminal factions – what Hobbes calls the “war of every man against every man.”Footnote 8 Steven Marcus, for instance, describes the novel's point of view as pre- rather than proto-Marxist or “Hobbesian rather than Marxist” and makes the point that “the only thing that prevents the criminal ascendancy from turning into permanent tyranny is that the crooks who take over society cannot cooperate with each other … and return to the Hobbesian anarchy out of which they have momentarily arisen.”Footnote 9 For Marcus, Personville, or Poisonville as it is colloquially known, constitutes a premodern world much in the same way that Freedman and Kendrick imagine it: brutal, chaotic and without a sufficiently powerful or legitimate authority to exercise monopolistic control. This description also invokes another powerful account of US state formation – the western.Footnote 10 And in this respect, it is hard not to read the nature of political authority in Red Harvest as echoing an older, less evolved form of rule associated with gunfights, saloon brawls and, indeed, the kind of charismatic demagoguery that Quentin Skinner identifies with the premodern era.Footnote 11
Contrary to these positions, however, I want to argue that the system of rule in Red Harvest is neither premodern (or rather pre-Hobbesian in the sense that it foreshadows a move towards the social contract) nor preindustrial (in the sense that the US western harks back to an earlier moment of less systematic or bureaucratized authority). Such accounts both miss what is actually going on in Red Harvest and offer very limited understandings of organized power in the early twentieth century. Instead, I want to argue that Hammett's novel constitutes a highly original response to the consolidation of state power and the expansion of the state system at the time and the increasing interpenetration of civil, economic and political society. As such, the key theoretical touchstone is not Hobbes's state of nature (or other premodern accounts of political power), or even Marx, but rather Gramsci's prison notebooks. Lee Horsley notes that, perhaps because of Hammett's leftist political orientation later in the 1930s, “there has been a marked tendency to read back into his novels – Red Harvest especially – a Marxist political agenda,” but she urges caution in this endeavour. Hammett's nightmarish vision of unchecked greed, endemic violence and systematic exploitation might read like a left-wing critique but Horsley correctly reminds us that it is a critique borne of failure and despair.Footnote 12 As I will try and demonstrate here, this double move – one that is critical of the exploitative nature of monopoly capitalism and yet simultaneously questioning of Marx's more emancipatory rhetoric (i.e. regarding the inevitability of revolution) – precisely characterizes both Hammett's novel and Gramsci's political writings.
My argument, then, is twofold. First, following Heise and McCann, I want to suggest that Red Harvest depicts the shift from the rawer, more barbaric forms of capitalist production characteristic of the robber baron or Gilded Age era of the late nineteenth century to the consolidation of monopoly capitalism in the US and the development of newer, more efficient methods of production in the first three decades of the twentieth century. But second, and as I will try and demonstrate, this shift can only be properly interrogated and understood in the light of contiguous developments in Marxist or, to be more specific, Gramscian thinking about the role of the state. For Gramsci, arguably more than Marx, the resilience of the state, especially in western Europe and the US in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, depended not just upon its ability to control its populace forcibly through its monopolistic control over the means of violence, but also on its ability to win the consent of the people through the working of hegemony.Footnote 13 I am, of course, wary about drawing Hammett and Gramsci together in too close an alliance and therefore overlooking their different, to some extent, political perspectives. While Gramsci, the foremost Italian communist of his generation, was imprisoned near Bari in southern Italy in 1928 for his part in the struggle against fascism, Hammett only joined the Communist Party in California in the mid-1930s, having previously served as a Pinkerton agent for mine owners in Montana against striking workers. That said, given that Gramsci's first prison notebooks and Red Harvest were written at almost exactly the same time, and arguably in response to similar state-sponsored crackdowns against the working class and trade unions in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution in Italy and the US, and concomitantly with changes in the productive forces and the consolidation of monopoly capitalism in the same era, my decision to use Gramsci's analysis of the state to think about the nature of political authority in Hammett's novel, and to use Hammett's novel to think about and interrogate Gramsci's analysis of the state, is not without significant foundation.
Gramsci did write, if very sketchily, about the rise of the detective story, but his frame of reference did not, by the time of his incarceration, include Hammett or indeed any of the US writers beginning to make names for themselves in Black Mask magazine in the 1920s. Nonetheless his brief analysis is pertinent, at least for my purposes, for a number of reasons. Rejecting the notion that the English detective or judiciary story represents a “defence of the law” while the French equivalent exalts the criminal, Gramsci, instead, notes “a cultural passage” in the detective story from the latter to the former and, in turn, links this to the rationalization of existence under capitalism. For Gramsci, the crucial question is whether the adventure promised by the detective story speaks about, or is a response to, the “predictable” in a world increasingly dominated by the forces of “coercive rationalization.”Footnote 14 As I will show in the final section of this article, the fact that the actions of Hammett's protagonist in Red Harvest, the Continental Op, are wildly unpredictable and violent and yet part of a publicly sanctioned campaign to pacify the excessiveness of Personville, means that Hammett's novel covers markedly similar territory. Gramsci's musings on the detective story are, I think, too brief to draw any definitive conclusions but insofar as he distinguishes between “beautiful” adventure which is the product of an individual's “free initiative” and “ugly and revolting” adventure which is “due to conditions imposed by others,” he implicitly offers us a way of seeing the Continental Op's dilemma: the Op may appear to be free and uncoopted, but the ugliness of his actions reveals his complicity in the system that, at times unwillingly, he serves.
FROM ECONOMIC-CORPORATE PRIMITIVISM TO THE ETHICAL STATE?
Red Harvest constitutes something of an anomaly in Hammett's oeuvre as a detective writer both because it focusses directly on the effects of state-sanctioned violence and because the “scene” of the novel remains avowedly public throughout. In The Maltese Falcon (1930) or The Glass Key (1931), the initial crimes which seem to hint at larger political or economic disturbances are ultimately resolved when Sam Spade and Ned Beaumont respectively confront and expose individualized threats to their existences. In Red Harvest, however, the threat to the Continental Op derives from the larger macro-disturbances he is tasked with investigating. As many commentators on the novel have noted, one murder leads to another and another, ad infinitum. If Red Harvest does indeed constitute Hammett's fullest, most impressive dissection of political and economic power, then it is because it dramatizes (more than his other novels and more than all other hard-boiled crime novels of the era) the violence of the US state. For the Continental Op, the traces of this violence are visible from the moment he first arrives in Personville. Echoing Hammett's own experiences as a Pinkerton detective in the western US in the early 1920s, a strike at the city's mine has, just prior to the start of the novel, been broken by a motley crew of “hired gunmen, strike-breakers, national guardsmen, and even parts of the regular army.”Footnote 15 In other words, the striking miners have effectively been defeated by the head of the mining corporation, Elihu Willsson, but only because he has been able to call upon both private gunmen and the repressive apparatus of the State (i.e. national guardsmen and even parts of the regular army). The dispute between Willsson and the miners is reflective of a broader struggle in the first three decades of the twentieth century between the owning and working classes and is thus broadly equivalent to Gramsci's description of a genuine crisis of authority or a crisis of the state: what happens when the masses “have passed suddenly from a state of political passivity to a certain activity, and put forward demands which taken together, albeit not organically formulated, add up to a revolution.”Footnote 16 The swiftness and viciousness of Willsson's response, in consort with the forces of the state that have been temporarily loaned to him, attests to the primitive character of the state in the novel and, by implication, in the US more generally. Indeed, Gramsci's description of the US state in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries as one that supports economic individualism and in doing so arrives at “regime of industrial concentration and monopoly”Footnote 17 perfectly describes the process by which Willsson – as the embodiment of monopoly capitalism – has come to preside over Personville.
In Gramscian terms, the phase of economic-corporate primitivism – whereby the state apparatus is geared towards safeguarding the forces of production – has to be superseded by an ethical turn whereby state power is exercised not simply through physical coercion but as a result of the perceived attractiveness of the ideas it stands for.Footnote 18 Gramsci acknowledges that the situation in the United States cannot necessarily be compared to that in Italy and much of continental Europe and makes the point that, by the time he wrote the first prison notebook, America had “yet to emerge from the economic-corporate phase.”Footnote 19 Certainly any shift from economic-corporate primitivism to what Gramsci calls the ethical state is more than a Hobbesian move from a state of nature into the social contract. For while Hobbes, as Iain McKenzie argues, “does not adequately capture the core complex notion of collective power and its subsidiary, governmental power,”Footnote 20 Gramsci is referring to the carefully orchestrated expansion of the state into all realms of social and political life; elsewhere in the prison notebooks, what he terms “Americanization” (or to be more accurate Fordism) comes close to describing this new stage of capitalist development: “passive revolution” predicated on the rationalization of the productive forces via “a skilful combination of force (destruction of working-class trade unionism on a territorial basis) and persuasion (high wages, various social benefits, extremely subtle ideological and political propaganda).”Footnote 21
In the light of Gramsci's analysis, it is not at all clear how to situate Hammett's novel. On the one hand, the violent suppression of the miners' strike prior to the start of the novel and the general pre-eminence of capitalist megalomaniac Elihu Willsson suggests that Personville has yet to emerge from what Gramsci calls economic-corporate primitivism. On the other hand, the fact that Willsson's pre-eminent status seems to have been usurped by the private gunmen he brought in to break the strike and the fact that the vanquished miners (and any trace of working-class dissent) remain an unseen presence throughout the novel do suggest some kind of transition in the way Personville is governed. The apparent anarchy unleashed by the arrival of the gangs and the rowdiness of the pool-rooms, bars and boxing halls are strong indicators that Personville has not, and perhaps will never, succumb to the logic of Fordist rationality and attempts to control and pacify the spaces of working-class life. Moreover, the widespread availability of cheap liquor means that the project of creating a skilled, sober and, above all, productive workforce remains a distant prospect. Nonetheless it is significant, I think, that the violent bloodletting that follows the Continental Op's arrival in Personville is not the product of a political dispute between Willsson and the miners but rather of an economic dispute between elements of the capitalist or proto-capitalist classes.
Part of my aim here is to argue that the violent bloodletting between rival factions that follows the retreat of the soldiers and the Op's arrival in Personville, in actuality, constitutes a relatively minor realignment within the ranks of the proto-capitalist classes. In this reading, gunmen and bootleggers like Pete the Finn, Lew Yard and Max Thaler are not representative working-class figures struggling to assert themselves in the face of the repressive authority of the state but rather proto-capitalists every bit as eager as Willsson to exploit the working class for personal gain. Therefore what the novel illustrates is not what Gramsci calls a genuine crisis of authority but rather a nasty and uneven or asymmetrical dispute amongst the capitalist classes, on terms which inevitably favour Elihu Willsson. At first glance, little would seem to separate Willsson's “legitimate” enterprises (e.g. mining and banking) from the “illegitimate” enterprises of Pete the Finn, Lew Yard and Max Thaler (e.g. bootlegging, bail-bonding, loansharking and gambling). Just as Willsson is not shy of using violence to get his way, the gang leaders see the value of adopting a business-minded approach to their criminal activities. As Pete the Finn puts it, “That damned gunwork is out … This busting the town open is no good for business” (136). This point is underlined by Dinah Brand, who is unable to distinguish between “Max, Lew, Pete … and Willsson” (38). In part, then, the fighting that takes place in the novel can be interpreted as disagreements within the capitalist classes – or between different factions of capital. But my point is that these factions are not competing on equal terms. From the outset, the circumstances always favour Willsson, who has moved beyond the “economic individualism” that Gramsci describes. It is the gang leaders, not Willsson, who collectively pursue what Freedman and Kendrick call a “radically individualist” agenda and must therefore operate “without the formal sanction of the State” – a situation that leaves them continually open to challenge. Willsson, on the other hand, though threatened by the apparently anarchic competition unleashed by the arrival of the gangs, is ultimately much less vulnerable to external threat precisely because of his privileged position within the state system. As Freedman and Kendrick point out:
Whereas the position of the Personville Mining Corporation could be assaulted – and unsuccessfully at that – only by the collective action of the militantly organized working class, the actual defeat of the gangsters is triggered by the lone, chubby figure of the Continental Op (who is officially employed, not accidentally, by Elihu Willsson).Footnote 22
The business of trying to distinguish between the private gunmen, Willsson and the larger forces of the state mirrors the problem inherent in Gramsci's writing of distinguishing between the state and civil society. Hoare and Nowell-Smith, for example, make the point that Gramsci did not “succeed in finding a single, wholly satisfactory conception of ‘civil society’ and the State” and that the state is both defined as “political society+civil society” and elsewhere as a balance between civil society and political society.Footnote 23 But insofar as Red Harvest is more than simply an account of brute force wielded by the police and army against the working class and insofar as it suggests the interpenetration of political and civil society, Hammett's novel alludes to the same transition in state formation that Gramsci is seeking to map in his prison notebooks. If the state=political society+civil society, it also becomes what Buci-Glucksmann calls “the site of class compromises, the place where a power bloc is articulated and organized, a bloc that can become ‘contradictory and disarticulated’ in a war of position.”Footnote 24 This is precisely what we see in Red Harvest as Willsson and the various gunmen jostle, often violently and with fatal consequences, for power and position – not in a way which ultimately threatens the fabric of the state but rather in a way that results, ultimately, in the further strengthening of both the State and the capitalist economy. Hence at the end of the novel it is the “white collar soldiers” (181), acting on Willsson's authority, who profit from the disorganization to seize control of Personville. In other words, what we see is not the absolute (or Hobbesian) anarchy described by Marcus and others but rather the manifestations of exactly the same processes that Gramsci describes regarding the expansion of the state; that is to say, “the incorporation of hegemony and its apparatus into the State.”Footnote 25 More particularly, Hammett's novel helps bring into focus and perhaps even explain one of the more knotty contradictions inherent in Gramsci's definition of the newly expanded state. For just as Gramsci argues that the state is only ethical insofar as the raising of the populace to a particular cultural or moral level “corresponds to the needs of the productive forces for development, and hence to the interests of the ruling classes,”Footnote 26Red Harvest reminds us that the raising of the populace to a particular cultural or moral level need not involve potentially costly measures such as higher wages and better living standards but rather inculcating the town's residents with the base logic of the marketplace.
THE CONTINENTAL OP, CRIME FICTION AND THE STATE
The arrival of the National Guardsmen at the end of the novel might finally return some semblance of order to Personville but until this moment every attempt by the Continental Op and others to impose the law results not in the restoration of order but rather in further acts of violence. As Heise has rightly noted, the Op is not a neutral observer but rather “a catalyst for violence,” and “violence and disorder are an effect of the direct imposition of the law.”Footnote 27 For Heise and McCann, then, Red Harvest's seeming preference for the violence enacted by the Op as a means of cleansing Personville (as opposed to union activism, political reformism and progressive journalism, all of which fail to tackle the problem) proposes radical individualism as the de facto philosophy of the hard-boiled school. Such a view, however, ignores the extent to which the Op's credentials as an uncoopted individual come under severe scrutiny in the novel. At first glance, and in the narrowest politico-juridical sense (or rather thinking of the state solely as policeman – what Gramsci calls Stato-carabiniere Footnote 28) one might have to question whether the Op's primary loyalty is to the state. After all, having been hired by Willsson's son Donald, a crusading newspaperman, to investigate political corruption in the city, and then by Willsson to empty Personville of “its crooks and grafters” (42), the Op soon loses the semi-official status bestowed on him by Willsson once his investigations threaten to expose Willsson's complicity in the mire of corruption. In part, and especially after he is almost assassinated by the police chief, Noonan, the Op's declaration of war against Personville is driven by personal animosity: “I don't like the way Poisonville has treated me,” he tells Max Thaler. “I've got my chance now, and I'm going to even up … Poisonville is ripe for the harvest. It's a job I like and I'm going to do it” (64). The Op is by no means ideologically coopted, in the narrow sense of the term, and his autonomy from Willsson in particular is evidenced both by his linguistic prowess – when set against Willsson's flaccid bluster – and by his refusal to play “politics” for Willsson (43). Later in the novel, he seems even more unsure which side he is on, telling his associates from the Continental Detective Agency about his conflicting plans for Willson: “Maybe ruin him, maybe club him into backing us. I don't care which” (108–9).
Accounting for this apparent freedom, Freedman and Kendrick instructively describe the Op's labour as “bohemian” – when set against the “economic” labour of the miners and the “political” labour of the gunmen hired to break the strike. “[A]s work that frees the worker from the homogenized space-time of most capitalist labour,” they argue, “detective work is a peculiarly nonalienated variety of labor.”Footnote 29 Gramsci makes the point that someone “who works for a wage does not have time to dedicate himself to the pursuit of drink,”Footnote 30 but the Op's peculiarly nonalienated variety of labour means that he can go where he wishes and drink as much as he wishes. It might even be worthwhile to argue that the Op – and the hard-boiled detective in general – is a fantasy of nonalienated labour; that is to say, a figure who is, to some extent, able to operate outside social and political forces and who, perhaps as a consequence, is only available in the form of representation.Footnote 31 Still, the fact that the Op is not confined by the “homogenized space-time of most capitalist labor” is, in itself, no guarantee of his political or ideological autonomy. For a start, his labour, aimed at emptying Personville of its crooks and grafters, is police work in all but name and, at the most basic level, he has been paid by Willsson to do such work. Thus the Op treats the city's ageing patriarch in a qualitatively different manner than he treats the other gang leaders – or the other factions of capital. “Thaler, Pete the Finn, Lew Yard and Noonan are the men who've made Poisonville the sweet-smelling mess it is,” he tells Dinah Brand. “Old Elihu comes in for his share of the blame, too, but it's not his fault, maybe. Beside, he's my client, even if he doesn't want to be, so I'd like to go easy on him” (79).
My point here is twofold. First, that the Op constitutes a liminal figure in the novel, moving in and out of positions of power and authority and therefore suggesting that hegemony is not always successful in soliciting consent and, second, that we need to think about the Op's labour in the context of Gramsci's expanded notion of the state – and that “by ‘State’ should be understood not only the apparatus of government, but also the ‘private’ apparatus of ‘hegemony’ or civil society.”Footnote 32 As such, it would be quite wrong to see him simply as a state-sponsored vigilante purging all enemies of the industrial–capitalist state with wanton abandon, just as it would be equally wrong to see him as a pro-working-class sympathizer, committed to furthering the ethical claims of the general populace. Rather, the Op is better understood as someone whose private initiatives fall – not always neatly – into the ambit of the expanded or “ethical” state. Gramsci's conception of the state incorporates the apparatus of government with “elite” organizations like the Church, schools, and, I would argue in the case of Red Harvest, the Continental Detective Agency. Given the novel's perhaps deliberate linguistic slippages between the unnamed Old Man who runs the detective agency and old Elihu, who is also referred to as the “old man,” one could argue that both men are part of the same system. As such, the Op's carefully expressed loyalties – to his job, to the Old Man and to his function as a detective – underscore not his autonomy but rather his uneasy place in this expanded conception of the state.
We need to be very careful about making this point too unequivocally, just as we need to be careful about overstating the instrumentalist power of the state. Gramsci has helped us move on from conceiving of the state in reductive Marxist terms either as an instrument wielded by the bourgeoisie or as a functional reproduction of the base or productive forces. Just as Red Harvest characterizes a world in which corrupt lawyers, police chiefs and businessmen are locked in a vicious struggle for power and control, it is perhaps necessary to envisage a more unstable system of rule characterized by warring power blocs, shifting allegiances and constant struggle. More particularly, we should not think that Gramsci's conception of hegemony – “the hegemony of one social group over the entire nation”Footnote 33 – requires a general wilting in the face of power. Rather, the operation of hegemony always presupposes the possibility or likelihood of opposition. Seen in this light, the Op is not simply the lackey of a narrowly conceived politico-juridical state. Rather, he moves in and out of subject positions that both buttress the authority of the state and undermine it from within; as such, his desire to bring order to Personville (and to do so on his own terms) constitutes both the exercise of hegemony and the struggle against hegemony.
Part of my broader argument about crime writing as a genre is that it performs a similar function; that, as a genre which has developed in different directions and under different historical conditions, crime writing is best understood as an ongoing series of negotiations with the proliferating state formation, at once underscoring its ethical and coercive potentialities. What this presumes is that much, if not all, crime fiction posits the state and the law as necessary for the creation and maintenance of collective life and the public or common good and, simultaneously, as a vehicle for the reproduction of inequalities, violence and oppression. In the case of Red Harvest, Hammett establishes the need for state intervention – the fact that the State is necessary to discipline a society and create its own version of the “common good” – at every juncture of the novel, even as he alludes to the state's complicity in the tangled and related web of crimes that the Op has been called upon to investigate. For instance, the Op's revelation that MacSwain and not Max Thaler killed the police chief's brother leads not to the reimposition of order but rather to a further explosion of violence, some of it orchestrated by the police chief. Hammett takes and pushes this tension almost as far as it will go without breaking, and as such, his novel constitutes a perhaps more thoroughgoing assessment of the limitations of state power than we find in Gramsci's prison notebooks. For Gramsci, as Buci-Glucksmann points out, the State is a “bloc that can become ‘contradictory and disarticulated’ in a war of position,”Footnote 34 but on the evidence of the prison notebooks, his interest lies primarily with the mechanisms by which state power is secured, rather than in the ways it is challenged or undermined. Hammett's novel, I would argue, inverts this formulation. That is to say, while it does ultimately advocate a reinscription of the sanctity of the state, and of state power more generally, it is more interested in examining the cracks and fissures in the state form. As such, the Personville/Poisonville distinction is not simply a matter of nomenclature. Personville suggests an image of a city with a highly regulated bureaucratic–administrative system, with Willsson at its apex and Poisonville as its alter ego; a nightmarish place teetering on the brink of violent dissolution. “It's this damned burg,” the Op declares ruefully, reflecting on his own complicity in the killing spree. “You can't go straight here. I got myself tangled at the beginning” (139).
If the Op is indeed to be understood as a conflicted representative of an expanded state form, then Hammett's willingness to immerse him fully in the mire of bloodletting and corruption is a provocative move. Indeed, it is wholly unlike Raymond Chandler, who sought to differentiate his detective, Phillip Marlowe, from the general nastiness of his environment.
The climax of this process is realized when the Op wakes up to find his hand touching the ice pick that has been rammed into Dinah Brand's chest and we, as readers, are not sure, at least for another fifteen or so pages, that he did not kill her with his own hand. Ultimately Hammett steps back from this particular precipice and the Op's innocence is confirmed, allowing him to become instrumental in the restoration of order in Personville. Indeed, it is the Op who, in the end, lays the foundations for, and insists upon, the repressive mechanisms that ensure that power and authority are returned to the city's “white collar soldiers” and therefore, de facto, to Willsson and what he represents. As the Op declares to Willsson,
You're going to tell the governor that your city police have got out of hand, what with bootleggers sworn in as officers, and so on. You're going to ask him for help – the national guard would be best … You're going to have the mayor, or the governor, whichever it comes under, suspend the whole Personville police department, and let the mail-order troops handle things till you can organize another. They'll do whatever you tell them. And that's what you're going to tell them. It can be done, and it's got to be done. (180–81).
The return of the National Guardsmen at the end of the novel does not constitute the same moment of crisis that required their intervention to crush the miners' strike at the start of the novel, nor does it necessarily reflect the failure of the state to quell a politically agitated, restless populace. The disturbances, as severe and potentially destabilizing as they are, do not involve the miners, or the working class more generally, who remain utterly invisible throughout the novel; rather just warring factions of capital competing on albeit disadvantaged terms. In this sense, the need for, and indeed the function of, the modern state arises precisely out of the competitive pressures and often antagonistic interests affecting the ruling classes, and the State itself becomes a product of the competition in civil society and a necessary entity in the reproduction of social and class-based inequalities.Footnote 35 Crucially, therefore, the State does not play a neutral role in adjudicating between the claims of its citizens but intervenes to safeguard the interests of particular elites, even as their pre-eminence is threatened by a Gramscian war of position. In Red Harvest, Willsson is the personification of the mature capitalist economy and, insofar as the state, according to Harvey, has found and always will “find a way of organizing and maintaining the capitalist economy,”Footnote 36 the Op's interventions perform this same function. But even here Hammett adds a significant caveat. The Op gives Willsson back his city “all nice and clean and ready to go to the dogs again” (181), suggesting further disruptions to come. More particularly, his anger at having to do so suggests the kernels of a more thoroughgoing political critique, but it is a critique born of despair and resignation, one that yields nothing and goes nowhere.
CONCLUSION
In his prison cell in Turi, Gramsci appropriated Romain Rolland's now famous phrase “pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will”Footnote 37 to emphasize both the difficulty of instigating meaningful social and political change and, simultaneously, the need to continue to try and bring such change about. Writing in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and the systematic retrenchment against socialism and communism that swept through Europe and indeed the United States in the years following the First World War, Gramsci's pessimism – born of his own imprisonment – is perhaps more understandable than his optimism. Certainly this spectral dead end is where Hammett's Red Harvest seems, ultimately, to lead us. At the end of the novel, the actions of the Continental Op lead not to meaningful change but to the revitalization of state power. So where, if anywhere, might we find the optimism of the will? In this article, I have argued that the Continental Op functions – sometimes unwillingly – as part of an expanded, “ethical” state system (ethical only insofar as its authority is not only or even primarily exercised through violence and coercion). Indeed, what marks Hammett's achievement as both extraordinary and extraordinarily prescient is his willingness to implicate his protagonist in the repressive potentialities of state power, not least because the tension or indeed anger resulting from their conflicted status can be read in politically relevant ways. When the Op mutters “this damn burg” he is railing against not just Personville but, arguably, the whole of America. Raymond Chandler would lead figures as pre-eminent as Ross MacDonald, and the genre as a whole, down a very different path with his uncoopted “man who is not himself mean” and it would not be until Chester Himes's Coffin Ed Johnson or Grave Digger Jones or James Ellroy's “LA Quartet” protagonists that we would see the true heirs of Hammett's dark vision. Tantalizingly, the very instability of this system in Red Harvest means that further disruption and struggle cannot be ruled out – a clear echo of Gramsci's formulation whereby the state is characterized by warring power blocs, shifting allegiances and constant struggle. Two additional conclusions can be drawn. Given the fact that the working class have already been defeated before the start of the novel, Hammett is perhaps playing down the potential for meaningful or even revolutionary change but insofar as his own politics would take a more radical turn in the decade following the publication of Red Harvest, it might be possible to read the anger that lies behind the Op's rhetoric not simply as an expression of nihilistic despair but also as a spur to action on the part of his readers. That said, given the expanded nature and reach of state power in the novel, one could just as well see or read Red Harvest as a harbinger of the kind of even more repressive constellations of political and economic power characteristic of the post-Second World War era.
