What I Read on My Summer Vacation

It's happened before: I read a handful of books on vacation, and then never get around to writing about them.  So rather than full reviews, let's just have a little round-up.

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Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest (1929)

I had never really read anything in this milieu before, so I thought I oughta.  The protagonist and narrator of Red Harvest is a nameless operative for a San Francisco detective agency seemingly based on the Pinkertons, and can you believe they still exist?  He is called in to a town called Personville (colloquially referred to as "Poisonville"), but the man who called him is murdered before he even gets to meet him.  He spends some time looking into the guy's murder, but not much; the bulk of the novel consists of him "cleaning up" the town by orchestrating conflicts between the various criminal groups that de facto run the town.  Then, he leaves.

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