The New Death: American Modernism and World War I

Conclusion: New Death, Blood Simple

Conclusion: New Death, Blood Simple Play with murder enough and it gets you one of two ways. It makes you sick, or you get to like it. —dashiell hammett, red harvest In Dashiell Hammett’s novel Red Harvest (1929), the detective who tells the story plays with murder and, as he puts it, “get[s] to like it.”1 He arrives in Personville (alias “Poisonville”) on a routine assignment but finds himself in the middle of a gang war. After being threatened by a corrupt police chief, the detective himself, Hammett’s “Continental Op,” becomes a killer. He also uses his powers of detection and deduction not to fight crime but to pit the criminals against each other so that they will kill each other off. In other words, he joins the war. About two-thirds through the novel, the narrator takes a moment to count up the dead and concludes, “If I don’t get away [from here] soon I’ll be going bloodsimple like the natives. There’s been what? A dozen and a half murders since I’ve been here. . . . I’ve arranged a killing or two in my time, when they were necessary. But this is the first time I’ve ever got the fever” (154). Just pages after this speech, he wakes up next to a murdered woman, his hand tight around the ice pick that killed her. He has no memory of the night before, and neither he nor the reader knows for sure that he did not kill her himself. World War I has a strange status in Red Harvest. No characters are explicitly identified as veterans. And yet the novel both alludes to the war and textualizes the problems of New Death enumerated in the previous chapters. Hammett’s characters live in constant proximity to death: one shoots a man dead and then will not “let them take the body away” because he “want[s] it there to look at, to keep panic away” (43); a woman “heave[s] the corpse” in her living room at another man to knock him 200 / THE NEW DEATH down (106); liquor “tastes a little bit like it had been drained off a corpse” (134); men fire machine guns and throw bombs; dying men tell their last words; newspapers report the daily deaths. In Red Harvest, killing is ubiquitous , bodies bleed, pile up, and are reckoned by the dozen, and yet, as in other narratives of New Death, the central murder is mysterious and then imagined as an “accident.” Though it is virtually an all-male world, that most spectacular corpse is a woman’s. Taken together, these elements suggest that Red Harvest, like other texts of its era, responds to the world of New Death brought into being by the war. Though usually located within the genre of crime fiction, Red Harvest belongs alongside Gatsby and other modernist novels in a canon of post-World War I American Literature. Red Harvest epitomizes one of the things that, according to Greg Forter and others, makes hardboiled fiction in general distinct from previous detective fiction: it offers its reader “an opportunity to let the mind play over death as one’s ownmost destiny” through its insistent presentation of “the hardboiled corpse,” which “fixates us on a brute physicality.”2 Corpses in hardboiled fiction are not reducible to puzzles that must be solved or crimes that must be paid for but instead resist easy explanation and delay, sometimes exceed, narrative resolution. The premise of the foregoing chapters has been that four particular texts by canonical American writers center around a problem that came out of the cultural experience of World War I: how could the horror of young men’s death on a mass scale be represented in narratives? This representational problem leads Cather to split the war’s heroism from its modernity and, thus, contain some of its threat. Fitzgerald evokes the war in its ethos. Gatsby’s plot enacts the violence that machines do to bodies in modern war. Despite that violence, its narrative grows out of a desire to preserve a vision of male death as sacrifice, as a means to making things “tur[n] out all right at the end.”3 Hemingway revisits the scene of his own wounding and portrays the damage men suffer in modern war but manages to relocate the most abject aspects of death and suffering. All three authors manage these contradictory portrayals of New Death by relocating aspects of...