I actually read this in an omnibus edition, but what the hell.

The most amazing thing about this book upon reading it for the first time is the way it echoes down through some of my favourite films. Hammett was well served with adaptations, with The Thin Man and The Maltese Falcon being amongst the best of their era, Falcon in particular being one of the definitive private eye films. Red Harvest, less well known, inspired Kurosawa's brilliant samurai film Yojimbo, Sergio Leone's For A Fistful of Dollars and, er, Walter Hill's Last Man Standing, which i have a soft spot for. None of them directly adapted the book, but the influence is clear, and even more marked in the Coen brother's Miller's Crossing, which captured the language, the personality, the down-at-heels stylishness, the alcoholic haze and brought it to glorious life. Read this book with Gabriel Byrne's voice in your head. It's lovely.

So the nameless, overweight and frequently drunk Continental Op turns up in Personville, colloquially known as Poisonville, at the behest of the local newspaper editor. The newspaper editor turns up dead and it turns out Personville is choking on corruption and gangsterism and bootlegging and everything bad under the sun. Included in the line up of scoundrels is his client's father. Having solved the murder by page 50, the Op has also bullied the father into paying him to essentially clean up Personville, which he then proceeds to do.

There follows a scheming, twisting, tale of many, many murders as the Op pits faction against faction, finding any available spanners and tossing them into the works until the whole damn town explodes around, nearly taking him with it. the Op is the original hard-boiled, smart-talking, fast-punching quick-shooting gumshoe who's so good at outsmarting everyone around him, he even manages to outsmart himself. This is a fantastic novel, told with spare, witty language. It's a touchstone in popular culture, a classic of its kind and an all-round awesome read.