Red Harvest Research Articles

Improving the Taste of Robusta Coffee by Fermentation with Yeast Inoculum and Its Effect on Caffeine Content

Harvesting coffee process by farmers generally executed entirety, resulting rainbow harvest. Coffee fermentation with yeast starter cultures Saccharomyces cerevisiae Y612, Candida parapsilosis Y207 and Torulospora delbrueckii Y594 was executed separately to determine the role of starter cultures on caffeine and robusta coffee taste at different maturity levels. The study was conducted at the Indonesian Industrial and Beverage Crops Research Institute in Sukabumi,, from June to November 2022. The experiment used a factorial complete randomized design. The first factor was the maturity level of the coffee and starter culture as the second factor. Fermentation was implemented for 48 hours inoculated with 108 cells/mL starter culture. The results showed that the temperature fluctuated, the pH value always decreased to 4.50 and T. delbrueckii was the starter culture with the highest activity during fermentation. Inoculum-fermented robusta coffee caffeine content was higher than non-inoculum. The lowest caffeine content was found in spontaneously fermented red fruit of 1.39%, while the highest caffeine content was produced by red fruit samples inoculated with C. parapsilosis of 2.7%. Robusta coffee with S. cerevisiae inoculation brought the best taste of robusta coffee with 82.10%, there was no significant difference between the red harvest coffee fruit and the fermented rainbow color with a starter culture. Keywords: Caffeine, Harvest, Inoculation, Maturity level, Starter cultures

Establishing the Hardboiled Fiction as a Literary Landmark in Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest

Establishing the Hardboiled Fiction as a Literary Landmark in Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest

Establishing the Hardboiled Fiction as a Literary Landmark in Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest

Establishing the Hardboiled Fiction as a Literary Landmark in Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest

The ‘Corkscrew’ Journey of an Adaptation: Cultural Mobility in Hammett, Kurosawa, Leone, and Hill

Abstract Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961) has long been recognized as a quasi-adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest (1929), even if it relates much more closely to Hammett’s short story ‘Corkscrew’ (1925). Yojimbo was remade as the Italian Western Fistful of Dollars (1964) by Sergio Leone. The material finally ‘came home’ when Walter Hill adapted it as Last Man Standing (1996) that returns to the 1920s American desert town setting of the original story. This contribution seeks to examine the inflections of the individual incarnations that the material has undergone on its journey through various cultural contexts. The main argument is that the story of the outsider infiltrating a corrupt town and ‘cleansing’ it by playing off two gangs against each other has lent itself to commentary on transnational cultural exchange and mobility. ‘Corkscrew’ expresses anxiety over the integrity of cultural boundaries, Red Harvest expresses the inherent corruption of a ‘hermetic’ culture, Yojimbo uses the story to highlight the uneasy relation between tradition and Westernization in Japan while simultaneously drawing attention to Kurosawa’s status as ‘Western’ director and embraces a guarded cultural mobility, Fistful of Dollars empties the signs, icons, and narratives that make up the expressions of culture of any essentialist meanings and so stages cultural mobility as the shifting play of signifiers, endlessly transgressing acquired meanings and cultural boundaries, and Last Man Standing, finally, in reclaiming the Americanness of the story simultaneously forgoes any cultural specificity by reducing it to an excessive pastiche of prior elements.

Transcontinental Reflections on the American West: Words, Images, Sounds beyond Borders ed. by Ángel Chaparro Sainz and Amaia Ibarraran Bigalondo

Reviewed by: Transcontinental Reflections on the American West: Words, Images, Sounds beyond Borders ed. by Ángel Chaparro Sainz and Amaia Ibarraran Bigalondo Stephen J. Mexal Ángel Chaparro Sainz and Amaia Ibarraran Bigalondo, eds., Transcontinental Reflections on the American West: Words, Images, Sounds beyond Borders. London: PortalEditions, 2015. 424 pp. Paper, $22.90. For scholars of the American literary West, many of whom have long been invested in theories of borderless or "postregional" spaces, the events of 2016 must have felt like running full-tilt into an invisible wall. After England's vote to close its borders to the European Union or Donald Trump's election pledge to "build a wall" along America's southern boundary, it seems while scholars may be done with borders, borders are not yet done with us. Yet Ángel Chaparro Sainz and Amaia Ibarraran Bigalondo's edited collection of essays provides an opportunity for a global group of scholars to study the American West from a perspective that strives to be, as their subtitle has it, "beyond borders." For Sainz and Bigalondo, the borders in question refer not just to nation or region but to generic and disciplinary borders as well. The essays are united by this expansive sense of boundary crossing. It is in this spirit that Jesus Ángel González sketches the generic border crossings that connect Dashiell Hammett's hard-boiled fiction, the Western genre, and the many international film adaptations of Hammett's 1929 novel Red Harvest; that Krista Comer explores the theoretical borders between critical regionalism, feminist theory, and feminist activism; and that Luis Díaz Pulido studies the permeable cultural borders between America's Bush-era response to terrorism, Richard Slotkin's frontier myth, and the television program 24. The editors have assembled a global band of scholars. Many of the contributors are affiliated with the University of the Basque Country, some are at other universities in Spain, and still others are located in France, Italy, and the United States. Building on Neil Campbell's 2008 The Rhizomatic West (which is cited in nearly a third of the essays here), the contributors repeatedly make the case that the American literary West belongs not just to one type of text or nation. Instead, it is the product and purview of the entire world. But given such clear internationalist aspirations, the book is somewhat hampered by some missed opportunities. In defining [End Page 226] "borders" quite as broadly as it does—here, the generic boundary between a novel and a film is given roughly the same weight as the boundary between two nations—the book misses a chance to explore more fully the ways in which the American West has always been global. Some chapters do strive to uncover a legacy of transcontinental transmission. David Fenimore's chapter on Horace Greeley, Karl Marx, and the European communitarian influence on nineteenth-century western settlement is particularly strong. Similarly, Monika Madinabeitia's chapter on the history of the Basque diaspora and its connection to contemporary Basque music and identity in the American West is especially engaging. On the whole, though, the book stands as an important reminder that the academic study of the American literary and cultural West is not a small discipline, consigned to the dusty corners of a few regions of the United States, but rather a large one: the product and the subject of an expansive, interconnected world. Throughout, its contributors are tireless in their investigations of the porous disciplinary, generic, and political borders that limn the culture of the American West. Stephen J. Mexal California State University, Fullerton Copyright © 2017 Western Literature Association

Postharvest UV-B treatments increased fructose content of tomato (Solanum lycopersicon L. cv. Tayfun F1) harvested at different ripening stages

In the postharvest stage, taste and flavor are the key components of the marketability of tomato. Therefore, greater emphasis is now being placed on improving traits such as sugar content. In this study postharvest ultraviolet-B (UV-B) treatments on sugar, total soluble solids, and color of tomatoes harvested at different stages were investigated. Tomatoes harvested at turning, pink, and red stages were treated with two different doses of UV-B irradiation: UVB4 and UVB8. Color L* and hue angle values of tomatoes treated with UV-B were found to be high, which means the red color of tomatoes was improved. UVB4 treatments increased the color a* and saturation index values of tomatoes at pink and red harvest stage, although it did not affect at the turning stage. Additionally, UV-B irradiation treatments had no effect on sucrose content of the tomatoes. Fructose, glucose, and TSS content of tomatoes treated with UVB8 at red harvest stage were found to be high. Hence, the results obtained from this study are of great importance in terms of providing an increase in the amount of sugar without the need for breeding, and also consumer satisfaction.

Genetic analysis of agro-economic traits in chillies (Capsicum annuum)

The investigation was carried out in the vegetable Research Farm in Department of Horticulture, Allahabad Agricultural Institute-Deemed University, Allahabad during 2006-2007 to evaluate the performance of 20 geno-types in Allahabad agro-climate condition. All twenty genotypes were grown in a Randomized Block Design with 3 replication. The observations were recorded on 14 quantitative traits and 3 qualitative traits, i.e., plant height 100 days, 120 days, days to 1st flowering, days to 50 % flowering, days to 1st green fruit harvest, average fruit length, average fruit diameter, average green fruit yield/plant, days to 1st red ripe fruit harvest, average weight of red ripe fruit yield, number of seeds/fruit, weight of seeds/ fruit, ascorbic acids, oleoresin (%) and capsaicin content (%). Significant differences among genotypes for all the of the traits showed wide range of variability in the material. The estimate of phenotypic coefficient of variation was higher than the genotypic coefficient of variation for almost all the traits. Both heritability and genetic advance were higher for days to 50 % flowering, average green fruit yield, days to first ripe fruit harvest, no, of seeds /fruit, weight of seeds/fruit and oleoresin content. The magnitude of genotypic correlation was higher than the phenotypic correlation for all the characters. The most important trait total yield per plant was significantly and positively correlated with green fruit yield, fruit length and fruit diameter, weight of red ripe fruit. no of seeds/fruit, weight of seeds/ fruit, ascorbic acid, oleoresin, and capsaicin content. The important traits green fruit yield was significantly and negatively correlated with days to flowering, days to 50 % flowering, days to first green fruit harvest and days to ripe fruit harvest. Number of seeds/fruit, weight of seeds/ fruits, average weight of green fruit, and ascorbic acid had positive direct effect on yield at both and phenotypic levels. Based on performance SM-20, JCA-9, Pusa Jawala, Utakal Ragini and Kashi anmol exhibited high fruit yield per plant. Among all the genotypes SM-20 was found to be with highest yield, i.e., 168.42 g per plant.

A note on the effectiveness of incorporating management objectives with ecological variables when modeling red deer abundance

Big game populations are being raised in areas characterized by different land uses and are being managed under a wide range of circumstances which might influence their population densities and structure. However, the consideration of explanatory variables related to management activities is not generally explicitly considered in game population models. This paper focuses on how estate owners’ management objectives and strategies influence red deer (Cervus elaphus L.) hunting yields. We study red deer harvest in 187 hunting estates in Andalusia (Spain) and use both ecological and management predictors to describe capture levels in each hunting estate. We have found that the main land use of the area where red deer are being raised, the type of hunting holder, and the long-term management strategies (such as fencing and the hunting practices implemented) significantly explain red deer hunting bag, which is often used as proxy of population abundance. Therefore, ecological variables alone are not always sufficient to determine big game harvests. We provide empirical support that reinforces the relevance of considering humans and their long-term decisions when trying to interpret wildlife harvests, populations, and trends. We urge scientists and technicians to incorporate human aims in the game species distribution models and resource user decision models, particularly when game populations are being intensively managed.

Red Harvest Yield and Fruit Characteristics of Phytophthora capsici-resistant Bell Pepper Inbred Lines in New York

Phytophthora capsici is an oomycete pathogen that causes disease on bell pepper (Capsicum annuum) and many other vegetable crops globally. Newly developed bell pepper inbred lines have been shown to be resistant to P. capsici and have been previously evaluated for green harvest yield. Nine P. capsici-resistant inbred lines and three commercial cultivars were evaluated for red harvest yield and fruit characteristics at three sites and disease resistance was evaluated through field inoculation studies. Three of the P. capsici-resistant lines were further evaluated as hybrid parents by measuring hybrid yield and disease resistance. P. capsici-resistant lines had excellent disease resistance and provided high levels of resistance to F1 hybrids. Inbred lines had comparable yields to the commercial cultivars, but fruit were smaller in size and weight. These lines are suitable for use as inbred lines for markets where small fruit size is acceptable and have potential for use as hybrid parents.

Technologies of History: Visual Media and the Eccentricity of the Past (review)

Reviewed by: Technologies of History: Visual Media and the Eccentricity of the Past Terence Wright (bio) Technologies of History: Visual Media and the Eccentricity of the Past.By Steve F. Anderson. Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Press, 2011. Pp. vii+210. $35. We all have a sense of history: an idea of where we come from, where our family comes from, or what makes our social group or country what it is. Some of the information that forms our histories was taught to us at school: such school histories traditionally fit Jean-François Lyotard's notion of the "grand narrative." But our personal historical narratives, together with the information that gives us a sense of place in relation to preceding decades, is gained from a variety of sources. Anecdotes, family stories, local myths and legends, and state propaganda all have a role to play in creating our sense of historical identification. The media also play an important role, though, as Steve F. Anderson argues, they do so less through explicit attempts to teach about the past (as in historical documentaries) than through other, perhaps unexpected, sources. In Technologies of History, Anderson shows how home movies, science fiction, experimental film, and video games all play significant roles in forming our historical consciousness. His central concern throughout is visual history and its dependence on technology for its propagation. We may be aware that televised media and Hollywood are renowned for taking liberties with historical fact, but this is not the main issue for Anderson. As he puts it, "we should not look to media for the truth about the past but instead examine them for clues about the way history is constructed and engaged through cultural products, memories, myths, politics" (p. 2). Thus his book attempts to explore the complex entanglements of historical information with contemporary media technologies. In order to clarify Anderson's approach, we might apply it to a spaghetti Western such as Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars (1964). As a work of fiction, its main intention is to tell a gripping story. Its narrative is not primarily concerned with describing a period of history. After all, the film is a [End Page 717] remake of Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo (1961) in a Japanese setting (in turn inspired by Dashiell Hammett's detective novel Red Harvest set in the United States of the 1920s). Indeed, Leone shows how easily the archetypal storyline transfers from rural Japan to the lawless West. Yet A Fistful of Dollars does contain a number of much more subtle messages about how the particular historical period, nineteenth-century America, is to be regarded (as does Yojimbo convey information and suppositions about the nineteenth-century Japanese culture). But Anderson's argument, that a much wider variety of media forms play an important role in molding our conceptions of history and historical narrativity, is just the starting point. It is his contention that historians have disregarded the role of (what we might call) lateral inferences as making significant contributions to historiography and our historical understanding. One of the more extraordinary examples cited by Anderson, where futuristic fiction encounters History head-on, is an episode of Star Trek in which Kirk and Spock meet the inhabitants of a planet who base their culture on the 1930s/40s Nazi regime. Star Trek often fantasizes history for its "what if" scenarios. In the Nazi episode Anderson finds that "meaningful historiographical discourse takes place in many more places and cultural forms than we habitually acknowledge" (p. 18). The argument can be extended to the historiography of computer games in the controversial online game JFK Reloaded. Here "historical simulation" enables users to put themselves in the position of would-be assassin in order to evaluate how their strategies and responses weigh against the findings of the Warren Commission's official investigation into the Kennedy assassination. In the context of numerous conspiracy theories about the shooting, Anderson points out that the implicit historical goals are not to establish "truth" about events, but to create more or less successful interplays between the facts and "the cultural discourses of history" (p. 152). Technologies of History will be of interest to readers from a...

(Re)Model(ed) Towns and the Remodeling of American Ideology: The Expansion of Middle-Class Hegemony in Allan Pinkerton's <i>The Model Town and the Detectives</i> and Dashiell Hammett's <i>Red Harvest</i>

(Re)Model(ed) Towns and the Remodeling of American Ideology: The Expansion of Middle-Class Hegemony in Allan Pinkerton's <i>The Model Town and the Detectives</i> and Dashiell Hammett's <i>Red Harvest</i>

Maternal host plant effects on aphid performance: contrasts between a generalist and a specialist species on Brussels sprout cultivars

1 The performance of the second generation (G2) of alates and apterae of a generalist, Myzus persicae, and a specialist, Brevicoryne brassicae, aphid species reared on Chinese cabbage or cabbage was evaluated on five cultivars of Brussels sprout. 2 Aphid performance was influenced both by the type of host on which the parent aphid had been reared and by the host on which it was feeding when reproducing. 3 The fecundity of the G2 of alates of both aphid species reared on Chinese cabbage differed significantly between all the cultivars of Brussels sprout and, on average, was 25% higher than those reared on cabbage. These differences were also apparent for the intrinsic rate of increase of B. brassicae but not for M. persicae. 4 There was a trend for the G2 of alates from Chinese cabbage to have greater fecundity compared with aphids from cabbage. These differences were significant for the fecundity of the G2 of alates of both aphid species on Brussels sprout cultivars Fillbasket (30% higher), Red Delicious (35% higher) and Winter Harvest (25% higher) than those reared on cabbage. 5 The intrinsic rate of increase for the G2 of alates of B. brassicae from Chinese cabbage was significantly different on all Brussels sprout cultivars tested. The intrinsic rate of increase differed significantly between aphids reared on either Chinese cabbage or cabbage on cultivars Oliver and Darkmar-21 (M. persicae) and Red Delicious and Winter Harvest (B. brassicae). The cv. Oliver appeared to be the most consistently good host; Red Delicious was the poorest host overall.

“Hegemony Protected by the Armour of Coercion”: Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest and the State

This article argues that Dashiell Hammett's 1929 novel Red Harvest is best understood in the context of the consolidation and expansion of the US state following the First World War and the Russian Revolution. It also argues that Hammett's novel constitutes a highly significant articulation of theoretical debates about the nature of political authority and state power in the modern era and speaks about the transition of one state formation to another. Insofar as Red Harvest explores the way in which the state's coercive and ethical character are bound up together, this article argues that Hammett's novel draws upon an understanding of political authority and state power primarily derived from Gramsci, via Marx. Gramsci insists that control cannot be maintained through force alone (and his conception of hegemony, in turn, suggests a power bloc that can become fragmented and disunited in a war of position). In the same way, Red Harvest traces the transformation of the “economic-corporate” state into the expanded or “ethical” State but crucially any ethical dimension, as Gramsci notes, is always beholden to the needs of the capitalist economy. As such, the apparently arbitrary bloodshed in the novel is conceived as a relatively minor realignment in the ranks of the capitalist classes – certainly less serious than the miners' strike that prefigures the novel. What makes this realignment significant is that it calls attention to the state both as repressive and as a site of conflict and compromise. Here, the work performed by the Continental Op and by the crime novel in general – simultaneously buttressing and, to some extent, contesting the power of the state – needs to be understood as part of the process by which the state is consistently enacting hegemony (albeit protected by the armour of coercion). The article concludes by pointing out that while Gramsci is perhaps too willing to dwell upon the state's expanded reach, Red Harvest is more interested in examining possible “cracks and fissures” in the state formation, even if the critique it ultimately offers goes nowhere and yields nothing.

Briefcases for Hire: American Hardboiled to Legal Fiction

Take a shopworn, dick, softened with bourbon, rumpled at the edges, a piece snug under his arm, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. Take an Armani-clad attorney-at-law, all suave urbanity and legalese elocution, a Gucci briefcase dangling from his manicured hand. We are talking night and day, the pauper and the prince, the marginal and the mainstream, right? Well, not quite. Although not wholly obvious at first glance, the premier difference between the American gumshoe from the pages of fiction and the lawyer-hero of contemporary courtroom drama may be that one carries a gun and the other a briefcase. This flies in the face of a common perception that the two genres-hardboiled and legal fiction-have little in common. After all, they are not even of the same era. Tough guy prose peaked in popularity in the 1930s and 1940s, while the legal procedural did not go nova until the 1980s, enjoying its phenomenal success until this very day.1 And yet first impressions can be misleading. Take a look at the heroes, for instance. Both are archetypal, fast-talking urban cowboys, moving through the shark tanks of mean city streets or mean city courtrooms. Both are for hire for a fee plus expenses. Both are reluctant to use force at first, although when push comes to shove neither the PI nor the attorney-at-law will back down from a tangle with the wise guys-or pretty dames, for that matter. As even this thumbnail tableau reveals, the tough guy of the school may be more closely related to the hero of the legal procedural than previously allowed. Could this resemblance be more than a coincidence? For an answer to this question, we will look to two novels that in their own way typify their respective eras, Zeitgeists, and modes of writing. Samuel (Dashiell) Hammett's proto-hardboiled Red Harvest (1929) and John Grisham's novelistic and Hollywood blockbuster, The Rainmaker (1995), usefully highlight a number of the apparent differences and underlying similarities of their respective genres. Taking a closer look at the narrative styles, cultural roots, and socio-historical contexts of these two novels, we aim to establish beyond reasonable doubt the roots of contemporary law fiction. Paying particular attention to the prime mover of the crime and courtroom thriller-the hero, we'll trace how the conjunction hardboiled lawyer plays out in modern-day legal procedurals such as The Rainmaker. Although implicitly, at least, this article joins the debate on aesthetic and cultural merits of popular literature. We take the answer to the question Is there a point in studying genre fiction? as largely settled in the affirmative.2 Quite apart from the demonstrable inaccuracy of critiques aiming to put the aesthetic merit of popular fiction to doubt, this type of elitism is misplaced in the consideration of literature in its socio-cultural context. More to the point, genre fiction is by now a universal forum for the propagation and assimilation of ideas. Commenting on all aspects of contemporary life, it ends up informing, and in some cases even forming, the background of many people's values and beliefs. A good case in point may be the 1927 trial of Ruth (Momsie) Snyder and Henry Judd (Lover Boy) Gray, convicted of murdering Ruth's husband, Albert Snyder. Even though every paper, from Hearst tabloids to the New York Times, covered the sensational hearings, few of us remember anything about Snyder v. Gray. And yet anyone familiar with James M. Cain's classics, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and Double Indemnity (1936) -or their movie adaptations (Postman 1946, remake 1981; Oscar-nominated Indemnity 1944)-will recognize the case in a flash. While the names have changed -Cain, a seasoned journalist who covered the Snyder trial on assignment, turned them to Cora, Frank, and Nick in Postman, and to Phyllis, Walter, and Herbert in Indemnity-the circumstances did not. …

Smash Palace -- Model Four Hundred

Smash Palace—Model Four Hundred Michael Coles (bio) My eyes get lost in a matrix of muscular hips and curvature whilewandering through cemetery-like rows of timepieces. Model As and Model Ts lean and crumble on one another. Wooden spokes pop out of rusted rims. I am immersed in a stew of throwaways—Mercury Montclair, Pinto Runabout, Plymouth Cambridge, a blown out lawnmower, a broken washer, and a chunk of firewood. Jackrabbit bounces down a line of fenders as mountain air wisps through overgrown grass on this hillside outside Butte, Montana. Entire spans of American automobile-making in this graveyard are enough to induce a nomadic trance. Yet, amidst this jumble, one particular artifact emits sparks more than others. It seduces the lens of a camera. "No drama, take it for what it is—just another beater," I say to myself. But I remain transfixed by this still machine. Its very sight seems a coronation of a smash palace. "Packard 54–55?" (a speculation of the car's exact year) is scrawled beneath a back windshield rippling in cracked spider-web patterns. A hip of the car reads "Model Four Hundred." Tires are heaped on top of the hood, and typography is bleached out by years of cold rain and snow. An array of scratches and assorted dents are embedded in blotches of faded color. Bruises and slights absorbed over time start to add up and mesmerize. Packard's advertising slogan once rang, "ASK THE MAN WHO OWNS ONE." Czars, rajahs, kings, and presidents rode in Packards. Milt Taylor, a star clown for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, drove a special edition. Poncho Villa was a Packard customer. According to Packard lore, Czar Nicholas drove a Twin Six with its front wheels substituted by skis. Perhaps a gangster out of Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest drove this Model Four Hundred down Mercury Street in Butte. [End Page 139] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. I gaze at the silver winged-bird hood ornament. Down below, an emblem remains lodged in the radiator grill, displaying a coat of arms originating from the old English Packard family who came to America in 1638. This coat of arms has been described as "gules, a cross lozengy between four roses argent" and "a pelican in her piety, pricking blood from her breast to feed her young." Back in a dark room I gently roll a 48-ounce film canister half-full of developer on a countertop. One reel of Kodak Techpan film is suspended in the center between empty reels on either side serving as spacers. Kodak Techpan has recently been discontinued. I guess there is not enough interest for slow-speed, fine-grain emulsions in a digital age. A radio plays music as I hope something might come out of these frames I am developing. Staring through a film loupe at negatives, I return to this auto boneyard. The city of Butte lies across Interstate 90 from this quiet hillside of swaying grass. Mining escarpments hover in the distance, resembling a lunarscape. Wallace Stegner once described the town dump of his childhood as a "kitchen midden of civilization." This field of cars seems such a stowaway. My eyes become locked in the passageway of the loupe and the mind revisits. Thrusts, juts, and sharp corners of these cars offer a cubist smorgasbord. How does one make sense of all the names and shapes, the strange memories that they can trigger? "We learn to see before we talk or write," I tell myself. [End Page 140] Junkyards can serve as wellsprings for unremembered pasts. "America, that surreal country, is full of found objects. Our junk has become art. Our junk has become history," the critic Susan Sontag proclaimed. Photography is often a solitary effort. If I do not photograph alone, I will not arrive at certain places or follow hunches that lead to immersion in a particular environment. Images turn out different when I am shooting alongside other photographers. And so I stand awestruck on an October afternoon, my eyes sparked by generations of twisted, mangled, and smashed automotives—an affirmation of our relentless determination to replace, rebuild, and regenerate...

"Going Blood-Simple Like the Natives": Contagious Urban Spaces and Modern Power in Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest

In the great city the poor, the vicious, and the delinquent, crushed together in an unhealthful and contagious intimacy, breed in and in soul and body, so that it has often occurred to me that those long genealogies of the Jukes and the tribes of Ishmael would not show such a persistent and distressing uniformity of vice, crime, and poverty unless they were peculiarly fit for the environment in which they are condemned to exist. —Robert Park, Ernest Burgess, and Roderick McKenzie, The City "ARE YOUR FINGER PRINTS ON FILE? How J. Edgar Hoover's F.B.I. Can Help You Protect Yourself and Your Family" —Headline from the cover of Feds magazine, Sept. 1937 Dashiell Hammett's 1929 novel, Red Harvest, ends with an appeal to the forces of federal law, the professional and bureaucratic "white-collar soldiers" (134) of national law enforcement that historically in the 1920s and 1930s took over much of the terrain once [End Page 485] patrolled by the private detective. The ending surprises because it apparently signifies that Hammett's hero, the anonymous Continental Op, has failed in the job he was hired to perform, namely, to rid the working-class city of Personville (called Poisonville by its residents)—"an ugly city of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch between ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining"—of the criminal elements of its organized, ethnic underworld (3). In one of his final acts in the service of his client, the Op informs him that the dire situation in the city necessitates the intervention of an authority greater than that which the Op alone can provide: 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. I don't know how various ruckuses around town have come out, but I do know that the big boys—the ones you were afraid of—are dead. The ones that had too much on you for you to stand up to them. There are plenty of busy young men working like hell right now, trying to get into the dead men's shoes. The more, the better. They'll make it easier for the white-collar soldiers to take hold while everything is disorganized. . . . Then you'll have your city back, all nice and clean and ready to go to the dogs again. (134) Originally summoned to Personville by Donald Willsson, the editor of the local Herald, a civic reformer, and "a lousy liberal" who functions as the novel's spokesperson for the bourgeois values of fairness and transparency in government, the Op quickly finds himself working instead for Donald's corrupt father, Elihu (21). Before the novel begins, Donald's efforts to expose the roots of civic corruption lead him directly to his father—a nineteenth-century industrial magnate determined to hold on to power in the ruthlessly competitive world of twentieth-century capitalism—and lead indirectly to his (Donald's) murder on the day the Op arrives to meet him. 1 Instead of returning to his San Francisco office, the Op remains in town, commissioned now by Elihu, purportedly to clean the city of the gangs of bootleggers and gamblers that once were—like the mining company, the bank, the press, and the majority of elected officials—firmly under his control. As the I.W.W. union leader Bill Quint recounts it, these criminals initially were hired by Elihu from the ranks of "gunmen, strike-breakers, national guardsmen and even parts of the regular army" to violently beat down a union action at his mine in 1921, but stayed on after the strike, eventually taking "the city for...

Going Blood-Simple in Poisonville

This article examines the representation and critique of what it terms hard-boiled masculinity as an exemplary form of modern masculinity in Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest. The novel presents hard-boiled masculinity as violent, rationalized, and largely purged of interiority and affect. Its representation of masculinity is organized around a form of split narration in which the affective detachment and seeming rationality of the firstperson narration produces a textual unconscious in which the affect purged fromthe surface of the narrative is projected on to and returns in the shape of various gendered, racialized, and nationalized others. After explicating this split narration, and suggesting its links to the advent of Taylorism and incipient Fordism in the 1920s, the article charts the political costs of this displacement of affect and the form of masculinity it constructs.

Variations on a theme: Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars and the `servant of two masters'

Sergio Leone’s ‘spaghetti’ western A Fistful of Dollars (1964) is known to be in many respects a derivation from Akira Kurosawa’s swordfighting film Yojimbo (1961), which in turns borrows from Dashiell Hammett’s novel Red Harvest. But the two films have never to our knowledge been subjected to detailed comparison in relation to each other or to shared common origins. In this article we look at the known facts about Leone’s ‘borrowing’ from Kurosawa and then compare the two films in respect of narrative similarity, character, genre attachment and ethical-cultural factors. We conclude that a very close narrative similarity goes hand-in-hand with substantial differences at other levels, and raise the more general question of the adaptability of a central narrative core to a wide variety of possible workings-out.

Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science

1. The devices of truth Part I. Tell-Tale Hearts: 2. The lie detector and the thinking machine 3. The unequal voice in 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' 4. The letter of the law in The Woman in White 5. The criminal type in 'A Case of Identity' 6. The voice of America in Red Harvest Part II. Arresting Shots: 7. The mug shot and the magnifying glass 8. Photographic memories in Bleak House 9. Double exposure in The House of the Seven Gables 10. Negative images in 'A Scandal in Bohemia' 11. Empty cameras in The Big Sleep and Farewell My Lovely Part III. Identifying Marks: 12. The fingerprint and the map of crime 13. Foreign bodies in A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four 14. Accusing hands in Puddn'head Wilson 15. International plots in The Maltese Falcon and Murder on the Orient Express 16. Missing persons and secret agents Selected works for further reading.

The Crime of the Sign: Dashiell Hammett's Detective Fiction

Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley. Raymond Chandler 234 In 1941 Howard Haycraft wrote a literary history called Murder for Pleasure: Life and Times of the Detective Story. In it he celebrated what he termed the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, and he singled out certain people as masters of the classic detective story--Christie, Sayers, and Bentley, among others. In December 1944, in an essay in the Atlantic Monthly called. The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler issued a broadside against Haycraft's primarily British tradition. This narrative form, Chandler claimed, fails to provide, among other things, lively characters, sharp dialogue, a sense of pace and an acute use of observed detail (225). murders in these stories are implausibly motivated, the plots completely artificial, and the characters pathetically two-dimensional, puppets and cardboard lovers and papier mache villains and detectives of exquisite and impossible gentility (232). authors of this are ignorant of the facts of (228), too little aware of what goes on i n the (231). As the last quotes suggest, Chandler accusing the writers of Haycraft's Golden Age of failing to be true to the world: if the writers of this wrote about the kind of murders that happen, he says, would also have to write about the authentic flavor of life as it lived (231). Chandler goes on to single out Dashiell Hammett as the person who rescued the genre by bringing it back to the world. Hammett, he says, tried to write realistic mystery fiction (233). John Cawelti, a leading critic of detective fiction, qualifies Chandler's claims, insisting that Hammett's novels are not necessarily more realistic. Rather, they embody a vision of life in the hard-boiled detective formula (163). Another critic remarks that Hammett adapted to the genre a new and more exciting set of literary conventions better suited to the time and (Porter 130). While I grant that Chandler's arguments are partisan and naive, and that Hammett's realism every bit as conventional as Christie's, [1] I would like to take Chandler at his word and to investigate the real of Hammett's and, by extension, the world of American detective fiction. By looking closely at Hammett's fiction, especially Red Harvest, his first novel (1929), I propose to demonstrate that his powerful vision of derives in large part from his subversion of basic frames of intelligibility, including the frame that allows the art of fiction, language itself. Chandler uses the synecdoche mean to define Hammett's world, and various critics have characterized those streets in some detail. [2] world implied in Hammett's works, and fully articulated in Chandler and MacDonald, says George Grella, is an urban chaos, devoid of spiritual and moral values, pervaded by viciousness and random savagely (110). world of Red Harvest representative. novel takes place in a western mining town named Personville, which has been owned for 40 years by an industrial capitalist: Elihu Willson was Personville, and he was almost the whole state (9). Willson controls congressmen, city officials, and the police, but at the opening of the novel, his control of the town in jeopardy. In order to break a strike by the mineworkers, he called in thugs connected with the mob. After brutally suppressing the strike, the gangsters refused to leave and took over the town, occupying its offices and businesses. At the time of the Continental Op's arrival, an uneasy pea ce prevails in a thoroughly corrupt town, as rival gangster factions run different operations. police are bought off casually; they even supply getaway cars for criminals. At one point in the narrative, criminals are let out of jail in order to commit a midday bank robbery; they later use their incarceration as an unimpeachable alibi. …