Red Harvest
$60,000 · Offered by Biblio
First edition · Signed
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929. First Edition. Very Good+. First edition, first printing of Dashiell Hammett's first novel. Signed by the author on the fly-leaf and inscribed to the Arizona bookseller Billy Greer Hobson: "Keep a notebook and pencil - the story of the other fellows' crime pays. Dashiell Hammett." Hobson's bookplate on paste down. [viii], 270, [1] pp. Bound in publisher's red cloth decorated in black and yellow; lacking the scarce dust jacket. Very Good+ with sunned spine, moderate wear and several small faint stains to covers and upper textblock edge. Offsetting from bookplate to front free endpaper, San Francisco bookseller ticket to back pastedown; overopened in several places. Housed in a custom red cloth clamshell case, paper title label to spine. Layman A1.1.a. Dashiell Hammett turned to writing after tuberculosis forced him to resign from his mostly enjoyable job as a Pinkerton detective. He put his experience to good use, breaking with the Golden Age convention of the gentleman detective and introducing the hardboiled man who uses grit and legwork to get the job done. As his successor Raymond Chandler famously put it, "Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley." Hammett published his first short story in October 1922. "The Parthian Shot" was featured in the prestigious magazine The Smart Set: A Magazine of Cleverness, edited by H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. Luckily for Hammett, the two editors had also founded a
- Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
- Year: 1929
- Edition: First Edition
- Printing: first
- Binding: unknown
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