Plot
The Continental Op is called to Personville (known as "Poisonville" to the locals) by Donald Willsson, who is murdered before the Op has a chance to meet with him. The Op begins to investigate Willsson's murder and meets with Willsson's father, Elihu, a local industrialist who has found his control of the city threatened by several competing gangs. He had originally invited those gangs into Personville to help him impose and then enforce the end of a labor dispute.
The Op extracts a promise and a signed letter from Elihu that pays the Continental Detective Agency, the Op's employer, $10,000 in exchange for cleaning up the city. When the Op solves Donald's murder, Elihu tries to renege on the deal, but the Op will not allow him to do so.
In the meantime, the Op is spending time with Dinah Brand, a possible love interest of Donald Willsson's as well as a moll for Max "Whisper" Thaler, a local gangster. Using Brand and Personville's crooked chief of police, Noonan, the Op manages to extract and spread enough information to set off a gang war among the four major local factions.
The Op wakes up the next morning to find Brand stabbed to death with the icepick the Op had used the previous evening. There are no visible signs of forced entry. The Op ends up a suspect sought by the police for this murder, and one of his fellow operatives leaves Personville because he is uncertain of the Op's innocence.
The Op finds Reno Starkey, the only one of the four main gangsters still alive, bleeding from a gunshot wound. Reno reveals that he stabbed Brand, and that as she fell she collided with the semi-conscious Op landing in a position that made the Op look like the culprit. Reno has just killed Whisper, and after Reno dies, Elihu can restore his control over the town.
Read more about this topic: Red Harvest
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“Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—
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I want to make
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—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
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—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)