Crime fiction’s critics have long argued that the genre is inherently conservative. Nicholas Royle and Andrew Bennett elaborated on this in Introduction to Literature, Theory, and Criticism, noting that the genre’s strictures compel detectives to pursue individuals rather than institutions. As a result, society at large can never be the culprit, leaving less space for social critique. The story structure relies on the assumption of a harmonious status quo: a crime disrupts it and the detective is called upon to restore it by either killing or jailing someone. Moreover, crime fiction at least coexists alongside the more obviously reactionary genre of true crime, a steady diet of which convinces people that violent crime rates are perpetually soaring when they’re actually falling, eroding social trust and breeding reaction.

This case is only straightforward if we overlook American detective fiction’s leftist and socially conscious roots. Dashiell Hammett did as much as anybody to invent the modern detective novel through classics such as Red Harvest, The Maltese Falcon, and The Glass Key. But Hammett had started his career working for the Pinkerton Detective Agency, and watching the agency serve as muscle for mining magnates and other captains of industry deeply disillusioned him. Hammett claimed that he had even been approached to help murder an IWW leader in Butte, Montana. He spent the rest of his life on the Left, joining the Communist Party and being blacklisted during the McCarthy Era.

In Red Harvest, the unnamed detective known only as the Continental Op is invited to the town of Personville to eradicate gangs creating chaos there, only to discover that the newspaper editor who invited him has been murdered. He’s left to deal with the town’s reigning mining magnate and father of the murdered editor, Elihu Wilsson, who is revealed to have initially invited the gangs in to break up a labor dispute years before. The police are corrupt, and the gangs are in and out of favor with city hall. The Op manipulates them into killing each other off before summoning the feds to restore order.