The Red Harvest Project
November 9th, 2009
Red Harvest was written by Dashiell Hammett in 1929. While not as famous as its counterpart, the Maltese Falcon, Red Harvest is an excellent novel of intrigue, corruption and whip cracking dialogue. It is acknowledged as the inspiration for films such as Yojimbo by Akira Kurasawa and Blood Simple by the Coen Brothers. The story follows the Continental Op as he investigates the murder of Donald Willsson, editor of Personville’s Herald newspaper.
The Red Harvest Project is similarly inspired by this magnificent book, with an aim to bring this classic tale to a new audience of readers. I began this project at UTS and hope to branch it out to an entire full-length graphic novel. My hope for the future is that it will be accessible to a wide range of people via the internet.
CLICK HERE to view Chapter One: A woman in green and a man in gray
I don’t think that mystery novels should ever be made into graphic novels. It ruins them. I say this because people could just look at the pictures and figure out whats going on. You can’t do that with novels. That’s the fun part. The suspence, the climax. It’s all part of a good novel and again i say that graphic novels ruin it.
Hi Cassie,
Thanks for your feedback. Have you actually read Red Harvest? Dashiell Hammett makes it obvious who the murderer is, and the rest of the book isn’t so much about the murder but the corruption in town. Could you then say that mystery novels shouldn’t be made into movies? Graphic novelists can choose what they put in and don’t put into a scene as much as a filmmaker can.
Also I’m not sure that you can judge a graphic novel by the first seven pages.