Booze

It's not every novel whose central symbol is booze. We're talking bootlegged moonshine, folks—and a lot of it.

Red Harvest is set during the Prohibition era (which lasted from 1919 to 1933) when the manufacture, transportation and sale of alcohol was banned. Talk about a buzz kill. This ban on alcohol led to an unprecedented level of organized crime. Mafia groups spread in all the big cities. Bootleggers ran rampant selling alcohol. Racketeering became a widespread problem across the country.

In Red Harvest, the three corrupt mobsters who hold all the power in Personville each represent the different kinds of illegal operations that thrived during the twenties:

• Pete the Finn runs a bootlegging organization.
• Lew Yard is in charge of a loan shark business.
• And Max "Thaler" Whisper owns a gambling establishment.

There's even the figure of the corrupt policeman, Noonan, who knowingly turns a blind eye to the corruption. But let's get back to the booze. Characters in Red Harvest are constantly drinking, including the Op himself, who carries a flask of Scotch in his pocket at all times. And pretty much any mention of alcohol in the novel carries a hidden symbolic meaning tied to the era of Prohibition. It's the murky black market around which the entire town revolves.

Laudanum, a.k.a. Liquid Opium

Along with the mixing of booze and blood in Red Harvest, there's also some drug use in the form of laudanum, which the Op drinks with Dinah the night after the big meeting with all the local gangsters. The Op's mind becomes clouded from the laudanum, which becomes a general symbol of how the Op has become infected by Poisonville. The Op confesses to Dinah how his mission to clean up the city has poisoned him and he's gone "blood simple" from all the killing.