From a crime writer and "an acknowledged literary landmark," a PI heads west and battles corruption and a rising death toll in this 1920s classic mystery (The New York Times Book Review).
Summoned to Personville, the detective known as Continental Op discovers the real reason locals call the western mining town "Poisonville." The whole community has been divvied up into warring factions of gangsters and petty criminals. As the body count continues to rise, starting with the newspaperman who called in the detective for help, the Op decides to stick around. He is determined to clean up the criminal element, even if it means interrogating the whole town. But corruption knows no bounds and soon enough, the trusty detective finds himself a prime suspect of murder.
"Dashiell Hammett is an original. He is a master of the detective novel, yes, but also one hell of a writer." -The Boston Globe
"Hammett's prose [is] clean and entirely unique. His characters [are] as sharply and economically defined as any in American fiction." -The New York Times
"[Hammett] was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before." -Raymond Chandler
