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from fifteen years in Joliet”; to Toby the Lugs, “Bull’s running mate, who used to brag about picking President Wilson’s pocket in a Washington vaudeville theater”; to Paddy the Mex. The Agency’s founder, Allan Pinkerton, might have appreciated the low-life scholarship of such a list.
    If you consider The Big Knockover together with its follow-up, “$106, 000 Blood Money,” which began running in May, the two parts make up Hammett’s first novel. However, their author didn’t see them that way and would not have his linked novellas published together.
    By the baby’s first birthday that May, Jose and the girls had moved across the bay to a little house in Fairfax, California, where Hammett would visit them by ferry once or twice each week, and where baby Jo eventually learned to walk. By the end of 1927, doctors would tell him his TB was gone, butHammett stayed on at 891 Post Street, in a studio he would later come to share with Sam Spade.
    For his first published novel, he chose to take his Op on his bloodiest mission yet, away from the bay and up north into the mountains and the labor wars in Montana. With pressure from his Black Mask editors for ever more action, he chose a place he knew whose starkness and violence needed little exaggeration.
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    * Author’s correspondence with Fechheimer. The interview with Peggy O’Toole did not make its way into the all-Hammett issue of City of San Francisco Magazine (Nov. 4, 1975), which included the full sixty-five-page draft of Hammett’s abandoned original Thin Man novel, set in San Francisco. The City issue added to the drumbeat for a planned film based on the Joe Gores novel, Hammett , produced by Francis Ford Coppola, the publisher of City . The issue, without which no Hammett biography of the past forty years would be possible, now sells for $150 online.

Chapter XI
THE BIG SHIP
    “This damned burg’s getting me. If I don’t get away soon I’ll be going blood-simple like the natives.”
    —T HE C ONTINENTAL O P IN R ED H ARVEST

    You see the cindery hillside with a high funnel sticking out of it, a masonry smokestack almost six hundred feet tall, for a long time on the dusty approach to the town. And as you enter the small, flat grid of streets the stack hovers darkly over your shoulder on its slag-covered mound, while here and there, among the lines of houses and brick storefronts, appear Deco–style holdovers such as the Washoe theater or Club Moderne.
    Anaconda was founded in 1883 by a copper magnate named Marcus Daly, who had bought the nearby Anaconda mine and hoped to make his company town the capital of Montana. In Hammett’s novel Red Harvest , the Continental Op arrives in a grim 1920s mining town called Personville (“Poisonville” to locals) that shares some details with Anaconda. Marcus Daly’s story could be an inspiration for Personville’s oldmining “czar” Elihu Willsson, who “owned Personville, heart, soul, skin and guts” for forty years until 1921, when he paid an army of goons to help him break the miners’ union: “When the last skull had been cracked, the last rib kicked in, organized labor in Personville was a used firecracker”—but at a price. Like other nightmare towns Hammett wrote about, Personville had gone to the thugs. A city owned and run by Elihu Willsson had degenerated into a criminal free-for-all.
    Personville conflates Anaconda with nearby Butte and the smaller mining village whose name it echoes, Walkerville. But it actually borrows more from Butte:

    The city wasn’t pretty. Most of its builders had gone in for gaudiness. Since then the smelters whose brick stacks stuck up tall against a gloomy mountain to the south had yellow-smoked everything into uniform dinginess. The result was an ugly city of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining. 1

    The story opens with the Op having a drink in