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a real Butte location, the Big Ship, a miner’s nickname for Butte’s biggest boardinghouse, the Florence Hotel. The real Butte was certainly set “in a notch between two mountains,” a hillside town running up to the Mountain Meadow cemetery where the body of Frank Little was carried by grieving miners in 1917.
    Like Butte at this time, Personville had a “Broadway line,” which the Op rides to visit Elihu Willsson, whose homecorresponds on the map to where the surviving home of another copper king, William A. Clark, sits in Butte. 2 *
    The Op is called to town by Elihu Willsson’s son, Donald, who, as the editor of one of his father’s newspapers, has been naïvely running a reformist campaign to clean up Personville. Donald Willsson is quickly killed before the two men can meet, and not wanting to waste the trip from San Francisco, the Op gets himself hired by old Elihu himself to restore the town he once ran.
    Elihu’s check for ten thousand dollars to the Continental Detective Agency unleashes the bloodletting to come as the Op sets to work pitting the gang members against one another to empty Personville “of its crooks and grafters.” At one point a battered black touring car whips past him “crammed to the curtains with men,” and the Op grins with pride: “Poisonville was beginning to boil out under the lid.” The Op has a dark gift for sowing violence, cracking open the weak confederacies of criminals, and tying up loose ends outside the courts. This is put on spectacular display in Personville, where he quickly sizes up police chief Noonan as helpless and genially corrupt. Hammett knew that the real Butte bloomed with such evil characters—soiled lawmen such as the former chief detective Ed Morrisey, who was not unlike the sorry ex-detective Bob MacSwain in Red Harvest . Fired as a violent drunkard andsuspected (but never charged) in the death of his wife, Morrissey also hired himself out as a gunman and was discussed for decades as a suspect in the Frank Little killing. (A citizen definitely worthy of Poisonville, Morrissey was found beaten to death in 1922.) 3
    At the center of the storm he has caused, the Op finds a lucky ally in Dinah Brand, a “deluxe hustler” and gossipy moll who greets him with a “soft, lazy” voice. She has “the face of a girl of twenty-five already showing signs of wear,” her part is crooked, her rouge uneven, her dress is “a particularly unbecoming wine color,” and one stocking has a run, but, the Op deadpans, “This was the Dinah Brand who took her pick of Poisonville’s men, I had been told.” He warms to her, too, as she matches him drink for drink while dangling criminal gossip for sale: “I’m a girl who likes to pick up a little jack when she can.” She sketches for him the town’s outlaw cast of bootleggers, grifters, and crooked cops, but wants payment: “You can think it’s not going to cost you anything, but I’ll get mine before we’re through,” she says. Recognizing the Op’s mission, she offers, “If stirring things up is your system, I’ve got a swell spoon for you.” 4
    Dinah Brand is probably the most lifelike female character Hammett ever created, and as with a number of his fictional people, she was probably modeled in part on some vivid acquaintance; she resembles a type of woman he favored in his dalliances, “rumpled, frowsy, edging into blowsy,” as Jo Hammett describes her in A Daughter Remembers , “and perfectly comfortable with herself and with men—the kind of woman, I noticed over the years, that my father was attracted to.” 5 It is hard to know if, while writing his Poisonville novel, Hammettwas already spending time with Nell Martin, the spirited woman who would later accompany him to New York. “I used to think I knew men,” Dinah complains at one point, “but, by God! I don’t. They’re lunatics, all of them.” **
    Not only does the Op get a disturbing taste for death in Personville, but he befriends