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Poisonville by Dashiell Hammett

Poisonville by Dashiell Hammett

Poisonville is the original set of four stories from 1927 and 1928 that were edited together to become the novel Red Harvest.

Book Details

Book Details

Poisonville is the original set of four stories from 1927 and 1928 that were edited together to become the novel Red Harvest. The Continental Op is sent on assignment to a mining town in Montana to do “some business.” The man he was supposed to meet was murdered before he got to meet him.

Personville, AKA Poisonville, was being run by four gangs that were brought in to quell a labor strike but then decided to stay and set up shop. The dead man was a reformist newspaper editor who seems to have got in the way of the gangs. Add to that a corrupt and compromised police department and Hammett has given us a recipe for murders, frameups, ambushes and a massive gang war.

The Cleansing of Poisonville (1927)
In recent years there have been too many examples where civic politics has degenerated into a business for profit. This story is the first, complete, episode in a series dealing with a city whose administrators have gone mad with power and lust of wealth. It is, also, to our minds, the ideal detective story—the new type of detective fiction which Black Mask is seeking to develop. You go along with the detective, meeting action with him, watching the development as the plot is unfolded, finding the clues as he finds them; and you have the feeling that you are living through the tense, exciting scenes rather than just reading a story. Poisonville is written by a master of his craft.
A fourteen chapter novelette.

Crime Wanted— Male or Female (1927)
The grim adventures of the Continental detective in The Cleansing of Poisonville.
An eleven chapter novelette.

Dynamite (1928)
The Cleansing of Poisonville.
A nine chapter novelette.

The 19th Murder (1928)
The Continental detective cleans up.
A twelve chapter novelette.

In his obituary in  The New York TimesDashiell Hammett (1894–1961) was described as “the dean of the… ‘hard-boiled’ school of detective fiction.”

Hammett is remembered for writing some of the seminal novels of crime fiction: Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Glass Key, The Thin Man, and The Maltese Falcon.

BM1927 11 Poisonville by Dashiell Hammett
Black Mask 1927-11

FIles:

  1. Hammett-Poisonville.epub

Excerpt

Excerpt: The Cleansing of Poisonville

I

I  FIRST HEARD PERSONVILLE called Poisonville in 1920, in the Big Ship* in Butte, by a red-haired mucker† named Hickey Dewey. But he also called his shirt a shoit, so I didn’t think anything of what he had done to the city’s name. Later, when I heard men who could manage their r’s give it the same twist, I still didn’t see anything in it but the meaningless sort of humor that used to make richardsnary the thieves’ word for dictionary. In 1927 I went to Personville and learned better.

Using one of the phones in the station, I called the Herald, asked for Donald Willsson, and told him I had arrived.

“Will you come out to my house at ten this evening?” He had a pleasantly crisp voice. “It’s 2101 Mountain Boulevard. Take a Broadway car, get off at Laurel Avenue, and walk two blocks west.”

“I promised to do that. Then I went up to the Great Western Hotel, dumped my bags, and went out to look at the city.

It wasn’t pretty. Most of its builders had gone in for gaudiness. Maybe they had been successful at first. But since then the smelters, whose brick stacks stuck up tall against a gloomy mountain to the south, had yellow-smoked everything into a uniform dinginess. The result was an ugly city of 40,000 people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining. Spread over this was a grimy sky that looked as if it had come out of the smelters’ stacks.

The first policeman I saw needed a shave. The second had a couple of buttons off his shabby uniform. The third stood in the middle of Personville’s main intersection—Broadway and Union Street—directing traffic with a cigar in one corner of his mouth. After that I stopped checking them up.

At nine-thirty I caught a Broadway car and followed the directions Donald Willsson had given me. His house was set in a hedged grass-plot on the corner. The maid who opened the door told me he wasn’t home. While I was explaining that I had an appointment a slender blonde woman of something less than thirty, in green crepe, came to the door. When she smiled her blue eyes didn’t lose their stoniness. I repeated my tale to her.

“My husband isn’t in now.” A barely noticeable accent slurred her s’s. “But if he’s expecting you he’ll probably be home shortly.”

She took me upstairs to a room on the Laurel Avenue side of the house, a square room with a lot of books in it. We sat in leather chairs, half facing each other, half facing a burning coal-grate, and she set about learning my business with her husband.

“Do you live in Personville?” she asked first.

“No—San Francisco.”

“But this isn’t your first visit?”

“Yes.”

“Really? How do you like our city?”

“I haven’t seen enough of it to know.” That was a lie. I had. “I just got in this afternoon.”

Her shiny eyes stopped prying while she said:

“I’m afraid you’ll find it a dreary place.” She shrugged and returned to her digging with: “I suppose all mining towns are like this. Are you engaged in mining?”

“Not just now.”

She looked at the clock over the fire and said:

“It’s inconsiderate of Donald to bring you out here and then keep you waiting, at this time of night, long after business hours.”

I said that was all right.

“Though perhaps it isn’t a business matter,” she suggested.

I didn’t say anything. She laughed—a brief laugh with something sharp in it.

“I’m ordinarily not curious about other people’s affairs, really,” she said gaily. “But you’re so excessively secretive that you goad me on. You aren’t a bootlegger, are you? Donald changes them so often.”

I let her get whatever she could out of a grin. Downstairs a telephone bell rang. Mrs. Willsson stretched her green-slippered feet out toward the burning coal and pretended she hadn’t heard the bell. I didn’t know why she thought that necessary.

She began: “I’m afraid I’ll ha—” and stopped to look at the maid in the doorway. The maid said Mrs. Willsson was wanted at the phone. She excused herself and followed the maid out. She didn’t go downstairs, but spoke over an extension within earshot of my seat.

I heard: “Mrs. Willsson speaking . . . Yes . . . I beg your pardon? . . . Who? . . . Can’t you speak a little louder? . . . What? . . . Yes . . . Yes . . . Who is this? . . . Hello! Hello!” The telephone hook rattled. Then her quick steps sounded down the hallway.

I set fire to a cigarette and stared at it until I heard her going downstairs. Then I went to a window, lifted the edge of the blind, and looked out at Laurel Avenue and at the small white garage that stood in the rear of the house on that side. Presently a slender woman in dark coat and hat came into sight, hurrying from house to garage. She drove away in a Buick coupe. It was Mrs. Willsson. I went back to my chair and waited.

Three quarters of an hour went by. At five minutes past eleven automobile brakes screeched outside. Two minutes later Mrs. Willsson came into the room. She had taken off hat and coat. Her face was white, her eyes almost black.

“I’m awfully sorry.” Her little tight-lipped mouth moved jerkily. “You’ve had all this waiting for nothing. My husband won’t be home tonight.”

I said I would get in touch with him at the Herald in the morning and went away— wondering why the green toe of her left slipper was dark and damp with something that could have been blood.

Excerpt From: Dashiell Hammett. “The Cleansing of Poisonville.”

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