• American Literature
• Novels

• Type: Novel
• Length: 215 pages

Gamblers, Gunman and a Murder Mystery

Red Harvest is a 1927 crime novel by American author and former detective, Dashiell Hammett. The murder mystery was inspired by real events at the Anaconda Copper Mine in Anaconda, Montana. - AsNotedIn

I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit. I didn't think anything of what he had done to the city's name. Later I heard men who could manage their r's give it the same pronunciation. I still didn't see anything in it but the meaningless sort of humor that used to make richardsnary the thieves' word for dictionary. A few years later I went to Personville and learned better.

Places

• Anaconda Smoke Stack State Park, Anaconda, MT Since then the smelters whose brick stacks stuck up tall against a gloomy mountain to the south had yellow-smoked everything into uniform dinginess.
• Butte, Montana Personville is based on Butte: The city wasn't pretty. Most of its builders had gone in for gaudiness. Maybe they had been successful at first.