Samuel Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) was an American author widely recognized as the trailblazer of hard-boiled detective fiction with his unsentimental, breakneck storytelling chock-full of fast-paced, slangy dialogue and abrupt, explosive violence. Mining his own experiences as an operative of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, Hammett published his first novel Red Harvest in 1929, wherein his Continental Op investigates a series of murders amid a labor dispute in Personville, a corrupt Montana mining town known as "Poisonville," where no one should be trusted, and everyone becomes a suspect - even the Continental Op himself.