Red Harvest

In a mining town so rotten it's known as Poisonville, the Continental Op is hired to clean house. His method is simple and ruthless: turn the gangsters, crooked cops and greedy capitalists who run the place against each other, and let the town tear itself apart. Written in terse, unsparing prose, Hammett's 1929 debut moves at a relentless pace and offers no easy heroes, only a detective willing to get as dirty as the city he's been sent to fix. A founding work of hardboiled crime fiction, its influence runs through generations of noir writing and film.