Nightmare Town (short story)

Nightmare Town is a short story written by Dashiell Hammett in 1924. It was first published in a December issue of Argosy All-Story Weekly magazine. It became the title story of a 1948 collection of four Hammett short stories published in paperback with illustrations. It appeared again in 1999, the eponymous story of a collection of twenty short stories edited by Kirby McCauley, Martin H Greenberg and Ed Gorman. It was adapted for BBC radio in June 2010 and read by Stuart Milligan.

Nightmare Town begins as an adventure story, and Threefall is typical of the rough, manly hero often to be found in the genre. However, the setting is no adventure story environment, but according to Panek, a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah, "Izzard is the city in the desert whose iniquity leads to its own destruction." (Panek, 2004) It is the Prohibition Era, and violence and criminality are the foundations on which the town was built. Hammett had hit upon a theme which he would develop in subsequent work, such as Corkscrew (1925) and his most acclaimed novel, Red Harvest(1926).

Hammett's work moved away from the drawing-room detective of the "Golden Age" of English detective fiction exemplified in the work of Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy L Sayers and Agatha Christie. In his 1944 critical essay The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler wrote of Hammett's themes and style:

Steve Threefall accepts a bet with a hotelier in Whitetufts that he can drive a friend’s Ford non-stop across the desert with no supplies but liquor. After two days driving, he careers through the main street of a desert boom town named Izzard, Arizona. He narrowly misses knocking down a young woman. He mumbles a drunken apology but she ignores him. His car ends up smashed into the red brick wall of the Bank of Izzard. The marshal, Grant Fernie, jails him overnight for drunk and dangerous driving.

The next morning he pays a fine and as he leaves the courthouse he witnesses an altercation between two of the town's denizens, a large, beefy man named W.W. Ormsby and a thin man in his thirties, who is his son, Larry. Larry even pulls a gun on his father by way of warning. Steve goes to send a telegram to Whitetufts to collect on his bet. He meets the young woman he almost knocked down. She works there and her name is Nova Vallance. She is engrossed in conversation with Larry, but they hush up as soon as they see Steve watching them. Steve tries to apologize to Nova but she turns her back on him. He sends his telegram and wanders outside.

He meets a melancholy man named Roy Kamp. Roy tells him about the town. The main industry is a ‘soda niter’ (sodium nitrate) chemical plant. Dave Brackett is the banker, W.W. Ormsby owns the plant and Larry Ormsby imports flashy cars and is in love with Nova. Conan Elder deals in real estate, insurance and securities. Steve assumes that Larry was roughing up his father because of business interests. Roy takes Steve to Finn’s Lunchroom. Old Man Rymer, a blind man in his seventies, is eating a meal at the counter. Roy confides to Steve the legend that Rymer, who lives alone, has a stash of gold coins hidden under the floorboards of his shack. Roy says that this desert boom-town draws merciless men.

...
Wikipedia