This book, which I regard as my best work, is premised on an academic joke. More than fifteen years ago, a professor from Idaho, tongue firmly in cheek, suggested to a conference on the American West that the infamous murder in 1917 of I.W.W. organizer Frank Little, in Butte, had been the work of a Pinkerton agent who would later become famous as mystery novelist, Dashiell Hammett.

         Pinkerton, a notorious strike-breaking detective agency, was widely believed to be culpable of Little's murder. And it appears that Hammett may have been in Butte about that time. Hammett had more than once told people at Hollywood cocktail parties that a "high ranking officer" of the Anaconda Copper Company had offered him $5000 to kill Little.

          But this was just chatter. Hammett was a Pinkerton in his youth, but at the time of Little's death it was a callow youth: he would have been about twenty years old; a tall, skinny kid with a pencil moustache, fond of dancing pumps and fancy clothes who had never been west of Philadelphia. It is absurd to believe that any "high ranking" executive would offer money to a rookie Baltimore fop for an assassination.

          Nonetheless, for a novelist it was an intriguing concept. I thought it might help to extricate me from "type casting" as a mystery novelist. On mature consideration however, I felt that it would be a great disservice to the memory of a writer whom I regarded as an inspiration: if my novel were successful, it would give wide dissemination to a canard. Hammett didn't deserve this. So I changed the name of the hero to Goodwin Ryder: those familiar with Hammett's biography would see the connection anyway, while it wouldn't matter for those unfamiliar and uninterested. It was a way, as I saw it, of eating my cake and having it, still.