Where It All Goes Down
Personville in the late 1920s
The good: The Jazz Age and dancing flappers.
The bad: The Stock Market Crash. Prohibition Era.
And the ugly: Gangsters, gamblers and bootleggers.
Would you believe us if we told you that the good, the bad, and the ugly are all part and parcel of the Roaring Twenties in America? The twenties started off on a good foot, with women becoming more liberated and new technological advances like movies with sound. But the economy experienced a sudden decline in 1929 due to the Stock Market Crash. With the country struggling to deal with the Great Depression, crime grew at an alarming rate due to Prohibition.
#PoisonvilleProblems
Hammett's portrayal of Personville encapsulates many of the problems that a big city in America would be experiencing at the end of the twenties. Gangsters and bootleggers are running wild, and law enforcement is unable to keep the crime in check. To make matters worse, members within the police force are themselves crooked. Things are getting out of control, fast.
So let's take a look at how Personville is described by the Op when he first lays eyes on it:
The city wasn't pretty. Most of its builders had gone in for gaudiness. Maybe they had been successful at first. Since then the smelters whose brick stacks stuck up tall against a gloomy mountain to the south had yellow-smoked everything into uniform dinginess. The result was an ugly city of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining. Spread over this was a grimy sky that looked as if it had come out of the smelters' stacks. (1.5)
Okay, round up those adjectives: not "pretty," "gloomy," "yellow-smoked," "uniform dinginess," "ugly" (used no less than 3 times in the same sentence!), and "grimy." Definitely not an ideal vacation spot. No wonder the local citizens call the city Poisonville. The oppressive quality of the passage suggests that the city's outer ugliness is a sign of its inner corruption and decay. There's also a sense that this city could exist anywhere and everywhere in the United States, that there are scads of towns all over the country that have been poisoned by greed, lust for power, and ruthlessness.