“Boiling like a coffee pot before we were five miles out of Filmer, the automobile stage carried me south into the shimmering heat, blinding sunlight, and bitter white dust of the Arizona desert.”
So begins Dashiell Hammett’s “Corkscrew,” a twisting tale about a tough-as-nails private eye sworn in as a deputy sheriff to clean up a border town where immigrant-smuggling gangs run riot. The year is 1925, but it might as well be the 1880s, as the private eye provides the town’s only law and order, such as it is.

Our hero narrates and never gives his name. Our only biographical clue is that he is an operative for the San Francisco-based Continental Detective Agency, which has been hired by local landowners to protect their investments near the town of Corkscrew, Ariz. A murder happens almost as soon as the “Continental Op” arrives. It is followed by enough gunplay for a John Wick film, a fistfight in which the hero’s face “looked like it had been run through a grinder,” and concludes with a high noon showdown with a seeming ally. The main immigrant-smuggling gang is taken down, but in a shaggy-dog resolution, it turns out the murder didn’t have anything to do with the smuggling and instead involved a debt of $1.10.