Now here's one hard-assed detective novel for you: Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest. This 1929 opus features Hammett's running character, the Continental Op, a never-named operative for the Continental Detective Agency. This time around, the Op is summoned to Personville, a small Western city built on mining and rotten with corruption -- most people call it Poisonville. His client is murdered before he ever gets to meet with him, the local cops 'n' crooks jerk him around, and he decides to stick around and take the town apart piece by piece. In contrast to The Maltese Falcon and its strangely distant exteriors-only approach, Hammett's Op stories are in the first person, including his interior thoughts, which brings you much closer to it all. A splendidly tough piece of Prohibition era noir. Here's a more detailed analysis, though with too many spoilers if you haven't read it.