A wealthy New York family’s disreputable daughter, who has turned her back on her privileged upbringing, becomes the catalyst for a tangled case involving fraud, double-crosses, and murder. Abandoning her family for a life on the rough streets of New York, she initially aligns with a small-time racketeer, then falls for a violent, hard-drinking gangster. When she vanishes after a botched night at a speakeasy, her father secretly directs a detective agency to watch her without her knowledge. After a prolonged nationwide search, a telegram finally leads the agency to her last known address on the West Coast. Upon arrival, an operative finds her room empty but soon learns that she has reappeared with a new companion in a run-down apartment. As events unfold in rapid, unpredictable fashion, the investigation reveals a calculated plot to defraud her father’s fortune. A complex network of lowlife characters emerges: a smooth-talking but slippery associate, an overtly violent criminal with a penchant for using machine guns, and a reluctant conspirator whose loyalties blur the lines between romance and robbery. Dialogues and shifting alliances expose conflicting accounts of events, with each party trying to reclaim a share of the inheritance by any means necessary. Matters quickly turn deadly when the detective discovers that both the daughter and her conspirator have been murdered. Autopsy findings suggest chronic arsenic poisoning—a poisoning method ingeniously administered via an everyday household item, modified to act as “arsenical flypaper.” This obscure technique may have been used to deliver a slow, cumulative dose that left only trace amounts in the body, adding layers of both deception and miscalculation to the crime. Testimonies from those involved reveal that the intended plan might have been for the daughter to build up an immunity to the poison before using it against another lover in a bid to secure her share of the family money. Instead, the escalating doses resulted in her untimely death, and soon after, her father is also implicated as a victim of the scheme. As the detective sifts through a maze of conflicting stories, blue-collar street wisdom and high-society greed converge. Key suspects include a smooth operator who manipulated the scheme for his own gain and a brutal gangster whose violent nature appears to preclude the subtlety required for chronic poisoning. Interrogations, violent confrontations, and a harrowing chase through back alleys expose how personal vendettas merge with conspiracies, revealing that the crimes were as much about power and self-interest as about money. In a climactic series of shootouts and pursuits, one of the central criminals is eventually apprehended and later hanged for his role in the murders. Throughout the investigation, the detective struggles with theories that run the gamut from deliberate murder to orchestrated suicide. The evidence—a concealed package of flypaper soaked in arsenic, incriminating letters, and split testimonies—suggests that the daughter may have been experimenting with self-poisoning to build her immunity, a plan that disastrously backfired. The convoluted plot forces him to consider whether the act was a desperate attempt to manipulate the deadly ambitions of her dangerous associates or a final, tragic act of self-destruction. His findings point to a world where loyalty and trust are sparse, and where even the most meticulous plans can unravel into chaos. The narrative is a terse, hard-edged exploration of a corrupt underworld, where the collision of high society’s greed with the rough tactics of small-time crooks creates a morass of moral ambiguity. Every character—from the disillusioned heiress to the cold, calculating criminals—is enmeshed in a scheme where violence, betrayal, and the lust for money drive the action. In the end, the case remains a provocative study of how idealistic plans for escape and independence devolve into a relentless storm of corruption, leaving behind little more than bitter regret and unanswered questions about the true nature of justice.
By Dashiell Hammett · First published 1930 · Genre: Crime Fiction, Noir, Detective Fiction