Tijuana the American Town: Images of the Corrupt City in Hammett’s “The Golden Horseshoe” J. A. ZUMOFF Abstract. Dashiell Hammett’s short story “The Golden Horseshoe” (1924) pres- ents a vision of society as fundamentally corrupt. Because it takes place in Tijuana, Baja California, many critics have read it as a description of Mexican or Tijuanan corruption. The author analyzes this corruption in Hammett’s story and argues that the story depicts a North American corruption rather than a Mexican cor- ruption. In Dashiell Hammett’s “The Golden Horseshoe” (first published in Black Mask, November 1924), corruption is a central theme, as it is in much of his early fiction. Corruption is ever-present and affects almost all charac- ters and institutions. This story, unlike Hammett’s norm, is set outside of the United States, in Tijuana, Baja California. This raises the question of the relationship between the story’s Mexican setting and its emphasis on corruption. Although the Tijuana of “The Golden Horseshoe” is thoroughly corrupt, this is an American, not a Mexican, corruption. In this essay I exam- ine the role of corruption in “The Golden Horseshoe” and the relationship of the story’s Tijuana setting with this corruption. In the story, the Continental Op—a serial character in Hammett’s short stories—is hired by a wealthy British woman to find Norman Ashcraft, her estranged husband. He deserted her four years earlier because she had (falsely) accused him of infidelity. Filled with remorse, she tried to locate him, eventually following the trail to San Francisco. By the time of the story, DOI: 10.3172/CLU.26.4.35 35 J. A. Zumoff has taught at the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Mon- terrey in Mexico and currently teaches history at the City College of New York. He is researching a study of the political development of Dashiell Hammett.