Although no one was apprehended or prosecuted for Little's lynching, a number of people have speculated about his murder. The author Dashiell Hammett was working as a strikebreaker in Butte for Pinkerton's, and (allegedly) turned down an offer of $5,000 to assassinate Little. Hammett later made use of his experiences in Butte to write "Red Harvest". Rory Carroll writes, "In her memoirs Lillian Hellman, Hammett's companion, said he told her he was offered to murder Little. 'Through the years he was to repeat that bribe offer so many times that I came to believe … that it was a kind of key to his life. He had given a man the right to think he would commit murder.'" William Nolan, one of Hammett's biographers, thinks that "the fact that someone even asked him, thinking that he would be that kind of person, and that he was that deep into the thing made him feel guilty. He never got over and it always haunted him."