The Dashiell Hammett Tour: Thirtieth Anniversary Guidebook (The Ace Performer Collection series)

N O R HER L L E I H S THE DA T T E M M HA R U O T DON T I E T H RY R I H T ® ERSA ANNIV BOOK GUIDE San Francisco Exa...

Author: Don Herron

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N O R HER

L L E I H S THE DA T T E M M HA R U O T DON

T I E T H RY R I H T ® ERSA ANNIV BOOK GUIDE

San Francisco Examiner: “Hammett shows San Fran-

cisco at its most glamorous, dangerous, and intriguing. The City is full of Hammett landmarks, and if you want to see them all, take The Dashiell Hammett Tour.” The Mystery Fancier: “If you can’t go to San Francisco,

you can still take the tour vicariously by purchasing The Dashiell Hammett Tour. It contains photos, maps, bibliography, and the best capsule biography of Hammett I have ever read.” San Francisco Chronicle: “It’s fun, fascinating, and fully

illustrated with photos of appropriate sites. A gas.” New York Times: “A hard–boiled stroll through the

world of the American private eye.” Los Angeles Times: “Friendly, witty, articulate, theatri-

cal, and thoroughly immersed in Hammett arcana.”

“Hammett was the ace performer. … He did over and over again what only the best writers ever do at all.” — Raymond Chandler The Ace Performer Collection is a series of books by and about Dashiell Hammett: volume 1:

Lost Stories by Dashiell Hammett volume 2:

Discovering The Maltese Falcon and Sam Spade edited by Richard Layman volume 3:

Hammett’s Moral Vision by George J. “Rhino” Thompson volume 4:

The Dashiell Hammett Tour: Thirtieth Anniversary Guidebook by Don Herron forthcoming:

The Crime Wave: Collected Nonﬁction by Dashiell Hammett additional volumes

to be announced

N O R HER

L L E I H S THE DA T T E M M HA R U O T DON

T I E T H RY R I H T ® ERSA ANNIV BOOK GUIDE

PRODUCTIONS ® S AN F R A NC I S C O

Preface by JO HAMMETT Introduction by CHARLES WILLEFORD Maps by Mike Humbert

The Dashiell Hammett Tour: Thirtieth Anniversary Guidebook by Don Herron Preface by Jo Hammett Introduction by Charles Willeford Maps by Mike Humbert For current information about the Dashiell Hammett Tour: www.donherron.com “Dashiell Hammett Tour” is a registered trademark and service mark of Don Herron. Published by Vince Emery Productions P.O. Box 460279 San Francisco, California 94146 USA www.emerybooks.com Vince Emery Productions produces books and videos by and about established writers to give readers a deeper, closer connection with their favorite authors. Text © 1979, 1982, 1991, 2009 by Don Herron. Preface © 2009 by Josephine Hammett Marshall. Introduction “Hammett’s San Francisco: On the Trail of Sam Spade” originally appeared in the Miami Herald January 20, 1985, and appears here in a slightly different form © 2009 by Betsy Willeford. Maps © 2009 by Mike Humbert. Design, cover art, and indexes © 2009 Vince Emery Productions. Book design and composition by Desktop Miracles. Photo credits: California Historical Society, pp. 124-125. Vince Emery, pp. 39, 48, 51, 96, 107, 120, 123, 133, 144, 151, 157, 173. Don Herron archives, pp. 33, 46, 49, 60, 76. Mike Humbert, pp. 94, 98, 100, 122, 134, 152, 158, 160, 166, 176. Josephine Hammett Marshall, pp. iii, x, 12, 69, 81, 116. William Kostura, pp. 114, 135, 156. San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library, pp. 40, 63, 66-67, 140, 164, 172, 174. Mary Spoerer, pp. 8, 73, 80, 88, 106, 109, 127, 128, 132. Mark Sutcliffe, p. 99. Thirtieth anniversary edition, Kindle version: Created in USA. Publication date October 15, 2009. ISBN-13: 978-0-9825650-0-1

For Christy and Bertie and the Next Thirty Years

N O R HER

L L E I H S THE DA T T E M M HA R U O T DON

T I E T H RY R I H T ® ERSA ANNIV BOOK GUIDE

San Francisco Examiner: “Hammett shows San Fran-

cisco at its most glamorous, dangerous, and intriguing. The City is full of Hammett landmarks, and if you want to see them all, take The Dashiell Hammett Tour.” The Mystery Fancier: “If you can’t go to San Francisco,

you can still take the tour vicariously by purchasing The Dashiell Hammett Tour. It contains photos, maps, bibliography, and the best capsule biography of Hammett I have ever read.” San Francisco Chronicle: “It’s fun, fascinating, and fully

illustrated with photos of appropriate sites. A gas.” New York Times: “A hard–boiled stroll through the

world of the American private eye.” Los Angeles Times: “Friendly, witty, articulate, theatri-

cal, and thoroughly immersed in Hammett arcana.”

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P R E F A C E

Back Where I Might Have Been by Jo Hammett . . . 1 I N T R O D U C T I O N

Hammett’s San Francisco: On the Trail of Sam Spade by Charles Willeford . . . 7 P A R T

O N E

Dashiell Hammett: A Brief Biography . . . 13 Timeline of Hammett’s San Francisco Residences . . . 60 P A R T

T W O

The Dashiell Hammett Tour . . . 61 Overall Map . . . 62 Walking Map #1 . . . 64 Driving Map #1 . . . 65 1. 200 Larkin: Hammett’s Reading Room . . . 62 2. Civic Center Park: Kids’ Playground . . . 68 3. City Hall: Politics and Murder . . . 71 4. 580 McAllister: Whosis Kid Gundown . . . 72 5. Redwood Alley: Unexpected Palm Tree . . . 77 6. 408 Turk: TB Flare-Up . . . 78 7. 620 Eddy: Blackmasking . . . 79 The Puzzle of the City Streets . . . 85

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8. Blanco’s: Dain Curse Cuisine . . . 87 9. 811 Geary: Stalking Sam Spade . . . 91 10. 891 Post: Sam’s Place . . . 93 The Puzzle of Spade and the Falcon . . . 100 Walking Map #2 . . . 104 Driving Map #2 . . . 105 11. 1309 Hyde: Big Knockover . . . 103 12. 1155 Leavenworth: Writer at Last . . . 109 13. 1201 California: Brigid’s Place . . . 113 The Puzzle of the Blocked Writer . . . 117 14. Dashiell Hammett Street: Street Cred . . . 120 15. 20 Monroe: Ad Man . . . 121 16. Stockton Tunnel: Death by Night . . . 122 17. Burritt Street: Crime Scene . . . 126 The Puzzle of the Billboard and the Brick . . . 129 18. 111 Sutter: Spade & Archer . . . 131 Walking Map #3 . . . 136 Driving Map #3 . . . 137 19. Sir Francis Drake Hotel: Gunsel and Gutman . . . 138 20. St. Francis Hotel: Fatty Arbuckle . . . 139 21. Geary Theatre: Pound of Flesh . . . 144

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22. Clift Hotel: Sherlock Slept Here . . . 145 23. Bellevue Hotel: Cairo’s Place . . . 146 24. Floyd Thursby’s Apartment: Dead Gangster . . . 150 25. 120 Ellis: Tying the Knot . . . 151 26. 114 Powell: Wife to Be . . . 151 27. Samuels Street Clock: Diamond Days . . . 155 28. 870 Market: Pinkerton’s Man . . . 156 The Puzzle of the Jobs and the Years . . . 161 29. John’s Grill: Chop House . . . 165

30. Off-Tour Hammett Sites . . . 170 Other Hammett Sites Map . . . 171 A. Pickwick Hotel: Black Bird Hideaway . . . 170 B. Old Mint: Big Knockover Inspiration? . . . 172 C. Remedial Loan: Brigid Hocks Her Jewels . . . 172 D. Julius Castle: Spade’s Other Lunchspot . . . 173 E. Waverly Place and Spofford Alley: Chinatown Action . . . 173 F. Portsmouth Square: Stevenson Monument . . . 174 G & H. Ferry Building and Pier 35: On the Waterfront . . . 174 I. Holly Circle: Big Flora’s Hideout . . . 174

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A F T E R W O R D

Notes from Thirty Years Up and Down the Mean Streets . . . 175 Sources: Annotated Bibliography . . . 185 Index of Streets and Addresses . . . 201 Index . . . 203 About the Writers . . . 211

9-month-old Jo Hammett in San Francisco, February 1927.

P R E F A C E

Back Where I Might Have Been by Jo H a m m et t

I

t is the mid-eighties and I’m taking Don Herron’s Dashiell Hammett Tour for the ﬁrst time. We’re a small group, just me and my friend Marj, trailing along after Don up Eddy Street. We’re on the edge of the Tenderloin and I have taken a ﬁrmer hold on my purse and am trying hard not to look at the street people. Up ahead Don stops suddenly and points across the street, “That’s the Crawford, where your folks were living when you were born.” We look over at a rather severe rectangle of a building, a bit taller than its neighbors. An attempt at a classic façade is marred by heavy twin ﬁre escapes. I guess we’re blocking the sidewalk because a street person—ancient three-piece suit of no discernable color, [1]

Preface

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Back Where I Might Have Been

sockless feet in duct-taped sandals, crumpled paper bag under one arm—comes pushing straight through us. At the curb he turns to look back and singles me out. “Why don’t you go back where you came from?” he says. His voice is low and slurred. As we watch him weave away I mutter to Don my whatI-should-have-said: “There. That’s where I come from. Over there.” ♠

T

HERE, I thought later, and lots of other places: parks, churches, apartments. My very ﬁrst memory is of a train ride. It is 1929 and my mother is taking my sister Mary and me south from San Francisco to L.A. That memory has always seemed like a frustrating barrier separating me from a lost age, a time that had a golden, mythic feel to it, made up mostly of snapshots and Mama’s bits and pieces, a collage of donkey rides in Golden Gate Park, Mass at Old Saint Mary’s, playgrounds, trolley rides. Strangely enough, when Papa is around he seldom mentions that time at all. Those years seemed enchanted to me, but they were confused and clouded. Actual dates, places, addresses— context—were lacking. I got some help from my father’s biographers but found them often in error. My mother’s memories in later life grew shadowed and I knew there were parts of Papa’s life about which she knew nothing. He was good at keeping his worlds separated. So every time I visited San Francisco I had questions in my head. The Crawford Apartments on Eddy I was sure of since it was the address on my birth certiﬁcate, but I wondered where else the family had lived. We had moved around like gypsies, easy to do when you could toss all your possessions into a couple of suitcases and had no fancy baby equipment to haul. (I came home from the hospital to sleep in a dresser drawer.)

[2]

by Jo Hammett

Which park was that in the picture of my sister Mary and me playing in the sand? And where was the old Samuels Jewelers where Papa had keeled over in a pool of blood? I had lots of maybes, lots of mights. ♠

T

hen one day when I was up in the City with my friend Marj Smith, I decided to call Don and take his tour. I’d read about it in a couple of places and was of course intrigued. But guardedly so. We Hammetts are not by nature a trusting bunch. Don Herron might be a ﬂake. Who runs a walking tour in hilly San Francisco, for God’s sake? Or he might be a phony—the worst thing Papa could call you. Well, we’d see. We met on the steps of the old library on Larkin where my dad had spent many hours. Don was easy to spot: a big guy in an unbelted trench coat, open to show a black, falconed tie over a white shirt. A slouched felt hat shaded his face. We introduced ourselves and Don set out, going at a good pace, stopping only for trafﬁc lights and Hammett sites. We did Civic Center Park, where Mary and I had played in the sand, and it was soon clear that Don really knew The City and my dad’s stuff, not just The Maltese Falcon. When we stopped on McAllister where the Whosis Kid—from the Continental Op story of the same name—had been up to no good, Don described the action in rapid-ﬁre detail. It was like a sports announcer calling a football game. I was impressed. The going got rough—I couldn’t do it today. San Francisco is a tough climb, part of its charm, and my bad knee was starting to complain. I wondered how my dad, his TB barely in remission, could have walked these steep streets and breathed in this damp air while mapping out his stories. But walk them he did. [3]

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Back Where I Might Have Been

According to Fritz Leiber, Joe Gores, and others who have tracked his work, his physical settings are often remarkably precise. We visited Eddy Street and 811 Geary where Leiber had done his pioneering Falcon research. Then we reached 891 Post. Papa moved there by 1927, wrote the Falcon there and used it for Sam Spade’s apartment in the book. Of all the sites on the tour this is the one I had most fantasized about. I had stood across the street, looking up, wondering which window had been his, visualizing Brigid O’Shaughnessy shivering in the cold waiting for Spade to come home and Wilmer the Kid lurking in the shadows, about where I stood. Don answered my question about the window by pointing out the top corner one as my dad’s. But the icing on the cake would come years later when he introduced me to that apartment’s present occupant, architect Bill Arney, who invited my daughter Julie and me in to see it. What struck us both at once was its miniscule size: one room with wall bed and pocket-sized kitchen and bath. Still, windows overlooking both Post and Hyde gave it an open feeling. Bill had restored and furnished the place as it might have been in my dad’s time—desk and typewriter at the Hyde Street window, padded black leather chair. If I squinted I thought I could see my dad, rail-thin, there at the desk, coffee cup in hand, about to light up a Murad. No. Probably a Camel, back then. Papa’s apartment, Sam Spade’s apartment, Bill Arney’s apartment. I’d noticed this peculiar shape-shifting quality about my father’s work before. In the days when The Thin Man series was at the height of its popularity the personas of Nick Charles, actor William Powell and my dad all seemed to overlap and blend into one universal Thin Man. This was all the more mysterious because, of course, the title character in the book was not the hero, but the murder victim. Bill’s generosity in letting others view the apartment [4]

by Jo Hammett

has evoked some interesting reactions. Hammett scholar Richard Layman breathed a sigh of relief on realizing that, in the scene in which Spade makes Brigid disrobe, she cannot be seen by the Casper Gutman crew in the living room. Score one for Spade as a gentleman. He might send Brigid over but would never embarrass her like that. ♠

T

he highlight of the tour for many people is Burritt Street where a plaque memorializes the ﬁrst murder in The Maltese Falcon. I can see why. Don plays the murder scene for all it was worth, acting out the drama as Miles Archer the sap is lured up a blind alley by the implacable Brigid and gets it. Don ﬂashes a toy pistol: “Pow! Right through the pump.” Marj and I jump and look around nervously, as startled as Archer must have been. The plaque reads: On approximately this spot Miles Archer, partner of Sam Spade, was done in by Brigid O’Shaughnessy. What seems remarkable to me is that it sounds for all the world as if Archer and Brigid were real people and an actual murder had taken place. It is a tribute to the lasting fascination of the Falcon and to Don’s part in giving it life that for many people, myself included, this is virtually true. We stopped long enough at Dashiell Hammett Street for Marj to take my picture under the street sign. I am shown smiling despite all protests from my knee. Then there was a string of hotels—the Clift where I had stayed with Mother in the forties, the Union Square where I learned she had stayed the day before her wedding. And then the Flood Building, where the Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency ofﬁce had been located. The tour wound up at John’s Grill. Marj had to run to catch her train, but Don and I sat down at a booth, my knee whimpering a muted thank you, and ordered drinks. [5]

Preface

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Back Where I Might Have Been

I looked around, savoring the particularly masculine atmosphere. My mother might not have felt comfortable here but Spade would have and my father did. “I’ll have the lamb chops, tomatoes, and a coffee, black.” No place I’ve been has preserved the feeling of old San Francisco better than John’s. Its dark, photo-lined walls have absorbed a century of San Francisco stories—from politicos, lovers (licit and il-), ball players, promoters, writers, artists, perps, and police. It’s all happened here, or been talked about, and the walls remember. Owner Gus Konstin came over and Don introduced us, beginning a long and happy relationship between our two families. Gus’s son John now manages the Grill and is, like his father, warm, cultured, cosmopolitan. The ideal host, ideal friend. ♠

J

ohn’s was the perfect ending for Don’s tour. It was there that I ﬁrst began to make sense of those early, confused years, where I began to narrow the gaps and pencil in dates and addresses. Of course, not all blanks have been ﬁlled in, nor all questions answered. My father, an intensely private person, remains essentially unknowable. And for me that’s the way it should be. It was because of the tour, Don, and people that I met through him, that I was able to renew my attachment to a place and time that had seemed inaccessible. For this and for Don’s enduring friendship I am truly grateful. And to the nameless street person on Eddy: “Thanks for your advice. I am now happily back where I came from. Hope you can say the same.”

[6]

I N T R O D U C T I O N

Hammett’s San Francisco: On the Trail of Sam Spade by Ch a r l es Wi l l efor d

T

he Dashiell Hammett Walking Tour isn’t advertised, but by word of mouth and by news stories published about the tour, enough people know about it. So Hammett fans meet Don Herron in front of the main library on Larkin and McAllister, Civic Center, in San Francisco. On the bright and sunny Sunday afternoon I took the three-hour, three-mile walking tour, there were 13 paying members. Three were seniors and two were teen-agers who had been assigned to read The Maltese Falcon by their high school English teachers. There was a speech therapist from Toronto; a computer programmer from San Jose; a businessman from Dallas, wearing a cowboy hat; [7]

Introduction

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Hammett’s San Fr ancisco

Don Herron leading The Dashiell Hammett Tour.

a journalist; a railroad brakeman; and a novelist. There was also a street person, who didn’t pay and did a fair imitation of Dylan singing “Mr. Tambourine Man,” but he dropped out after two blocks of hiking and we never saw him again. Herron said he has given the tour when only one person has shown up, and he has guided a group as large as 73. The latter took place during the Bouchercon Mystery Festival in San Francisco, when Herron was the festival’s chairman. Herron also arranges for private tours during the week. Herron, who moved to San Francisco from St. Louis during the giddy Haight-Ashbury migration of the mid1960s and taught for a while at San Francisco State University, started the tour for his college students. But he had a good thing going, recognized it as such, copyrighted the tour, quit teaching, and now drives a cab parttime when he isn’t giving the tours or lecturing to clubs and other interested groups on Hammett, Fritz Leiber, or author Robert Louis Stevenson. A familiarity with Hammett’s life and work makes the tour more enjoyable, but isn’t absolutely necessary. Herron, wearing a soft fedora, a battered trench coat, and a hand-painted tie with a picture of a falcon on it, gives the group a short biography on Hammett and a brief [8]

by Charles Willeford

rundown on Hammett’s novels and short stories before he takes off at a loping walk through the Civic Center to the public library, where the tour begins. Hammett lived in San Francisco from 1921 until 1930. The library is where Hammett read and spent his time when he wasn’t working in the advertising department for Samuels Jewelers. The old Hall of Justice, where Sam Spade used to crack jokes with the law, stood on Kearny Street, opposite Portsmouth Square. A gigantic Holiday Inn occupies that space now, but the other buildings are still there, looking about the same as they did in the late 1920s. In “The Whosis Kid,” a Continental Op story, the jewel thief Inés Almad has her apartment at 580 McAllister. And this seminal story, according to Hammett, was the prototype for his famous Sam Spade novel, The Maltese Falcon. After stopping at 580, we trail Herron up Franklin and turn into Golden Gate Avenue. We walk north on Van Ness, east on Turk, and then three blocks up to Hyde Street. This is now a tough neighborhood, and tourists are warned not to wander around down here by themselves after dark. At 408 Turk, Hammett kept a ﬁrst ﬂoor room for a period in the ’20s while his wife lived in their apartment on Eddy Street. The separation was forced by the contagious nature of his tuberculosis. We then return to Larkin, and see the Hammetts’ ﬂat at 620 Eddy, where the couple lived in the Crawford Apartments. This is where Hammett spent ﬁve of the eight years he lived in the city, in a furnished apartment that rented for $45 a month. In some stories, Hammett used the real names of streets; in some he made them up. “Eddis” Street is, in all probability, a cross between Eddy and Ellis, but the consensus of Hammett scholars is that 601 Eddis is really 601 Eddy, because the story says that the apartment building overlooked Larkin Street. [9]

Introduction

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Hammett’s San Fr ancisco

Continuing north on Larkin, we turn into Olive and go down the alley. Here the lettering on the back of the building still reads “Blanco’s”—the restaurant where the Op ate a meal in the last Continental Op novel, The Dain Curse. The building now houses The Great American Music Hall. After separating from his wife in 1927, Hammett moved to the Charing Cross apartments, 891 Post St. And this was the apartment where Sam Spade said to Brigid O’Shaughnessy: “I won’t play the sap for you.” Hammett reunited with his wife for a while at the Locarno Apartments, 1309 Hyde. From there he moved to 891 Post (Sam Spade’s apartment). The San Loretto Apartments were Hammett’s final address in San Francisco, at 1155 Leavenworth. He completed the ﬁnal draft of The Maltese Falcon here, before moving to New York in late 1929. At 1201 California the “Coronet” is the apartment Brigid O’Shaughnessy stays in through most of The Maltese Falcon. We continue downtown, passing the Fairmont and the Mark Hopkins. This is quite a climb, but at Powell we begin the descent from Nob Hill. At 20 Monroe, we can see where Hammett lived brieﬂy in 1926. Going down Bush Street, we walk to Stockton—a half a block—and cross to where the two ﬂights of stairs emerge at the top of the Stockton Tunnel. There’s a bronze plaque on the wall at Burritt Street that states, “On approximately this spot Miles Archer, partner of Sam Spade, was done in by Brigid O’Shaughnessy.” There is no other identiﬁcation, so unless a person has read The Maltese Falcon, he might think the reference was to an actual murder instead of a ﬁctional one. At 111 Sutter, in the Hunter-Dulin Building, Spade and Archer had their ofﬁce. The Sir Francis Drake Hotel is probably the hotel where Casper Gutman stayed, although this is not deﬁnitive. The St. Mark in The Maltese Falcon [ 10 ]

by Charles Willeford

is probably the St. Francis, because in 1928 the St. Francis was the number one hotel in the city. We then take a look at the Geary Theatre, across the street from the St. Francis, where Joel Cairo had a ticket to see George Arliss in The Merchant of Venice, and then we pass 120 Ellis, where Hammett had a room before he was married. At John’s Grill on Powell Street, Sam Spade had a dinner of two chops, a baked potato, and sliced tomatoes. The dinner was about 50 cents then; you can order the same meal today for $16.95. John’s also has an upstairs room with some Hammett memorabilia and photos, and when they have them in stock, the bartender will sell you a souvenir menu with Hammett’s portrait on it. Around the corner from John’s Grill on Market Street is the James Flood Building at 870, where Hammett worked as an operative for Pinkerton’s San Francisco ofﬁce for about $100 a month. The tour ended here, but a few of us diehard fans, including Herron, repaired to the Dashiell Lounge, a glitzy bar on Powell Street, to drink cold Anchor Steam Beer and to discuss the life of Hammett for another two hours. To prepare for the tour, if you’re going to San Francisco, read Hammett’s novels and short stories ﬁrst, and invest in a pair of comfortable walking shoes.

[ 11 ]

Dashiell Hammett in the early 1920s.

P A R T

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Dashiell Hammett: A Brief Biography

S

amuel Dashiell Hammett was born May 27, 1894, in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, and died January 10, 1961, in the city of New York. In those sixty-six years he became a revolutionary force in popular ﬁction in this country, the seminal twentieth-century mystery writer, pioneering an authentic American style for the tale of crime and murder. And it was while living in San Francisco that Hammett reinvented the form, creating the modern hard-boiled detective story in a series of furnished rooms from the Tenderloin to Nob Hill. Hammett came to San Francisco in June 1921. Before he left in October 1929, he had written most of his ﬁction, including the landmark novels Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon, as well as The Big Knockover, The Dain [ 13 ]

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Dashiell Hammett

Curse, and the beginning of The Glass Key. All but two handfuls of his more than one hundred short stories were created in his apartments in Eddy, Turk, Hyde, Monroe, and Post Streets. More than half his ﬁction takes place in The City. His characters Sam Spade—blond, slope-shouldered, Satan-faced—and the Continental Op—a nameless short fat detective—gumshoed grooves in the foggy streets of Frisco. And Nick and Nora Charles, visiting in New York when the thin man is murdered, were also residents here. Hammett’s San Francisco stands as one of the great literary treatments of a city, and has been compared to Joyce’s Dublin and Dickens’ London for its evocation of time and place—that 1920s San Francisco when nightfog cloaked the hills and a host of sinister customers were afoot. In the Continental Op tales the unnamed operative for the Continental Detective Agency goes into every neighborhood and encounters every level of society, from bankers with wandering daughters in their Paciﬁc Heights mansions to cheap gunmen dwelling in barren rooms in Tenderloin hotels, doing their drinking in North Beach speakeasies. With The Maltese Falcon Hammett created a plot as glamorous as San Francisco herself, adding new luster and legend to The City. Sam Spade in snap-brim hat and trench coat, stalking through the fog, is as ﬁrm a part of San Francisco’s lore as the 1906 earthquake and ﬁre are of her history. No other novel has excited so much interest here, or sent so many people scurrying over the hills, shadowing Spade’s movements in his search for the fabulous ﬁgurine of a mysterious black bird. ♠

B

orn into a working class family, the son of Richard Thomas Hammett and Annie Bond Dashiell, Hammett was raised with his brother and sister in the cities of Philadelphia and Baltimore. Frequently down on their

[ 14 ]

A Brief Biography

luck, they lived in Baltimore for several years off and on in 212 North Stricker Street, a house rented by Hammett’s maternal grandmother. Whenever they got more income, they would rent a separate apartment for themselves, but invariably they came back to North Stricker. When Hammett turned fourteen his father became too sick to work. It was expected, and it was necessary, that Hammett as the oldest son quit Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, the high school where he had enrolled on September 14, 1908, to get a job and help support the family until his father became well enough to take up the slack as the major breadwinner. He withdrew from classes February 9, 1909. Once he went to work, Hammett did not return to high school. He would never attend college. From the apartments and ﬂats the family lived in, Hammett held a long series of short-lived jobs through the remainder of his teenage years. Initially he worked for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. In time he served as a stevedore, messenger, and freight clerk. For awhile he operated a nail machine in a box factory. These jobs bored him, and often he would not show up for work on time. As he later wrote in a letter to Black Mask, the mystery magazine where most of his ﬁction ﬁrst saw print, “after a fraction of a year in high school . . . I became the unsatisfactory and unsatisﬁed employee of various railroads, stock brokers, machine manufacturers, canners, and the like. Usually I was ﬁred.” Nineteen-ﬁfteen was the year Hammett recalled he began what became the cornerstone job on which he built his career as a writer. He was twenty-one years old and once again out of work. Looking through the job ads in the Baltimore paper, he came to an oddly-worded but intriguing notice. From the manner in which the ad was worded, he could not tell what kind of job it offered. Speaking of it later, he suggested that the ad had a sense of glamour or adventure to it—perhaps something like the sense of pervasive danger the Pony Express ads of the [ 15 ]

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Dashiell Hammett

nineteenth century imparted with the deadpan statement, “Orphans Preferred.” Hammett decided to give it a shot, following instructions to the Continental Building in downtown Baltimore. As he wrote later, the “enigmatic want-ad took me into the employ of Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency.” ♠

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he Pinkerton’s agency was started in 1850 in Chicago by the Scots immigrant Allan Pinkerton. During the Civil War, Union President Abraham Lincoln gave Pinkerton and his operatives the assignment to spy on the Confederacy. With Union victory, Pinkerton consolidated his position, building a business that became, in effect, the largest nationwide law enforcement agency until 1924, when J. Edgar Hoover began his reign over what would become the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Newspaper accounts during the Depression of Hoover’s G-men in pursuit of John Dillinger or Machine Gun Kelly echo Pinkerton’s operatives hounding Jesse and Frank James and the Younger Brothers in the years following the War Between the States. At the time Hammett hired in, Allan Pinkerton’s son William was still in charge of the organization. Over the next seven years, Hammett would travel America as a Pinkerton’s operative. The job introduced him to a wide variety of people, places and types of crime. In the early days of World War I, Hammett said he was assigned to shadow a man around Washington, DC who was suspected of being a German spy. He wrote that the man was not a secret agent for Germany, but he was the single most boring suspect he ever had to trail during his detective career—and added that he used this man as the model for Casper Gutman, the fat man in The Maltese Falcon. In Pasco, Washington, he nabbed an oily little guy who had been forging checks. This fellow served as [ 16 ]

A Brief Biography

the model for the perfumed rogue Joel Cairo in the Sam Spade novel. Spade’s secretary Efﬁe Perrine was based on a woman, Hammett wrote, who “once asked me to go into the narcotic smuggling business with her in San Diego.” Working out of the San Francisco Pinkerton’s ofﬁce, Hammett said he was assigned to go to Stockton, California, to look for a man who had smashed in the window of a jewelry store in San Jose and boosted the display jewels. He could not ﬁnd that suspect. He did, however, put the arm on a criminal he said the Stockton papers had labeled the “Midget Bandit.” A week before, the Midget Bandit had stuck up a ﬁlling station in Stockton, before ﬂeeing to Los Angeles. The owner of the station, interviewed by the press, chose to make some unfortunate remarks about the robber. He described the Midget Bandit as “a runt” and suggested what he might do if the runt ever showed his face again. These remarks turned out to be unwise— apparently the Midget Bandit collected his press clippings. He bought the Stockton papers to read the account of his daring robbery, saw the comments on his size, stole a car and drove back to Stockton to see what the owner would do the second time, with a gun held on him. Hammett spotted the robber walking down the street, recognized him as “a fair pick-up,” put the arm on him, and turned him over to the police. When he came to write The Maltese Falcon, he used the Midget Bandit as the model for Wilmer Cook, the young gunman traveling with Gutman, who threatens to “fog” Sam Spade if he doesn’t “lay off.” In New York in the 1940s, over lunch in Luchow’s Restaurant, Hammett told Frederic Dannay (who wrote, in collaboration with his cousin Manfred B. Lee, under the penname “Ellery Queen”), that the Continental Op was modeled on Pinkerton’s Assistant Superintendent James Wright of the Baltimore ofﬁce. Jimmy Wright, he recalled, gave him his initial training. Since the Continental Detective Agency in his stories is modeled directly on Pinkerton’s, it now is taken as a given [ 17 ]

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that the name for the ﬁctitious agency derives from the Continental Building in Baltimore where Hammett ﬁrst took instruction in detection from Wright. Hammett claimed he got his first promotion with Pinkerton’s by capturing a man who had stolen a Ferris wheel. Tantalizingly, that is often all he said about it. When he went into more detail, he said the episode occurred when he was working in Idaho and Montana. To ﬁnd the stolen Ferris wheel, he went around to every carnival in the area until he found one of the machines without a proper bill of sale. Mystery solved. But then he sometimes mentioned that after he had turned the thief and the Ferris wheel over to the local police, the man proceeded to escape, taking the Ferris wheel with him—and was never caught again. Good reason exists to doubt some of Hammett’s accounts of his Pinkerton’s exploits. As early as 1923 in letters to Black Mask and in an article for The Smart Set titled “From the Memoirs of a Private Detective,” Hammett began to parlay his years as a sleuth into a glamorous-sounding back story from which his ﬁction leapt, alive with realistic detail, onto the page. Still, while it is possible to imagine a stolen Ferris wheel, it is a big strain on credibility to imagine a jailbreak hauling along a stolen Ferris wheel. One fact remains certain: whether the incidents related by Hammett are in some cases complete lies, or only partial fabrications, or in other instances the actual truth of what happened during his days as a detective, this line of work was inﬁnitely more interesting than spending more years of his life operating a nail machine in a box factory outside Baltimore. ♠

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ome aspects of detective work could not be made to sound glamorous—consequently, Hammett did not refer to them directly in statements made for print,

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and seems to have refrained from talking about them much among his friends. By the time he began working for the agency, Pinkerton’s dealt far less with robberies, kidnappings, and murders than one might expect after scanning “From the Memoirs of a Private Detective.” More and more of the company’s income, and that of every other large detective agency in America, came from acting as strikebreakers against the unions organizing across the country. The largest purchaser of the Thompson submachine gun ultimately would not be the growing ranks of gangdom, but the Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency—pro-union forces faced rows of Pinks at the factory gates, Tommy guns held ready. Working for Pinkerton’s in that era, Hammett undoubtedly did a lot of strikebreaking. In fact, Hammett probably began as a strikebreaker with Pinkerton’s rather than as an investigator, based upon his description of the employment ad he answered—which did not tell exactly what kind of job he was applying for, but made it sound interesting and exciting. Leo Huberman in The Labor Spy Racket (1937) described the manner in which detective agencies would “hook” factory workers, offering them extra money if they would write daily reports on unionizers. Using information uncovered by the Subcommittee of the Committee on Education and Labor hearings conducted by Senator Bob La Follette, Huberman goes into detail on how the agencies groomed their stool-pigeons and union-busters, and notes: But sometime the plant setup is such that an outside operative can be brought in without causing undue suspicion. The agencies usually recruit these outside operatives by the “blind ad” method. . . . They look like any other ad. But they are not. . . . Any applicant who writes an intelligent reply to a blind ad is notiﬁed to call for an interview at a stated address. The name on [ 19 ]

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the door may be John Smith Company or Green Engineering or any other name—except the name of the detective agency. . . . If the interviewer is satisﬁed that he is capable, he is told that a job will be found for him at such and such a factory; he will receive his wages for work at the factory, and an additional sum for the daily reports he is to write. The applicant next applies at the factory, is given the job at once, and his career as a stool-pigeon is begun. Given his commonplace work experience up to 1915, it is easy to picture Hammett pulled into Pinkerton’s employ in yet another factory by the blind ad method. From that point, it is also easy to see his intelligence being recognized, and soon used, as his supervisor decides to move him up to full operative status—which will result in many more assignments for Hammett to act as a strikebreaker. For the irony involved, it is worth noting that Leo Huberman would be one of the people Hammett’s good friend and ex-lover Lillian Hellman appealed to in 1951, when she tried to raise bail money for the crime writer when the juggernaut forces backed by Senator Joseph McCarthy and HUAC threatened to send Hammett to prison. Huberman and some others offered to put up the money to aide the ex-strikebreaker. Bail was denied. In her book Scoundrel Time (1976), on those years dominated by the House Un-American Activities Committee, Lillian Hellman suggests that Hammett’s later Communist political philosophy was an eventual reaction to the experiences he had as a strikebreaker— and the realization that he had been working on the wrong side. Speciﬁcally, Hellman claims that Hammett told her that he worked as a Pinkerton’s strikebreaker in 1917 for the Anaconda Copper Company in Butte, Montana, against the Industrial Workers of the World, the so-called Wobblies. He told his family about this [ 20 ]

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period, too; his oldest daughter, Mary Jane, is quoted as having asked him: “You mean you were working for Pinkerton against the IWW?” and he said, “That’s right.” Mary Jane added, “He told me he was not politically aware at that time. . . . He was strictly out to do his job.” During their ﬁrst months together in 1930, Hellman says that Hammett told her about the Butte job, saying that an ofﬁcer of the Anaconda Copper Company had offered him ﬁve thousand dollars to assassinate the labor organizer Frank Little, in town at that time rallying the copper miners. She said the realization that he had been a strikebreaker made her think, I don’t want to be with this man. When she told him that, he said, “Yes, ma’am. Why do you think I told you?” Hellman said, “He seldom talked about the past unless I asked questions, but through the years he was to repeat that bribe offer so many times that I came to believe . . . that it was some kind of key to his life. He had given a man the right to think that he would murder, and the fact that Frank Little was lynched . . . must have been, for Hammett, an abiding horror. I think I can date Hammett’s belief that he was living in a corrupt society from Little’s murder. In time, he came to the conclusion that nothing less than a revolution could wipe out the corruption. I do not mean to suggest that his radical conversion was based on one experience, but sometimes in complex minds it is the plainest experience that speeds the wheels that have already begun to move.” Hammett said he turned down the offer. Five thousand dollars in 1917 was a tremendous amount of money—he was making less than one hundred dollars a month with Pinkerton’s. A half-dozen other men had less scruples. Frank Little, a one-eyed, half-Indian labor organizer, by that point on the IWW General Executive Board, spoke [ 21 ]

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at a miner’s meeting on July 31. About 3 a.m. on August 1 he was dragged from his room by six armed and masked men. One of Little’s legs was still in a cast from an earlier brush with vigilantes. The men roped him to the back of a car and dragged him to the outskirts of Butte. According to IWW tradition, the men castrated Little before lynching him from a railroad trestle. The note pinned to his swaying body read: “First and last warning 3-7-77”—3-7-77 being an old vigilante warning symbol, purportedly based on the dimensions of a grave. The note was initialed six times, with the initials matching the ﬁrst names of six union ofﬁcials in Butte. In his biography of Hammett, Shadow Man (1981), Richard Layman states that the story of “Hammett’s peripheral involvement” in the murder of Frank Little “is implausible.” In 1982, however, the Butte bookstore owner Richard Green developed a theory that not only was Hammett involved, he had not turned down the offer. Green cites Hellman’s statement referring to the bribe offer. Then he notes that in his 1921 novel 100 Percent, the radical writer Upton Sinclair ﬁctionalized the lynching of an IWW organizer in which a character named Hammett participated. Green’s most tempting piece of evidence is the description of the lynch party given by Little’s landlady, with one of the men said to be about ﬁve foot eleven, thin, maybe twenty years old—with Hammett standing about six foot one, thin throughout his life, and in August 1917 twenty-three years old. Whether or not Hammett was involved remains unknown, since Little’s murder has never been ofﬁcially solved. But no doubt exists that Hammett did work as a strikebreaker, or that he was intimately familiar with Butte. Hammett’s vision of a hard-boiled universe for his ﬁction clearly derives from his direct participation as a Pinkerton’s op in the war raging between labor and management during the teens. His ﬁrst hardcover novel, Red Harvest (1929), is set in a city named Personville—with the [ 22 ]

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nickname “Poisonville,” but completely recognizable as Butte. André Gide later called Red Harvest “the last word in atrocity, cynicism, and horror,” yet many critics naively have assumed that the landslide of violence portrayed in the book—thirty-odd deaths courtesy of dynamiting, machine guns, pistols, knives and ice-picks—was greatly exaggerated. They do not take into account Hammett’s days as a strikebreaker and the tremendous violence of the time. On October 30, 1916, forty Wobblies came to Everett, Washington, to protest the arrest of IWW agitators. They were clubbed and taken to jail. That night the Wobblies were torn from their cells, stripped of their clothes, and forced to run a gauntlet of several hundred vigilantes who beat the naked men with guns, clubs, and whips. Wobblies called this night the Everett Massacre, but it hardly ranks with the Red Harvest-like scenario of November 5, when two hundred and ﬁfty Wobblies chartered a boat up Puget Sound to demonstrate against the “massacre.” Alerted by private detectives, sheriff ’s deputies met the boat at the dock. Someone—which side unknown—ﬁred a ﬁrst shot. By the time the boat cast loose and ﬂed from the gunﬁre, four men aboard were dead, another was dying, and thirty-one were wounded. Several bodies had fallen overboard and were never recovered. On the dock, one deputy was dead, another would die, and twenty-one were wounded. ♠

D

uring World War I Hammett interrupted work with Pinkerton’s, enlisting in the U.S. Army’s Motor Ambulance Corps in June 1918. His year of service was spent about thirty miles from Baltimore—he did not go overseas or get near actual combat. Most of his time was spent in the army hospital. That year an epidemic of Spanish inﬂuenza swept the world, killing over ﬁfty million people in a few short months. Hammett contracted [ 23 ]

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the disease but was lucky enough to live through it, yet in the army hospital he would develop tuberculosis, which would plague his health off and on over the next decade. By May 1919 Hammett was out of the service and well enough to return to detective work. In 1920 he transferred to the Pinkerton’s ofﬁce in Spokane, Washington. Suddenly the tuberculosis again became active. That November the Pinkerton’s operative found himself a patient in a U.S. Public Health Service hospital located on the Puyallop Road, which ran between Tacoma and Seattle. The place had been an Indian school for the Puyallop tribe until converted into hospital use at the end of World War I. According to Hammett, the patients were half “lungers” and half “goofs”—victims of shell-shock. At the Cushman Hospital Hammett met a pretty young nurse named Josephine Dolan. Later she recalled that Hammett was quiet, welldressed, and would read to the other patients. She recalled that they went out to restaurants in downtown Tacoma and on ferryboat rides. The romance was disrupted when Hammett was moved to Camp Kearney, near San Diego, and she was transferred to the Cheyenne Hospital in Helena, Montana. They kept in touch by mail. Hammett left Camp Kearney May 15, 1921 and returned brieﬂy to Spokane. He spent another week or two in Seattle, and then arranged to meet Josephine Dolan in San Francisco, where Pinkerton’s had assigned him to work as a strikebreaker on the docks for the businessman Blackjack Jerome. Hammett said that Jerome continued the longtime San Francisco tradition of shanghaiing, driving a truck through The City in the early hours and rounding up drunks. He barreled his machine through the picket lines and had the slowly sobering drunks at his mercy—give him a full day’s work and be driven out afterwards, or cross back through the picket lines on foot. [ 24 ]

A Brief Biography

On July 6, 1921, Hammett and Josephine Dolan took out a marriage license. They married July 7 in the rectory of St. Mary’s Cathedral on Van Ness Avenue. Originally they planned to return to Baltimore and set up housekeeping near Hammett’s family, after the job for Blackjack Jerome was ﬁnished, but once Hammett had a taste of life in San Francisco, Baltimore seemed less attractive. Hammett decided to stay in San Francisco. For the ﬁrst few months, he continued to work for Pinkerton’s, but would quit for good by the end of 1921 and no later than February 1922. The tuberculosis ﬂared up once more, and his health no longer permitted him to do detective work. How could he spend hours on his feet shadowing a suspect, or act tough as a strikebreaker, when with the TB on him he would have to line up a row of kitchen chairs leading from the bed to the bathroom, so he could prop himself up to get to the sink to hemorrhage blood? He needed an easier job, maybe even a job he could do at home. At the age of twenty-eight, Hammett decided to become a writer. In 1922, funded by the Veterans Bureau, he enrolled in the Munson School for Private Secretaries in 600 Sutter Street, a vocational school offering classes in stenography and writing. The courses ran for a year, but Hammett later told his daughter Jo that he only stayed long enough to learn how to touch type, and then dropped out. By the end of the year he made his ﬁrst sales to magazines. With his background as a detective, Hammett quickly saw the likelihood of cracking the detective pulp ﬁction market. Most of the writers had no idea of what real detective work involved, and their highly artiﬁcial stories proved it. Surely, with his experience he could do just as well—and maybe better—with a crime story, and bring in some extra money. ♠ [ 25 ]

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ammett’s career as a Pinkerton’s operative obscured for many people the full scope of his literary ambitions. In the essay “The Simple Art of Murder” (1944), Raymond Chandler, Hammett’s major successor in the hard-boiled detective genre, speculated that Hammett had produced his ﬁction almost by accident—a high school dropout, a job as a detective, a huge native talent, these factors combined to produce a major primitive artist, who wrote what he wrote because it came naturally, not because he was going about it intellectually or perhaps even artistically. In fact, Hammett seems to have begun writing, as did Chandler, in hopes of becoming a poet—with the fame and respect to follow which is a poet’s due. Beaten down by tuberculosis, Hammett faced his own mortality, and discovered an anomalous craving for some kind of immortality. A lapsed Catholic, religion would not serve him to this end. His marriage and the start of his own family reﬂected a need to perpetuate his name, but as the son of an anonymous working class father and grandfathers, he knew having a family would not be enough. Feeling he had a talent for writing, Hammett set his eye on poetry and sophisticated squibs and vignettes aimed at publications such as The Smart Set. Some of the biographers feel Hammett took the classes in the Munson vocational school with plans for becoming a journalist, but that seems unlikely—a reporter in those days held down a schedule not far removed from that of a detective. Hammett surely was smart enough to know he was not going to make enough money to live on by writing poetry and vignettes, but might be able to survive by selling longer stories on the side—if he could type fast enough and write clearly enough. Ultimately Hammett would satirize his early literary goals in the ﬁgure of a sonnet-writing sleuth named Robin Thin in the stories “The Nails in Mr. Cayterer” (1926) and the posthumously published “A Man Called Thin” (1962). Working for his [ 26 ]

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father’s detective agency in San Francisco, Thin would prefer to be left alone to write his verse. His ﬁrst publication, a short squib called “The Parthian Shot,” appeared in The Smart Set for October 1922, under the name Dashiell Hammett. In the December 1922 issues of Brief Stories and Black Mask, his ﬁrst crime stories saw print, but under the penname “Peter Collinson,” which was taken from prison slang familiar to the former op and meaning “nobody’s son.” Obviously, Hammett hesitated to use his own name on crime ﬁction, apparently wanting to preserve it as a byline for more prestigious work or higher-paying magazines. With his “Peter Collinson” tales for Black Mask, however, Hammett found a ready market in an area where he had no shortage of ideas. Within a year of his ﬁrst sale to The Smart Set, he dropped the “Peter Collinson” byline—the October 15, 1923 issue of Black Mask actually features two Continental Op tales, with “Slippery Fingers” appearing under the “Collinson” handle and “Crooked Souls” under the byline Dashiell Hammett. By 1923 even the vignettes for The Smart Set had been abandoned. Hammett was not the ﬁrst American mystery writer with real experience of detection and life on the streets behind him. That claim could be put forth for Josiah Flynt, who wandered the country as a hobo and claimed to have served in the late 1800s on the Chicago police force—Flynt’s books include Notes of an Itinerant Policeman (1900) and The Rise of Ruderick Clowd (1903). But Hammett certainly had a far greater talent than Flynt, and more importantly, soon came to an awareness of the literary possibilities of the crime story. His decision to use his own name on his tales for Black Mask reﬂects the realization that he knew these stories were a way to make his name known. Writing in 1944, Raymond Chandler did not have access to the letters indicating Hammett’s literary ambitions [ 27 ]

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which are available today. The clearest statement of his goals appears in 1928 in a letter to Blanche Knopf, the year before her husband Alfred A. Knopf would bring Hammett into hardcover with Red Harvest. Dated March 20 of that year, his letter says: I’m one of the few—if there are any more—people moderately literate who take the detective story seriously. I don’t mean that I necessarily take my own or anybody else’s seriously—but the detective story as a form. Some day somebody’s going to make “literature” of it . . . , and I’m selﬁsh enough to have my hopes, however slight the evident justiﬁcation may be. I have a long speech I usually make on the subject, all about the ground not having been scratched yet, and so on, but I won’t bore you with it now. Self-educated out of the free and lending libraries of America, Hammett was an intelligent and voracious reader with wide-ranging tastes. In the letter to Blanche Knopf he noted that Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier “wouldn’t have needed much altering to have been a detective story.” In the Continental Op tale “Fly Paper” (1929) a woman borrows a method of building gradual immunity against arsenic from The Count of Monte Cristo, in order to murder her criminal boyfriend. In the novel The Dain Curse (1929) the Op says, “I had a wisecrack on my tongue—something about Cabell being a romanticist in the same sense that the wooden horse was Trojan.” And Hammett was acquainted with far more obscure authors than James Branch Cabell—in another Op tale, “The Gutting of Couffignal” (1925), the nameless short fat detective is found reading The Lord of the Sea by M. P. Shiel before the lights go out and the guns start blazing. The Op provides a capsule review: [ 28 ]

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The book was called The Lord of the Sea, and had to do with a strong, tough and violent fellow named Hogarth, whose modest plan was to hold the world in one hand. There were plots and counterplots, kidnappings, murders, prisonbreakings, forgeries and burglaries, diamonds as large as hats and f loating forts larger than Coufﬁgnal. It sounds dizzy here, but in the book it was as real as a dime. Shiel’s speculative novel ﬁrst appeared in 1901, and today is considered a science ﬁction classic in which the mulatto author predicts, decades before the founding of Israel, the creation of a Zionist state—and provides a onestop example of the strange literary byways with which Hammett was familiar. In an introduction to the 1934 Modern Library reprint of The Maltese Falcon, Hammett wrote that his idea for the jewel-encrusted statue came about because “somewhere I had read of the peculiar rental agreement between Charles V and the Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem.” Another time he mentioned that The Maltese Falcon derived from the Henry James novel The Wings of the Dove—perhaps from that aspect of the novel which Henry James himself described as the lure his heroine had for the other characters, who are “entangled and coerced . . . drawn in as by some pool of a Lorelei . . . inheriting from their connection with her strange difficulties and still stranger opportunities.” ♠

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oday it is fashionable to downplay Hammett’s shorter ﬁction in favor of his novels. Hammett by the 1930s personally dismissed his shorts and novelettes for Black Mask, and wanted his reputation to be based on the [ 29 ]

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ﬁve novels Alfred A. Knopf published in hardcover—Red Harvest (1929), The Dain Curse (1929), The Maltese Falcon (1930), The Glass Key (1931) and The Thin Man (1934). In her biography Dashiell Hammett: A Life (1983), Diane Johnson quotes from letters Hammett wrote to his wife in which he says he is “Blackmasking” and working “on the Black Mask junk,” comments which possibly reﬂect his sardonic and often self-deprecating humor as much as his growing discontent with the pulp magazine marketplace. During his years in San Francisco, Hammett even brieﬂy abandoned ﬁction writing in favor of writing advertising copy for Samuels Jewelers, but then returned to Black Mask to produce the novel-length works on which he felt his fame would be based. The fact is that with the short stories he wrote in San Francisco, Hammett completely revolutionized the way writers in America perceived the mystery story. In 1926, when a new editor named Joseph T. Shaw assumed command of Black Mask, he looked over the stories the magazine had published since its inception in 1920, and recognized Hammett as the standout writer. By 1936, when Shaw left after a decade at the helm, Black Mask was the most prestigious pulp magazine for a mystery writer to appear in, the locus of a new and exciting kind of crime story—Raymond Chandler was so enthralled that he deliberately sat down to write mysteries in the Black Mask style, cracking its covers in December 1933 with his ﬁrst submission, “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot.” The proliﬁc pulp ﬁctioneer E. Hoffmann Price told me that he too cracked Black Mask once, but he made the sale after Shaw had left and it just didn’t mean as much. Even at the time, Shaw’s editorship was seen as a golden age where you could appear in the same pages with new stories by Hammett and Chandler. William F. Nolan chose this statement by Russell B. Nye from The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America as the front quote for his history of the magazine entitled The Black Mask Boys (1985): “The greatest change in the detec[ 30 ]

A Brief Biography

tive story since Poe came in 1926 with the emergence of the Black Mask school of ﬁction.” Edgar Allan Poe, of course, created the mystery story as we know it today in the early 1840s, and in only four tales—“Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Purloined Letter,” “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” and “Thou Art the Man.” In these four stories Poe came up with the idea of the brilliant amateur detective who solves puzzles that bafﬂe the ofﬁcial police force, in the person of C. Auguste Dupin of Paris—the origin for Sherlock Holmes and hundreds more to follow. Dupin’s cases are narrated by an admiring friend—the origin for Dr. John Watson and a host of similar sidekicks. In only four tales Poe also came up with almost every technical device used in mysteries since then—the locked room puzzle, the least-likely suspect, the mystery based on an actual murder case, et cetera. Until Hammett sat down at his typewriter in Eddy Street, no essential change had been wrought in the mystery story since Poe had Dupin explain his methods of ratiocination. Raymond Chandler in “The Simple Art of Murder” made the classic case for the hard-boiled school of detective ﬁction that came out of Black Mask, and said that Dashiell Hammett was “the ace performer.” Chandler wrote, “Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for a reason, not just to provide a corpse.” He said that Hammett wrote “for people with a sharp, aggressive attitude to life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street.” In a word, Hammett was the ﬁrst writer to make the crime story realistic, and he did it in the ﬁrst handful of tales he wrote for Black Mask. As soon as Joseph Shaw began editing Black Mask, Hammett became the most inﬂuential writer of crime ﬁction in America since Poe, because Shaw developed one standard: You want to write for my magazine, then write like Dashiell Hammett. [ 31 ]

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From his ﬁrst sale to the December 1922 issue of Black Mask—“The Road Home”—the essential elements of Hammett’s writing that would revolutionize the mystery are evident: a terse, rapid-ﬁre style, as economical as the reports which Hammett had turned in for years as a Pinkerton’s operative; as hero, a professional detective, so dedicated to his job that he has spent two years tracking down a fugitive through the jungles of Burma and Indo-China; and an offer which may draw the hero to the wrong side of the law, as the fugitive suggests a partnership in a fabulous bed of gems in exchange for freedom—proceeding in print by seven years Casper Gutman’s negotiations with Sam Spade over the statue of a jewel-encrusted falcon. The manhunter, Hagedorn, cries: “after all I’ve gone through you don’t expect me to throw them down now—now that the job’s as good as done!” When his prey suddenly escapes into the jungle, Hagedorn takes off after him, with the doubt raised in the reader’s mind—will he bring the criminal to justice, or cash in on his offer? Hammett does not say. This stark etching of a lawman riding the edge of morality and the law would become a commonplace in Black Mask, which became a pulp paper mirror of a society corrupt on all levels, from the hoodlum on the street to the graft-taking politician in city hall. Only the detective, alone, is seen as a largely honest man, trying to do his job and stay largely honest. In that same issue of Black Mask with “The Road Home,” Carroll John Daly also appeared for the first time with “The False Burton Combs.” In May 1923 Daly would be the ﬁrst writer for the Mask to introduce a wisecracking tough guy detective in “Three Gun Terry,” the premiere tale about the sleuth Terry Mack. Hammett’s Continental Op would not appear until October of 1923. While there is no question that Daly established some of the ground rules for the hard-boiled ﬁction to follow, a few commentators have overestimated his importance, [ 32 ]

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From the pulps to the slicks.

suggesting that he beat out Hammett. In fact, the two crime writers came out of the gate at the same moment, with similar ideas, but in the race to follow Hammett led the way for writers such as Chandler (whose poetic voice for Philip Marlowe completely eclipsed the blunt narration for Daly’s heroes), and Daly with his simplistic [ 33 ]

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style—the detective ﬁres both pistols at once, yet only one hole appears in the forehead of the guy he has just drilled, a swell shot—led the lesser talents to a dead-end in the character of Mike Hammer, whose creator, Mickey Spillane, was a big fan of Daly’s writing. This period during the 1920s when Hammett, settled in San Francisco, was working on his initial stories, was soon followed by the period when Ernest Hemingway in Paris began writing his ﬁrst terse tales of violence. The “tough guy” school, a new movement in American letters, as modern as jazz, was springing up spontaneously in the wake of the World War. By the end of the Depression, the hard-boiled story was entrenched in far more venues than just Black Mask. ♠

E

ven as Hammett began writing the novels in the late twenties which would take his name to international fame, his marriage had hit the skids. By the time he left San Francisco for New York in October 1929, he and his wife were living separately. From The City she took the two daughters from their marriage to southern California, in expectation that Hammett would be able to see them when he got to Hollywood to write movies. His ambitions were skyrocketing. Knopf in 1929 had issued both Red Harvest and The Dain Curse in hardcover. Before Hammett left San Francisco he rewrote the Black Mask version of The Maltese Falcon for publication in Knopf’s 1930 schedule. After hitting New York Hammett completed The Glass Key in what he claimed was a whirlwind of typing—the last third of the novel composed in something like one thirty-hour session. And in 1930 Paramount released the ﬁrst ﬁlm based on Hammett’s work—credited as coming from both Red Harvest and a story by Ben Hecht entitled “The River Inn.” Roadhouse Nights introduced Jimmy Durante and his famous nose [ 34 ]

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to the screen, and bears no remarkable resemblance to Hammett’s novel. The Glass Key appeared in four parts in Black Mask in 1930, along with two ﬁnal short stories featuring the Continental Op—after that, Black Mask never again would be able to afford the word rates Hammett’s ﬁction could command. From his rooms in 133 East ThirtyEighth Street in New York, Hammett brief ly took up mystery reviewing for the New York Evening Post, which he continued after moving to Hollywood later in the year. From 1927 through 1929 Hammett had provided occasional mystery reviews for The Saturday Review of Literature, with his ﬁrst review now seen as the announcement of his intention to sweep all competition away—he trashed The Benson Murder Case by “S. S. Van Dine,” penname for Willard Huntington Wright, the bestselling and most respected author of mystery novels in America in the twenties. After Red Harvest appeared, serious readers abandoned Wright’s unlikely plots in favor of the new writer and the new school of crime writing on the scene. The Post reviews reinforced Hammett’s eminence as the hot new mystery writer, but soon he found he did not have time for them. The last reviews for October 1930 were written in 1551½ North Bronson Avenue in Hollywood— but quickly Hammett’s preferred stopping place became the Beverly Wilshire. In Hollywood during the winter of 1930 Hammett met Lillian Hellman. She was then the twenty-four-year-old wife of screenwriter Arthur Kober, apparently an agreeable fellow who made little objection to her move over to live with Hammett. In 1934 the Kobers got a divorce, in the ﬁfth year of the on-and-off relationship with Hellman that would last until Hammett’s death. By 1931 it may have seemed to Hammett that he had it made. His original story for the screen “After School” was released by Paramount, after rewrites by others, as City Streets, starring Gary Cooper and Sylvia Sidney. Warner [ 35 ]

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Brothers bought all movie rights to his novel The Maltese Falcon for $8,500, producing a ﬁlm by that title directed by Roy Del Ruth, with Ricardo Cortez in the role of Sam Spade and Bebe Daniels as the femme fatale. Hammett contributed polish dialog to many other ﬁlms in his ﬁrst couple of years in Hollywood—incredibly well paid work done without screen credit. In this period it is said that he was hired to develop a screen treatment for Greta Garbo as well, which was never produced. Also in 1931, Knopf published The Glass Key in book form. The protagonist is the anti-hero Ned Beaumont (always called Ned Beaumont, both names, never by one or the other in the clipped reportorial narrative), who works in a sometimes illegal capacity for the political boss Paul Madvig. The novel explores their friendship and ﬁnal split against a background of political corruption in an eastern city, which may be modeled on Baltimore, maybe Philadelphia. Here Hammett moves away from the violent carnage of Red Harvest, or even the select murders of The Maltese Falcon, to a subtle but insidious portrayal of psychological threats, including a scene where Ned Beaumont sets up a man so that he commits suicide. In another sequence—quite famous as one of the most brutal ever written—Ned Beaumont is held prisoner by some of Madvig’s rivals and systematically beaten by a thug in a sadomasochistic ritual. Hammett in this novel tries to do far more than write a couple of hundred pages and then report whodunit. ♠

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ut then Hammett hit a slump in his Hollywood career. No ﬁlm companies were interested in optioning The Dain Curse, and he found no immediate takers for The Glass Key. In 1932 Hammett cashed in on the popularity of The Maltese Falcon and quickly wrote three short stories about Sam Spade. He did not direct them to [ 36 ]

A Brief Biography

the pulp market, but sold them to the slicks. Pulps—so called because they were printed on the cheapest wood pulp paper—were in his past. Slicks—so called because of the slick coating on the paper—were in his present, and paid much, much more. He is rumored to have received around one thousand dollars each for these new Spade tales. He had only one other short story published during that year. Hammett’s last active burst of ﬁction writing came in 1933, as he somewhat desperately tried to come up with properties which would appeal to the Hollywood producers, and wrote several short stories in an attempt to take him out of the crime genre—one of these stories, “Night Shade,” is considered by Hammett admirers as an example of his style at its peak. Far less satisfying is the short novel Woman in the Dark he serialized in three parts in Liberty—done in the same style as The Glass Key, even to the heroine’s name always appearing in the narration as Luise Fischer, both names, never by one or the other, but lacking the suggestion of unspoken meaning with which Hammett invested the story of Ned Beaumont. Almost certainly Hammett wrote Woman in the Dark with an eye toward a pickup by Hollywood, in addition to the thousands Liberty paid for it. By 1933, despite the royalties from his novels and the thousands from his new stories and screenwriting, Hammett suddenly found himself broke. He spent money on women, parties, drinking and gambling as fast as it came in, and in 1933 it was not coming in fast enough anymore. To appreciate the amount of money Hammett was running through, you must consider that in the fall of 1929 the stock market crashed, plunging the country into the Great Depression. The newspaper columnist Russell Baker, in his Pulitzer Prize winning autobiography Growing Up (1982), writes about that time, when he was a child. Nineteen-thirty and thirty-one were bad years, but 1932 he said was “the bleakest year of the [ 37 ]

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Depression.” Baker’s father had died, leaving him and his mother destitute. One of her brothers took them in. Baker said he was a “salesman for a soft-drink bottler in Newark . . . wore pearl-gray spats, detachable collars, and a three piece suit, . . . and took in threadbare relatives.” His uncle did this on “an income of $30 a week”—during the Depression, if you were making $1,500 a year, you were pretty well off. The $8,500 Warner Brothers paid for The Maltese Falcon alone, a seemingly trivial amount by today’s standards, could have supported several families in style through those years. Hammett burned through the money. With Hellman in New York City Hammett went to ground during the fall of 1932 in the Hotel Sutton on East Fifty-Sixth Street, managed by their friend Nathanael West, who would write the classic novels Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust. West’s brotherin-law, the humorist S. J. Perelman, described the hotel in the memoir The Last Laugh (1981): “The décor of all the rooms was identical—ﬁreproof early-American, impervious to the whim of guests who might succumb to euphoria, despair, or drunkenness.” In her memoirs Lillian Hellman said that West would let his broke writer pals run up a rent bill under an assumed name, then check that name out, telling the owner the person had skipped out—meanwhile registering a new name without having to disturb the literati. Using the experiences he had had spending his money, with himself and Hellman as the models for his heroes, Hammett settled in at the Sutton for what would be his last major creative work: a new detective novel, The Thin Man, ﬁnished in a concentrated burst of writing with Hammett locked in his room for two or three weeks, sending out only for sandwiches and cigarettes. A slick commercial effort, The Thin Man became Hammett’s bestselling book. The wise-cracking, hard-drinking husband and wife sleuths Nick and Nora Charles would carry [ 38 ]

A Brief Biography

him ﬁnancially for years to come. Hammett dedicates the novel to Hellman, and it clearly reﬂects their life together in New York living off Hollywood money, though in the story Nick Charles has retired from his job with the TransContinental Detective Agency to manage the millions inherited by Nora. Another personal allusion in the book is the dog Asta, named after the dog owned by S. J. Perelman’s wife Laura. The Thin Man appeared in Redbook for December 1933, and Hammett and Hellman used the magazine payment to cover a few weeks spent in Miami, followed by more weeks in spring and summer Hammett posed for the 1934 relaxing in a fishing cover of The Thin Man. camp in the Florida Keys. Alfred A. Knopf brought out the hardback in January that year, and it immediately climbed the bestseller lists. Once more, Hammett was hot. MGM paid $20,000 for the screen rights for the 1934 W. S. Van Dyke ﬁlm of The Thin Man, starring William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora. RKO Radio Pictures picked up Woman in the Dark, starring Fay Wray of King Kong fame in the title role. King Features Syndicate hired Hammett to create a comic strip character and write continuity as competition for Dick Tracy—he came up with a tough unnamed government man known only as Secret Agent X–9, with the panels drawn by Alex Raymond (more famous today for the science ﬁction strip Flash Gordon). Hammett is thought to have written continuity for two long adventures which appeared in 1934 and 1935, and to have plotted—possibly—a couple more. The pay sometimes is reported at $500 per week. [ 39 ]

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Hammett toasts Alex Raymond in 1934 for their Secret Agent X–9 comic strip.

In 1935 Universal Pictures brought out Mister Dynamite, adapted from an original screen story by Hammett called “On the Make.” This ﬁlm is set in San Francisco (though ﬁlmed in Hollywood on sets), and much of the action occurs in the St. Francis Hotel. Edmund Lowe stars as the detective named T. N. Thompson—“T.N.T.”—, a roguish fellow who wears white gloves most of the time and leaves no fingerprints behind. At one point this vehicle was intended as another starring role for William Powell—in which he would play Sam Spade gone crooked. Protest from Warner Brothers over rights sidetracked that possibility. Also in 1935 a ﬁlm made from The Glass Key was released by Paramount, starring George Raft as Ned Beaumont. In 1936 Warners tried to do more with the $8,500 sunk into The Maltese Falcon. The 1931 version with Ricardo Cortez had been only a modest success, but attempt number two bombed: Satan Met a Lady, which features neither Sam Spade nor the falcon. Instead of a fat man there is a fat woman. Instead of a slimy little guy in the role of Joel Cairo you ﬁnd the tall English actor [ 40 ]

A Brief Biography

Arthur Treacher, famous for playing butlers (“My word!”). They are after Roland’s Horn of Plenty, ﬁlled with jewels, from French—right—rather than Maltese legends. The movie stars Bette Davis. She said it was the worst dog she ever made in Hollywood. ♠

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y 1934, with successes cutting through the book, comic strip, and ﬁlm worlds, Hammett without doubt was the uncrowned king of the crime story in America. But for the easy money to be made from mysteries, though, he might have abdicated his throne that year. Hammett had become tired of writing detective stories, and had his eye on other forms. The social reality from which his hard-boiled ﬁction sprang had not changed that much, though he had. Pinkerton’s operatives were still busting heads as strikebreakers, and crime was as widespread as ever. The critics who think Hammett’s ﬁction too violent only need to look to the headlines the year his last novel appeared to see that The Thin Man is a relatively gentle read. Red Harvest only became more real, as Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow died in a hail of bullets May 23, 1934, followed by John Dillinger in July, Pretty Boy Floyd in October and Baby Face Nelson in November. Ma Barker stayed alive until January 1935, and then she too perished in an epic gun battle with the law. And in San Francisco an island in the middle of the bay was converted to a new use in September 1934, as Alcatraz—“The Super Prison for Super Criminals”—opened its gates for customers, where in an escape attempt “Doc” Barker of the Depression-era Barker Gang would die in a shoot-out with the bulls on January 13, 1939. Hammett’s preoccupations were elsewhere. In 1934 Lillian Hellman’s ﬁrst produced play, The Children’s Hour, came to the theatre. She said that Hammett suggested to [ 41 ]

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her the incident of teachers tried for lesbianism as ripe for drama—he may even have been considering working up a play or a novel on the subject himself before turning the idea over to her. Knopf was waiting for Hammett’s next novel, but he did not expect a mystery—Hammett was planning a mainstream novel, perhaps something like his drinking buddy William Faulkner was writing, or his exlandlord Nathanael “Pep” West. He knew the major writers of the day, and his expectations for his writing came to be measured against what they were producing. He could possibly have sat down at the typewriter and knocked out eighty or so books about Sam Spade, as his fellow Black Mask writer Erle Stanley Gardner was writing his long series of books about the lawyer Perry Mason, but he did not care to do that. Hammett came to feel that he had done all he legitimately could do with the mystery story, without beginning to repeat himself. He announced titles of his mainstream novels over the next years. There Was a Young Man. The Hunting Boy. The Valley Sheep are Fatter. Some of these novels he got a few pages into before freezing up. Once The Thin Man and three short stories saw print in 1934, no other new novels or stories by Hammett would appear for the rest of his life. Knopf grew impatient to have another book to follow the others, and in a letter to Hellman dated November 26, 1934, Hammett mentions that “Alfred’s been bothering me with pleas that we bring ‘The Big Knockover’ out between covers with a foreword saying it was written long ago and we don’t think much of it, but there it is. He claims he’s being hounded by my public—the rats!—and I love you very much, but I don’t think I’ll let him do it.” Knopf waited for something else a few years, and then dropped Hammett’s contract—the short novel which appeared in two parts in Black Mask as “The Big Knockover” and “$106,000 Blood Money” saw print as a ﬁrst edition paperback from the Lawrence E. Spivak company in 1943 under the title $106,000 [ 42 ]

A Brief Biography

Blood Money, with a reprint on pulp paper bound in cheap boards from Tower Books later in the year with the title shortened to Blood Money. How much better off Hammett would have been to have allowed The Big Knockover, one of his virtuoso performances in the crime genre, to have seen book publication from Knopf. By 1935 Hammett was ﬁred from writing for Secret Agent X–9, but it was this innocuous comic strip that initially brought his name to the attention of the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover happened to notice that X–9, in the comic strip a free-ﬂoating agent of some faceless branch of the government, had started out as a “G-man,” one of Hoover’s boys. He requested a background check on Hammett. As Hammett’s politics moved increasingly to the left, the FBI ﬁle on him grew, and by the time of his death stacked up quite evenly with a New York City phone book. The movie After the Thin Man, second in the series of six ﬁlms, appeared in 1936. MGM brought Hammett back to Hollywood to work on a screen treatment, to be followed by a screenplay written by others. They hired him for $2,000 a week for ten weeks to write on the project, during which time he stayed drunk and made the social rounds. Then came ﬁve weeks more at $2,000 a week, with no screen story, followed by ﬁve more weeks at half pay, $1,000 a week—loose ﬁgures, but close enough to the actuality. In this period Hammett knew everyone—as Hellman said, for a season or two, he was the hottest thing in both New York and Hollywood. He met former Ziegﬁeld Follies star Fanny Brice, and Orson Welles. When Gertude Stein came from Paris on her American tour, she said the only persons she wished to meet were Dashiell Hammett and Charlie Chaplin, and she met both at a party in Hollywood. Jerome Weidman, author of I Can Get It for You Wholesale and later the Pulitzer Prize winning play Fiorello!—about New York City mayor LaGuardia—met Hammett in 1937 and said everyone expected a new novel out from him at any time. [ 43 ]

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In 1937 Hammett and Hellman rented an island cottage off South Norwalk, Connecticut, where she worked on her play The Little Foxes. Hammett, who apparently kept trying to create a non-crime novel or a play of his own well into the 1940s, found the true creative outlet for his energies from that point on would be Hellman and her plays, as he began to act as a ﬁrst reader for her. In her memoirs Hellman gives Hammett much credit for instilling in her an attitude which pushed for only the very best work, summed up in his observation about something she had just written: You can’t let this be published or performed—this is worse than bad—it’s only half-good. If he was stalled on his own writing, nonetheless he was there in support of Hellman, from the suggestion of the trial on which she based The Children’s Hour to a detailed criticism of The Autumn Garden, ﬁrst performed in 1951, a play in which Hellman credits him for contributing a pivotal speech in the last act spoken by the character Ben Griggs. This speech ends with what today only can be taken as a stark autobiographical statement from a writer whose last ﬁction had appeared in 1934: “I’ve frittered myself away.” ♠

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eturning to Hollywood for a third ﬁlm about Nick and Nora Charles later in 1937, Hammett moved back into the Beverly Wilshire. Savvy to the possible problems they might have with Hammett after his delays with the screen treatment for the second Thin Man ﬁlm, MGM signed him on with a contract with increasing beneﬁts—the synopsis would earn $5,000, acceptance of the idea for the movie outlined in the synopsis would earn $10,000, and a ﬁnished screen treatment would pull in another $20,000. The third in the series, Another Thin Man, appeared in 1939—the last time Hammett personally had anything to do with the characters. [ 44 ]

A Brief Biography

While Hammett was in Hollywood MGM also made him an offer of $40,000 for all further dramatic rights to Nick and Nora, which he accepted with only one change—he would keep radio rights, since the makers of Old Gold cigarettes even then were offering him $500 a week for a radio series. Hammett had grown as tired of Nick and Nora as he had of his old work in Black Mask, which may suggest some self-disgust over his inability to escape from his crime ﬁction into the mainstream of literature. Ernest Hemingway in the autobiographical Death in the Afternoon (1932) wrote that he had his wife read to him from The Dain Curse, but by that time Hammett was dismissing The Dain Curse as “a silly story.” When he sold ﬁlm rights to Nick and Nora Charles, he could write, “Maybe there are better writers in the world but nobody ever invented a more insufferably smug pair of characters. They can’t take that away from me, even for $40,000.” Hammett returned to Baltimore in February 1939 with Lillian Hellman to work on the preview performances of The Little Foxes. Her successes for the stage enabled Hellman to go in with Hammett on the purchase of one hundred and thirty acres, dubbed Hardscrabble Farm, in Pleasantville, New York—bought under Hellman’s name alone. Hammett often lived there through the next decade, though he kept his own apartments in New York City. In 1941 a young screenwriter on the Warner Brothers lot wanted a shot at directing. The Warners had no problem with that, as long as he kept the costs down, shot on the back lots, got the thing in on a fast schedule. They already had all rights in the property paid for, since John Huston wanted to direct a new version of The Maltese Falcon, conﬁdent that no one would remember the two earlier versions, which he dismissed—of a similar mind with Bette Davis—as “dogs.” Huston’s ﬁrst ﬁlm follows the novel closely, and especially is faithful to Hammett’s dialogue. This adherence [ 45 ]

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to the novel may have been accidental. In interviews for TV years later Huston said that he was so nervous about directing that he felt lucky to have such a professional cast, with Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor and Peter Lorre practically directing themselves. Sidney Greenstreet was making his movie debut, but he had acted on the stage for many years. One suspects that Huston, as a screenwriter himself, may have wanted to rewrite the material more extensively than he did, but had his attention diverted by his job as director. The desire at Warners to keep it cheap may have been the crucial factor—in Hammett: A Life at the Edge (1983), William F. Nolan recounts a story told by Allen Rivkin about how Huston, realizing he would be busy as director, asked him to be co-screenwriter for the project. Rivkin said that Huston had his secretary at Warners type the novel into blocks of scenes with dialogue. Jack Warner saw this typescript, okayed it, and told Huston to start ﬁlming. Rivkin was out of a job, and pressure was on to get the project made.

Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941). [ 46 ]

A Brief Biography

Using stock documentary footage of the new bridges over the bay and downtown San Francisco as viewed from the waterfront to set the scene, Huston shot the rest of the movie at Warners. Bogart came in every morning from his home at 8787 Shoreham Road. Originally the studio had wanted George Raft in the role of Sam Spade, but Raft—then at the peak of his career—was not willing to trust his future on any untried director such as John Huston with a property like The Maltese Falcon, which had bombed twice. Raft’s refusal opened the part for Bogart, who was just beginning to rise again at Warner Brothers after playing Raft’s kid brother in They Drive by Night and co-starring opposite Ida Lupino in High Sierra, scripted by John Huston. Bogart had become typecast at Warners for several years following his role as Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest (1936), playing a succession of shyster lawyers and gangsters. In The Maltese Falcon he got his ﬁrst opportunity to portray the hero, the leading man—and the part as Sam Spade catapulted him to superstardom. Although Hammett made no money from this third ﬁlm version of the Falcon, it signaled the opening of a decade in which he was without rival as the most famous mystery writer in America. MGM kept Nick and Nora before the public in Shadow of the Thin Man (1941), The Thin Man Goes Home (1944), and Song of the Thin Man (1947). Paramount brought Ned Beaumont back to the screen in the person of Alan Ladd in a 1942 remake of The Glass Key. The airwaves were alive with Hammett characterizations, with The Adventures of the Thin Man beginning in 1941 on NBC and running to 1942; CBS carried the show from 1943 to 1947, but in 1948 Nick and Nora returned over NBC in The New Adventures of the Thin Man and moved to ABC by 1950. In 1946 Hammett licensed the rights to The Adventures of Sam Spade, sponsored by Wildroot Cream Oil for the hair, with Howard Duff as the [ 47 ]

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voice of Sam Spade (“Efﬁe, take a memo . . . ”). Warner Brothers sued him over this show, alleging they owned the dramatic rights to Sam Spade, but the courts decided otherwise—so that Hammett, if unrewarded by the box ofﬁce takes from the Bogart version, nonetheless proﬁted by the high proﬁle of his detective, with some accounts ﬁguring his weekly fee for the radio rights at a thousand or even two thousand dollars. The show ran for years. In 1946 Hammett also created a character expressly made for radio, in a loose sense a continuation of his heavyset Continental Op and a ﬁne counterpart to the Thin Man series. This show began: “There he goes! Into that drug store. He’s stepping on the scales . . . Weight: 237 pounds. Fortune: Danger! Who is he . . . ? The Fat Man . . . !” The sponsor for The Fat Man series had to be the most appropriate in the entire history of radio, with the adventures of Brad Runyon, a.k.a. the Fat Man, brought to the listeners by Pepto-Bismol. After Hammett sold the idea he had nothing more to do with it. The most amazing story about this series has it that Hammet t provided only three words, the—fat—man, for the show, earning a fee of $60,000—or $20,000 a word. Beginning in 1944 with The Adventures of Sam Spade, Hammett also allowed Ellery Queen to gather some of his short stories for the The first printing of pulps for paperback publication— The Adventures of Sam compact editions distinguished by Spade was a 25-cent informative, conversational notes paperback in 1944. written by Frederic Dannay. The Continental Op and The Return of the Continental Op followed in 1945. The royalties from these books in no way could have rivaled the money Hammett was making from his radio shows, but it was money coming in, free [ 48 ]

A Brief Biography

and easy. And Hammett, apparently, felt no hesitation over these books appearing to perhaps muddle the reputation he had built up with his ﬁve hardcover novels from Knopf—like a great many other people in the early days of the paperback or pocket books, Hammett does not seem to have regarded them as “real books.” Rather, they were disposable reading, inconsequential, and unlike the real books which came out in hardback, in no danger of being taken seriously.

Each Dell mapback paperback included a map on its back cover.

When she assembled the ﬁrst hardcover collection of Hammett’s Black Mask tales in The Big Knockover (1966), Hellman noted that “by publishing them at all, I have done what Hammett did not want to do: he turned down offers to republish the stories, although I never knew the reason and never asked.” Surely she refers to hardcover issues, because Frederic Dannay as “Ellery Queen” eventually brought out almost all of Hammett’s pulp shorts in no less than nine paperback collections. [ 49 ]

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D

uring the thirties, in New York and Hollywood, Hammett drifted out of his state of being politically unaware, cause unknown. Whether it was residual guilt over his years as a strikebreaker and his suggested complicity in the lynching of Frank Little, or perhaps a spark ignited while listening to the political rhetoric passing about the intellectual circles he moved in, may never be determined. Historically, though, Hammett’s activism seems to have been occasioned by an event which brought many people in that era into the political arena—the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Completely aside from the elements of Marxist politics that began to appeal to him, Hammett recognized Hitler as a genuine threat. He spoke at anti-Nazi rallies and began to contribute to political causes—which brought him back to the active attention of the FBI. His concern over the rise of the fascist nations spurred him to ﬁnish the only ﬁlm assignment he considered important, and then prompted him at the age of forty-eight to enlist in the army after America entered World War II. Early in 1942 Hammett signed on with producer Hal B. Wallis at Warner Brothers to adapt Lillian Hellman’s play Watch on the Rhine for the screen, and agreed to do so “in record time.” He wired on April 13 that he would ﬁnish the script that week if he did not break a leg. His wire on April 23 communicated his activity in one word: “Done.” Hammett took this assignment seriously, both because of his respect for Hellman’s material and for the message the play—and thus the movie—put before the public. Watch on the Rhine, during all his years in and out of Hollywood, was his only screenplay credit—his other credits stories for the screen which other writers ﬁnished. The credit reads Screenplay by Dashiell Hammett—with additional scenes and dialogue by Lillian Hellman. The movie came out in 1943, directed by [ 50 ]

A Brief Biography

Herman Shumlin, starring Paul Lukas and Bette Davis. Lukas won an Oscar as Best Actor of the Year for his performance. Hammett’s screenplay was nominated for an Oscar, but did not win. The anti-fascist message of that movie clearly was important to Hammett, but he realized it was not enough to just make a statement. To Hellman’s disbelief, and against her protests, he enlisted as a private in the army in September 1942. Initially he was refused induction—when the doctor asked about the scars on his lungs which appeared in the Xrays, Hammett said they came from TB, but that had been cured by 1927. As the war effort stepped up, they became less choosy, and soon Hammett was stationed stateside in uniform. He felt he was wasting his time with busy work while the war raged in Europe and the Paciﬁc. Hammett put in a request to be transferred to a combat zone, and soon found himself on the islands of Adak and Kiska in the Aleutian chain. With fellow corporal Robert Colodny, he wrote the booklet The Battle of the Aleutians: A Graphic Histor y 1942–1943, published by t he army’s Intelligence Sect ion in 19 4 4. He soon was put in Hammett wrote The Battle of charge of the servicethe Aleutians in 1944. men’s newspaper, The Adakian. Ironically, given his desire to be in on the action, Hammett missed the ﬁghting that occurred in the Aleutians, and only got to write a book about it. Hammett loved his time in the Aleutians. The much younger men he was stationed with called him “Grandpop” or “Pop,” asked his advice, borrowed money. In his letters home to Hellman and his daughters, he glamorized life in the army as he had never glamorized [ 51 ]

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detective work, with even a dismal march to the latrines against crushing winds made to sound like something no one ought to miss out on. The jazz sax player Bud Freeman of Chicago was one of the troops on the scene, and he recalled the creator of Sam Spade as “a super guy. He used to give two lectures a week on China . . . . It was like going to school. He had a lot of knowledge and was a wonderful man.” Referring to the editorials Hammett wrote for The Adakian, Freeman added, “I remember that he would favor the progress of the Russian troops, our allies, and rarely ever mentioned anything about American forces. And, as I recall, the general of the Alaskan command came down to see him about that. The general asked why he didn’t write of the progress of the American forces. Dashiell said, ‘Well, sir, this paper has a policy not to publish any ads.’” ♠

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ammett spent the last few months of his army service in Anchorage, and for some reason soured on an idea he had been contemplating of simply staying in the army. He left the service in September 1945 and went back into civilian life, with the radio shows of Sam Spade, Nick Charles, and Brad Runyon paying his way. In addition to spending his money on good times, Hammett increasingly became a contributor to leftist causes. He gave thousands of dollars to various groups, signed petitions, appeared at rallies. While he worked on new ﬁction, he found himself frozen to the extent that he never ﬁnished any project he started. Nonetheless he wrote hundreds of political speeches. Beginning in 1947, Hammett taught a class in creative writing for the Jefferson School of Social Sciences in New York. Frederic Dannay was one of the writers Hammett brought in to speak to his students. Richard Layman notes in Shadow Man that in 1949 Hammett hired a secretary to help with miscellaneous [ 52 ]

A Brief Biography

chores, as he decided to start writing again. But his typewriter seldom was engaged, and his secretary remembered that they would sit silent for hours at a stretch, reading. In her introduction to The Big Knockover Hellman spoke of that period beginning about 1948, noting, “good as it is, productivity is not the only proof of a serious life, and now, more than ever, he sat down to read. He read everything and anything.” His secretary said that Hammett, as his apartment piled up with books, often would burn them in the ﬁreplace. And he would receive requests for book jacket blurbs—Layman mentions one from Agatha Christie’s publisher, where Hammett declined comment. One of the few endorsements he gave was a blurb for the 1948 British edition of The Best Short Stories of M. P. Shiel, where Hammett stated that the author of that novel which had gripped the short fat Continental Op in “The Gutting of Coufﬁgnal” was nothing less than “a magician.” Hammett had bought a house near Los Angeles for his wife Josephine. He spent six months there with her and his children in 1950, lured back to work in Hollywood for the ﬁnal time by the promise of relatively easy money writing for the screen. The project he took an advance for was more ambitious than most: the director William Wyler was developing a ﬁlm for Paramount called Detective Story, to star Kirk Douglas, and wanted Hammett to do the screenplay. In this same period Hammett also talked with Alfred Hitchcock about working on one of his ﬁlms, but that fell through, and Raymond Chandler would be the Black Mask alumnus who would get a credit on a Hitchcock ﬁlm with Strangers on a Train for 1951. The deal with Wyler also fell through—Hammett found that he could not write, and returned the advance and bowed out of the project. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times during this visit, he commented on the tough school of detective writing of which he was the primary mover. Hammett said, “This hard-boiled stuff is a menace.” [ 53 ]

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In 1950 the only literary project he found himself interested in was the progress of Hellman’s play The Autumn Garden, although he did manage to write a short introduction for George Marion’s book The Communist Trial. Hammett’s own Marxist political beliefs came to trial in 1951. From about 1946, when he was elected president of the group, the ex-mystery writer had been associated with and active in the causes of the Civil Rights Congress, which had Communist afﬁliations. Hellman in her memoirs says that she did not know if he was a card-carrying party member or not, but Jo Hammett tells me that her father once showed her his Communist Party card when she was about twelve or thirteen years old. Hammett was serving as chairman of the bail bond fund for the Civil Rights Congress as the Communist witch hunts heated up under the direction of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Four Communists released on bail from that fund skipped out, and Hammett and three other men connected with it were pulled into court. The man who appeared in court before Hammett refused to cooperate and had been sentenced to six months in prison for contempt. Likewise, Hammett refused to cooperate with the inquiry—he took the Fifth Amendment repeatedly when pressed on his association with the Civil Rights Congress, invoking his right against self-incrimination dozens of times before he too was sentenced to six months in prison for contempt. When asked at the sentencing if he had anything to say as to why that judgment should not be pronounced upon him, Hammett said, “Not a thing.” On July 10, 1951, he was put into West Street Jail in New York City. From there he was transferred to a federal penitentiary in West Virginia and then to a prison in Kentucky. He got a month off for good behavior and was freed December 11, 1951. Hellman wrote that when she met Hammett at the airport after his release, he stumbled going down the stairs [ 54 ]

A Brief Biography

from the plane and afterwards never became well again. The stay in prison, the years in the Aleutian chain, his history of heavy smoking matched by heavy drinking—all the factors that could undermine his health began to overtake him. Coming out of prison, Hammett found himself one of a growing number of writers and artists facing a blacklist. Commercial sponsors in the McCarthy era were afraid of any connection with a “Communist writer.” Hammett was no longer active in screenwriting, so he could not be ﬁred by a studio or refused work by others, but he saw his name fade away just the same. Hollywood shied off from optioning more of his stories so a 1951 movie from Universal-International of The Fat Man—starring J. Scott Smart as Brad Runyon and also featuring a young Rock Hudson—was the last ﬁlm related to his work released in the author’s lifetime. The lucrative radio shows went off the air. In 1952 Ellery Queen edited an eighth collection of Hammett’s pulp writing under the title Woman in the Dark. The ninth and ﬁnal Queen gathering, A Man Named Thin, would not see print until 1962, when Hammett had been dead for a year. Only the witty martini-downing sleuths Nick and Nora Charles survived the connection with their creator. In an uncannily accurate forecast made in 1937 when he sold M-G-M the dramatic rights for $40,000, Hammett dismissed the pair as “insufferably smug” but said theirs was a “charming fable of how Nick loved Nora and Nora loved Nick and everything was just one big laugh in the midst of other people’s trials and tribulations.” Starring Peter Lawford, The Thin Man came to the new medium of television in the years when all other Hammett properties were untouchable. Since he had sold ﬁlm rights— Hammett had not anticipated TV—he made nothing from this show. Hammett desperately could have used the TV money. On the heels of his release from prison the Internal [ 55 ]

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Revenue Service looked into his tax situation and ﬁgured he owed unpaid taxes to the tune of more than $100,000. They froze his royalties and bank accounts, seizing the money that was available—but Hammett still owed more, and in the face of the blacklist the money stopped rolling in. But for the fact that Hellman and other friends paid his rent and bought him food, Hammett’s last years could have been much more bleak than they were. In 1952 his friends Dr. Sam and Helen Rosen offered him the four-room gatehouse cottage of their place in Katonah, New York, with the $75-per-month rent paid by Hellman. Hammett piled the place up with the books and gadgets he liked to accumulate, as well as a great deal of unanswered mail. Here he sat at the typewriter for one last try for one of those mainstream novels he had been thinking and talking about for decades, called Tulip—the unﬁnished fragment he managed to write was ﬁrst published by Hellman in The Big Knockover in 1966, the only non-Continental Op tale in the collection. Tulip is so clearly autobiographical that details from it have been lifted and applied to Hammett’s life in the various biographies. The story concerns a character named “Pop,” who like Hammett had had TB, had been on Kiska, had started to write while in San Francisco—all Hammett, of course, even to the inclusion of a bizarre book review of Arthur Edward Waite’s The Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross from 1924, concerning the Rosicrucian Order—the sort of off-trail book Hammett sought out and the kind from which he ﬁrst read of the falcon sent to Charles V by the knights on Malta. The main manuscript fragment of Tulip ends after sixty pages or so with the brutal observation: “If you are tired you ought to rest, I think, and not try to fool yourself and your customers with colored bubbles.” Hammett wrote four short paragraphs for the end of the projected book, in which the character Tulip says to Pop about the manuscript Pop has been working on, “I hurried through it this ﬁrst [ 56 ]

A Brief Biography

time, but I’ll read it again kind of carefully if you want me to.” The author never ﬁlled in the rest of the manuscript. ♠

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n 1953 Hammett was called before the televised Senate Internal Security Subcommittee hearings personally conducted by Senator McCarthy, in conjunction with Senator John McClellan and the lawyer for the subcommittee, Roy Cohn. Each time they asked Hammett about any Communist ties he may have had, he took the Fifth. The ﬁnal question from McCarthy today is quite famous: Mr. Hammett, if you were spending, as we are, over a hundred million dollars a year on an information program allegedly for the purpose of ﬁghting Communism, and if you were in charge of that program to ﬁght Communism, would you purchase the works of some 75 Communist authors and distribute their works throughout the world . . . ? McCarthy referred to books bought by the government for libraries in its foreign embassies. Hammett replied: Well, I think—of course, I don’t know—if I were ﬁghting Communism, I don’t think I would do it by giving people any books at all. McCarthy said, “From an author, that sounds unusual.” At that point, Hammett’s works were pulled from the government libraries, but soon were put back when President Dwight D. Eisenhower made a statement to the press that he would not have removed them from the shelves. By the time he was questioned by McCarthy, Hammett had little more to lose—he had stood up for his beliefs, and like so many others who deﬁed HUAC, he had been [ 57 ]

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crushed. Unlike many of the others, however, Hammett did not whine about his treatment—interviewed in 1957 by the Washington Daily News, he sardonically mentioned that he kept no less than three typewriters in his Katonah cottage “to remind myself that I was once a writer.” And of his imprisonment for contempt in 1951, he stated, “I found the crooks had not changed since I was a Pinkerton man. Going to prison was like going home.” Going home. For many Hammett fans, his stance during the McCarthy period is vindication for the years when he turned away from his hard-boiled stories, because Hammett facing the enemy in the 1950s could have been the Op or Sam Spade facing the enemy in the ﬁction—the attitude was the same, the code was the same. Ultimately, Hammett held true to the philosophy he put forth in his stories. Whatever he may have thought about knocking out the Black Mask junk in the 1920s or how many times he dismissed it later, in his stories it is obvious he was not kidding around—he personally meant what he said. When the chance came for Hammett to cooperate with the people who wanted to shove him around, he could have cooperated and kept his money, stayed insufferably smug as others faced their trials, but he did not. If he did not like it, he nonetheless took it. And refused the opportunities they gave him to beg. ♠

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n increasingly declining health, Hammett gave up his cottage later in 1957 and moved in with Hellman. From then until his death he lived in her New York apartment in 63 East Eighty-Second Street or her home on Martha’s Vineyard. The last couple of years he spent as a near invalid, and took to watching TV for hours at a time. On January 10, 1961, Hammett died in Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. Cancer of the lungs was the major contributing cause of death. [ 58 ]

A Brief Biography

The former pulp writer had requested that his body be buried in Arlington National Cemetery. He liked the army, feeling it was one of the very few social institutions in America in which there was some attempt to enforce social equality. J. Edgar Hoover wrote a letter included in Hammett’s FBI ﬁles, personally issuing an objection to his interment in Arlington. But Joseph McCarthy had died in the mid-ﬁfties, and with him went the Communist witchhunt of that day. Hammett, a veteran of two world wars, was buried in Arlington despite Hoover’s objections. Hammett’s importance to the ﬁction and cinema of crime and violence cannot be overestimated. His work paved the way for Raymond Chandler’s romantic private eye stories set in a Los Angeles bathed in heat and scented with jacaranda blossoms. He provided Bogart with the pivotal role of his career, and the Bogart cult, as widespread today as ever, has deep afﬁnities with the cult for Hammett. The appearance of his novels and stories in paperback recreated the excitement of their ﬁrst publication in Black Mask, inspiring new generations of writers to enter the hard-boiled arena—inspiring new writers today. His inﬂuence has spread far beyond the bounds of the detective story, and more and more Hammett is not being ranked just with his fellow pulp ﬁctioneers but with Faulkner and Hemingway and other major writers of his time. A standard. In his stories and novels, the majority of them written in San Francisco, Dashiell Hammett did what only a handful of writers have done: he created a mythic ﬁgure for our popular culture in the ﬁgure of Sam Spade, the hard-boiled detective, and created works of ﬁction which stand, more than three-quarters of a century later, with the best of their kind.

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Market Street to the Ferry Building in the early 1920s—no Bay Bridge yet.

Timeline of Hammett’s San Francisco Residences Circa July 7, 1921 marriage

120 Ellis Street

Circa July-August 1921 until July-August 1926

620 Eddy Street

During part of 620 Eddy residence

408 Turk Street

Circa August 1926 until October 1926

20 Monroe Street

Circa November 1926 until April 1927

1309 Hyde Street

Circa May 1927 until October 1929

891 Post Street

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P A R T

T W O

The Dashiell Hammett Tour

S

amuel Dashiell Hammett arrived in San Francisco summer 1921 and left in the fall of 1929. He began writing in this city, ﬁnishing almost all the stories and all three novels in his long series featuring the Continental Op, as well as what stands today as his single most famous work, The Maltese Falcon. In the tour which follows you can see the major sites of interest to the Hammett fan: all the known residences, scenes from his job with Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency, and the most important locales from his novel about Sam Spade, including the dead-end alley where Spade’s partner Miles Archer met swift death in the nightfog, and the Hammett hangout John’s Grill. Easily walked in two or three hours—or driven in a half hour—the tour starts in the Civic Center, a block from the Civic Center BART and Muni Metro station, and then loops along the [ 61 ]

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Overview of the tour route. Use the detailed maps in the following pages to visit the walking or driving tour stops.

edges of the Tenderloin, over Nob Hill, then down toward Union Square and a ﬁnish near the cable car turntable and the Powell Street BART station.

Begin where Larkin Street crosses McAllister Street, with the large structure of gray stone on the southeast corner:

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200 LARKIN: Hammett’s Reading Room

This building was dedicated in February 1917 as the new main library for The City of San Francisco, and Hammett, a proliﬁc reader for most of his life, made much use of it. After an extensive interior renovation, the site was turned over for use as the Asian Art Museum, which opened its doors for business in this location on March 20, 2003. The neoclassical façade remains very much as it looked in [ 62 ]

200 Larkin

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Hammett’s Reading Room

Hammett’s day, though—including the roll call of authors’ names chiseled into the stonework under the large secondﬂoor windows facing Larkin Street.

The old Main Library in the 1920s.

In an interview with Hammett’s wife and older daughter published in the November 4, 1975 issue of City of San Francisco magazine, his wife Josephine Dolan Hammett recalled that he particularly frequented the library when he was recuperating from illness, walking to this building every afternoon. The Hammetts lived for about ﬁve years in an apartment building in 620 Eddy—just three blocks up Larkin. The walks may have served as constitutionals for Hammett as the TB he had contracted in the army in World War I returned to plague his health during his ﬁrst years in San Francisco. In the early twenties Hammett simply was not making enough money to buy many books on his own, and in any case seems to have been by temperament a natural library user throughout his life. Check the book out, read it, return it. His younger daughter, named [ 63 ]

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The library reading room in 1923,

Josephine after her mother, once told me that Hammett signed out of a hotel he was staying in, during that period when he went back and forth frequently between New York and Hollywood. He left behind over ﬁfty books for room service to dispose of, but the hotel had the books packed and shipped to him. Hammett received the crate and was bafﬂed as to the possible contents. When he opened it he could not believe it—why had they forwarded these books? He already had read these books. [ 66 ]

200 Larkin

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Hammett’s Reading Room

when Hammett spent afternoons here.

A new main library for San Francisco now stands in the adjacent 100 block of Larkin. This modern library completes the plans for buildings to enclose the Civic Center which were envisioned after the destruction wrought by the 1906 earthquake and ﬁre. Another era for the San Francisco library has begun—but it is the shell of the old library in 200 Larkin that hosts the memory of Dashiell Hammett from the twenties, and his stops in his lifelong quest among books. [ 67 ]

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Across Larkin Street from the Asian Art Museum you’ll see:

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CIVIC CENTER PARK: Kids’ Playground

In the City interview, conducted when she was eighty years old, Josephine Hammett mentioned bringing their ﬁrst baby, Mary Jane, “to the park”—this park, conveniently close to their Eddy Street apartment. Mary Jane was born October 15, 1921, and her sister Josephine came along May 24, 1926, near the end of the Hammetts’ residence in Eddy. Jo Hammett said that their mother often took them to parks, sometimes even on extended excursions to Golden Gate Park or Fleishhacker Pool next to the Paciﬁc Ocean. Her younger daughter remembers her mother, originally from Basin, Montana, as remaining in many ways a country girl throughout her life, with a country view of child raising—which is to say, if you want healthy children, get them outdoors into the fresh air. Even in the twenties, fresh air seemed to be lacking on Eddy Street, so Josephine—or Jose—Hammett would get her girls up in the morning, feed them breakfast, dress them, bring them down to this park. They would go home for lunch, and then come back until it was dinner time. On the bitter cold days for the tour, I imagine these little girls decades ago, spending half their young lives freezing here in this park. In the interview, Mrs. Hammett stated that when she would bring the girls to the park in the afternoons to play, Hammett stayed home and cooked supper. She said he liked to cook hamburger with lettuce and when they could afford it, ground round. In the early twenties they probably could not often afford ground round. As a Pinkerton’s operative in 1921 she believed that Hammett was earning about $105 per month, with rent for their apartment $45 a month. His initial writing for the pulp [ 68 ]

Civic Center Park

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Kids’ Playground

Mary Jane Hammett in Civic Center Park in 1923, with the old Main Library in the background.

magazines beginning late in 1922 could not have earned much, because the pulps, on average, paid about 1¢ a word for material. Two ways existed for making better money as a pulp fictioneer: you could sit down at the typewriter and pound out millions of words a year (and many writers did); or, via building the appeal of your work to the readers you could slowly work your way up to better word rates, to 4¢ or 5¢ or—for a select few—even 6¢ a word. Hammett, with only six novel-length works and slightly more than one hundred short stories to his credit was by no means proliﬁc compared to other writers for the pulps, such as Max Brand, who turned out well over a million words year after year, or Erle Stanley Gardner, who wrote eighty-ﬁve novels and novelettes about his character Perry Mason alone, or the amazing Walter Gibson, who under the name Maxwell Grant wrote about The Shadow and before he stopped had knocked out over three hundred short novels of that macabre crimeﬁghter. Soon the appearance of Hammett’s name on the cover of Black Mask would guarantee sales of at least twenty percent more copies for that issue, and he asked for a raise in [ 69 ]

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word rates. When he hit 3¢ about 1924 the editor at Black Mask refused to pay him more—it was bad business to pay your writers too much money—and publicly rejected two new Continental Op stories, “Women, Politics, and Murder” and another known under the title “Who Killed Bob Teal?” The section “Our Readers’ Private Corner” for August 1924 acknowledges that Hammett and the Op “had become more or less ﬁxtures in Black Mask” but that “the stories were not up to the standard of Mr. Hammett’s own work—so they had to go back.” Hammett contributed a brief note to the impromptu symposium, stating that “The trouble is that this sleuth of mine has degenerated into a meal-ticket. I liked him at ﬁrst and used to enjoy putting him through his tricks; but recently I’ve fallen into the habit of bringing him out and running him around whenever the landlord, or the butcher, or the grocer shows signs of nervousness.” He seems to concede that neither story was “worth the trouble” to rewrite, but “Women, Politics, and Murder” appeared in the September 1924 issue of the Mask and Hammett further deﬁed the rejection by placing “Who Killed Bob Teal?” in the November 1924 issue of True Detective Stories. As the veteran pulp writer E. Hoffmann Price once told me, based on his experience of selling some six hundred stories to a wide variety of pulp magazines, the only way you could break into better money was to get those sons-of-bitches bidding against each other. In 1927 Joseph Shaw, as the new editor, lured Hammett back to Black Mask from the advertising writing he had turned to with a higher word rate, at which time he began work on the novels which soon took him on to New York, Hollywood, and the really big money to be made as a writer.

Describing Hammett having to make do with cooking hamburgers on the tour always seemed to me to be about economics, until the Hammett Can’t Cook Woman came on the walk. I told her group pretty much what you see [ 70 ]

Cit y Hall

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Politics and Murder

written here, and this woman said, “That guy Hammett— he couldn’t cook.” Taken completely off guard, I replied, “What do you mean?” “Well, he cooked hamburgers with lettuce—anyone can cook hamburgers with lettuce.” What could I say? I couldn’t defend a guy for being able to cook a hamburger. Yet somehow the idea that Hammett couldn’t cook kept coming up again and again during the walk—something that had never happened before and never happened again. Like, when we got to John’s Grill, the woman declared, “Hey, it’s a good thing Hammett never tried to open a restaurant—he couldn’t cook!” I was on the ropes. Shortly after that walk, though, I did a tour with Jo Hammett and remembered to tell her about the Hammett Can’t Cook Woman. “Well,” Jo told me, “he could bake.” I thought to myself, hey, if I’d known that I would have had some ammo—but I had been defenseless. The massive domed building directly across Polk Street from Civic Center Park is:

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CITY HALL: Politics and Murder

I like to look at City Hall as a symbol of the law in 1920s San Francisco, given that the old Hall of Justice of Hammett’s day has long since been torn down. That building stood on Kearny Street opposite Portsmouth Square, where a gigantic Hilton stands today. If you’ve seen any hard-boiled detective movies or read any hard-boiled detective books, you know that at some point the hard-boiled dick gets pulled into a bureaucrat’s ofﬁce where he gets to crack wise with the law. This happens in The Maltese Falcon when Sam Spade is called into the district attorney’s ofﬁce for questioning about the murders of his partner Miles Archer and the criminal Floyd [ 71 ]

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Thursby. With the D.A. are an assistant district attorney and a male stenographer, who transcribes every word. The D.A. asks Spade to hazard a guess about the murders. Spade says, “My guess might be excellent, or it might be crummy, but Mrs. Spade didn’t raise any children dippy enough to make guesses in front of a district attorney, an assistant district attorney, and a stenographer.” Scribbling furiously, the stenographer tracks the rapidﬁre dialogue which follows. Suddenly Spade pauses and asks him, “Getting this all right, son? Or am I going too fast for you?” Spade tells the D.A. if he wants to see him again to call Sid Wise, his lawyer, and slap a subpoena on him. Exit Sam Spade. Construction on City Hall was begun in 1913, and the dedication occurred in December of 1915. The previous City Hall near the corner of Grove and Hyde had taken twenty-nine years to build, and was occupied in 1899. During the 1906 earthquake it fell rapidly apart—the shoddy but incredibly expensive construction became a symbol of the graft which had dominated San Francisco’s political scene for so many years. Stay alert while reading Hammett’s San Francisco tales and you’ll ﬁnd many references to the contemporary social and political scene of The City.

Head west around the north side of City Hall on McAllister Street, past the statue of Hall McAllister after whom the street is named. Cross Van Ness Avenue and go another block west to the corner of McAllister and Franklin. The building on the northeast corner is:

4

580 McALLISTER: Whosis Kid Gundown

In “The Whosis Kid” (1925), one in the series of twenty-eight short stories about the gumshoe work of the Continental Op, the jewel thief Inés Almad has her [ 72 ]

580 McAllister

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Whosis Kid Gundown

580 McAllister, site of “The Whosis Kid.”

apartment in this building—on a top ﬂoor in the rear, at the east end. The street number “580” is never mentioned in the story, but there can be no doubt whatsoever that this building, standing at the time, is the one where the action takes place—the building is said to be at Franklin, on the corner with McAllister, with the front door opening on McAllister Street and the rear door opening onto Redwood Street, an alley on the north side. The description is so exact that the artist in New York in the 1940s who drew the map for this story’s appearance in the Dell Mapback edition of The Return of the Continental Op pointed an arrow right to this corner. I suggested in the quick biography of Hammett that by 1934 he certainly was the uncrowned king of the crime story in America. The multimedia triumphs of the comic strip Secret Agent X–9, the fast sales for his new novel The Thin Man, and movie versions of both The Thin Man and Woman in the Dark were not the only indicators. When Knopf brought out the hardback of The Thin Man that [ 73 ]

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year, he used a photo of Hammett himself, posing with a cane and hat as Nick Charles, for the cover. Hammett was famous in his own right, and he was earning a great deal of respect. In 1934, The Maltese Falcon was reprinted in Random House’s Modern Library series, the first contemporary detective novel so honored, joining titles by Hemingway and Faulkner and Joseph Conrad—and it went through several printings. Hammett wrote a special introduction to the Modern Library reprint of the Falcon, and said that the Spade novel came about because “somewhere I had read of the peculiar rental agreement between Charles V and the Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, that in a short story called ‘The Whosis Kid’ I failed to make the most of a situation I liked, that in another called ‘The Gutting of Coufﬁgnal’ I had been equally unfortunate with an equally promising denouement, and that I thought I might have better luck with these two failures if I combined them with the Maltese lease in a longer story.” The lease required the gift of one living falcon each year for Emperor Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire from the Knights Hospitalers, as rent for the 122 square miles of the island of Malta, located about sixty miles south of Sicily. Hammett, who had been paying $45 a month for furnished rooms in Eddy Street, obviously was impressed by this arrangement. The other Op tale he mentions, “The Gutting of Couffignal,” takes place on a made-up island named Coufﬁgnal in San Pablo Bay north of San Francisco, most likely modeled on Tiburon and Belvedere. The short fat detective is stuck with the second most boring assignment possible: guarding wedding presents. (The most boring assignment is the ﬂip side of guarding wedding presents, a divorce case.) As the Op settles in for the night with his copy of The Lord of the Sea, a gang of crooks assaults the island. They blow up the one bridge leading to the mainland, and then they begin to loot the place. They gut [ 74 ]

580 McAllister

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Whosis Kid Gundown

the bank and jewelry store as they storm over Coufﬁgnal, casually slaughtering people right and left. These crooks are so mean they even kill the butler and steal the wedding presents the Op has been guarding. In the meantime, the Op has been hustling his short fat body all over the island, shooting it out with them and trying to ﬁgure out who is behind the plan. Tussling with a crook, he sprains an ankle. He limps around, and by the time the Coast Guard ﬁnally arrives, he knows who the crooks are; he arranges for the entire gang, with the exception of one member, to be rounded up without further gunplay. The mastermind of the gang is still at large. She’s a beautiful, evil Russian princess. The Op intends to nab her personally. He starts to hobble up to the house he knows she’s in, but his sprained ankle just won’t carry his weight anymore. He takes a crutch from a crippled newsboy, limps up to the house and confronts the woman. In another tussle the crutch is knocked from his grasp. He falls back into a chair, hauling out his .38 special. She tries to bribe him. All the loot is in the basement—the two of them can become partners and get away with it yet! The Op tells her the simple facts: Detecting is his job; it is the only job he knows; it is the only job he enjoys; you can’t measure any amount of money against that. She says he can have anything he asks for—coming from a beautiful evil Russian princess in a story written for a pulp magazine like Black Mask, in all probability she’s not referring to home cooking. The Op thinks, nix on that—he doesn’t know where these dames get their ideas, anyway. The princess ﬁgures she can escape with her own skin, at least. The Op can’t get up to run her down, and surely he wouldn’t shoot a woman. She goes for the door. He shouts at her to stop. When she gets to the doorway, the Op pumps a bullet into her leg and she drops, staring at him in shock. He shouts at her: “You ought to have known I’d do it! Didn’t I steal a crutch from a cripple?” [ 75 ]

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A clear case, as in The Maltese Falcon, of the beautiful evil lady type ﬁguring she’s got enough oomph to get away with her plots, then ﬁnding out at the end that oomph is not enough. In “The Whosis Kid” all the action occurs in San Francisco, including a shoot-out on the north sidewalk of McAllister just east of Inés Almad’s apartment, car chases in the Haight and North Beach, and more. In this single Continental Op tale the main plot structure for The Maltese Falcon is quite evident. Inés Almad, the dapper Edouard Maurois, and a young homicidal maniac known as the Whosis Kid are partners in a jewel heist in Boston. They plan for Inés to take the jewels to Chicago while the two men stay on in Boston to establish alibis and let the heat cool off.

This 1947 Dell mapback plots the action in “The Whosis Kid.”

Later the three will meet in Chicago, split the take three ways, and separate. But Inés makes a deal on the side with Maurois to meet him in New Orleans, ditching the Whosis Kid, for a two-way split. At the same time [ 76 ]

Redwood Alley ♠

Unexpected Palm Tree

she works a triple cross—she tells the Kid she’ll meet him in St. Louis, and they’ll divide the jewels up between them. Instead, she ditches them both and comes to San Francisco, where they track her down. If you recall the plot of the Falcon, Brigid O’Shaughnessy and Joel Cairo are supposed to steal a jewel-covered statue of a falcon for the fat man, but Brigid betrays both Cairo and Gutman and comes via Hong Kong to San Francisco, where they track her down. In the short story, the Continental Op gets stuck in the middle of the resulting action. In the novel, the thieves ﬁnd they must deal with Sam Spade. Another striking similarity between story and novel is that at the end of “The Whosis Kid,” we ﬁnd the principal characters all gathered here in Inés’ apartment, waiting for her to reveal where she’s got the jewels hidden—just as in The Maltese Falcon we ﬁnd Spade, Brigid, Gutman, Cairo, and the young homicidal maniac of that work, Wilmer Cook, all waiting in Spade’s rooms for his secretary to bring in the black bird the next morning. When the jewels appear in the short story, guns blaze in 580 McAllister, and the Op faces a tense situation in a suddenly darkened, bullet-riddled apartment, with the Whosis Kid somewhere nearby with gun ready, and Inés also lurking in the dark, with a knife.

Go around Inés’ apartment house, up Franklin half a block—then duck right into Redwood Alley, or what little remains of it since the State of California erected the large state ofﬁce building which covers the rest of the block in the late 1980s. It is worth a look for a moment, for a stop I call the:

5

REDWOOD ALLEY: Unexpected Palm Tree

You can go past the front of this building a million times and never dream that there’s this huge palm towering [ 77 ]

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over the back courtyard. At one point in the story the Whosis Kid walks all the way down Redwood from Van Ness—more of the street was available for young homicidal maniacs to stalk down in the 1920s—then goes into the rear door of the court and into the building to search Inés’ rooms for the jewels. Of note is the cover story the Op comes up with to explain himself to Inés, as he tries to worm him way into the plot: he tells her he is a bootlegger. She says to him, “And you are the bootlegger?” “Not the,” I corrected her; “just a. This is San Francisco.”

Return to Franklin, take a right, then another right on Golden Gate. The next place for a brief stop is at Turk and Hyde a few blocks to the east. Here on the northwest corner of the intersection a little playground occupies the lot where once stood:

6

408 TURK: TB Flare-Up

As of this writing, 408 Turk is the only known Hammett residence in The City to have been razed, and it was gone long before I began leading the tour in 1977. He kept a ﬁrst ﬂoor room for a period in the early twenties, at the same time he and his wife had their apartment two blocks away in 620 Eddy. In 1921 Hammett was still an operative for Pinkerton’s at the remembered salary of $105 a month, $45 of which went to rent the place on Eddy. In 1922 he began taking the courses at the Munson secretarial school, making his ﬁrst sales to magazines late in the year. It’s hard to see how he could have afforded a separate place—especially for the purpose his daughter Mary Jane recalled he kept it. In the interview from City she said her father “kept his India ink” in his room at 408 Turk, adding, “he used to do a lot of sketches.” Josephine [ 78 ]

620 Eddy

♠

Blackmasking

Dolan Hammett said to her shortly before this account of India ink was mentioned, “You were little, you know.” Today, it’s hard to credit a recollection of “sketches” against the scenarios imagination draws forth—of a place where Hammett could have all-night poker games with his pals, win enough cash to pay for this extra room and buy a little ground round, or a room in which an op for Pinkerton’s could meet underworld contacts without involving his wife and infant daughter. . . . The apparent truth behind this separate place is far less exciting. When the tuberculosis slipped out of remission, Hammett was advised by doctors to limit contact with his family to avoid contaminating them. The Veterans Bureau, when the TB became active, paid for this room, since he picked up the disease while in the army. When Hammett became seriously sick with the illness, they also would give him varying amounts of disability pay. He kept this room away from Eddy Street, then, to avoid infecting Jose and Mary Jane with TB. (And, no, he didn’t seem much concerned with the health impact on his fellow patrons in the main library.)

From this corner go west on Turk to Larkin, turn right one block, then left on Eddy. Less than halfway up the block on the north side you’ll come to:

7

620 EDDY: Blackmasking

The Crawford Apartments are a major Hammett site. Of the eight years spanned by his stay in San Francisco, Hammett lived almost ﬁve of them in this building. Even if you factor in some months in 408 Turk and possibly some other TB-time apartment that remains unknown to us today, this place remains his longest residence in The City. [ 79 ]

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620 Eddy, where Hammett first wrote, and where he wrote most of his short stories.

Soon after their marriage July 7, 1921, once they had decided to stay in San Francisco, he and his wife set up housekeeping here in a $45 a month furnished apartment. It had a living room, a small bedroom with a Murphy bed folding down out of the wall, a kitchen, and a bath. It was steam heated. The Hammetts lived in this small apartment until after the birth of their second daughter in May 1926, when they moved into a larger set of rooms in the same building—apartment number 35 appears on an envelope to Jose Hammett that has survived, and appears to have been the second of the two. Hammett suffered from hemorrhaging while in this building, and in Turk Street, and used the backs of kitchen [ 80 ]

620 Eddy

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Blackmasking

chairs to support himself so he could maneuver over to the bathroom sink. It was here in Eddy Street that Hammett began to write. Too sick to continue as a Pinkerton’s operative, hoping to carve out a name for himself and also earn enough money to support his family, he sat down in this building and wrote roughly half of all the short ﬁction he would complete. He did not work on the novels in 620 Eddy, those came later, but he composed most of his Op tales—“Arson Plus,” “Zigzags of Treachery,” “The Scorched Face” and many more—as well as occasional non-series tales, such as “The Crusader,” which appeared in The Smart Set for August 1923 under the name of his infant daughter, Mary Jane Hammett.

Hammett and daughter Mary Jane on the roof of 620 Eddy, with the dome of City Hall in the background.

In the interview with City, Jose Hammett said that he wrote directly on the typewriter, and would go through draft after draft on a story until he got it to his satisfaction. In the ﬁrst of the apartments, which was small, he placed the typewriter on the kitchen table. In the next, larger [ 81 ]

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apartment, they set up a writing table for him in the living room. She said they got letters from Black Mask—maybe from the editorial staff, maybe from the readers, maybe from both—which demanded, More action! More action! She said that Hammett was “kind of upset about that,” but then he apparently decided to give the Black Mask public what they wanted. The Continental Op shorts and novelettes in Black Mask today stand as hallmarks of pulp magazine violence, as Hammett put the fat sleuth through the meat grinder in story after story. If it was violent, these stories had it. An Op tale from 1923, the ﬁrst year of the series, was titled—believe it or not, but it’s true—“Bodies Piled Up.” The ﬁrst Hammett novel to make it into hardcover, the Op adventure Red Harvest, is a dark symphony of mayhem—even the hard-boiled little detective reels under the number of deaths and realizes the urge to kill is making him “blood simple.” The Op tales offer more than acts of violence, of course. The picture drawn of San Francisco and its environs alone is reason enough to seek out these stories. They also contain a wealth of background lore from Hammett’s years with Pinkerton’s, and in a real sense perform as detective procedurals, showing the reader how it is done. In “Zigzags of Treachery” (1924), for example, Hammett via the Op explains the four cardinal rules of shadowing: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Keep behind the suspect; Never attempt to hide; Act naturally, no matter what the situation; Never meet the suspect’s eye.

With these tales—the gold standard of pulp detective ﬁction—Hammett by 1926 had set the stage for the revolution in crime ﬁction to come, and nailed down his claim as the father of the realistic detective story. Of course, “realism” is an imperfect term—it is hard to [ 82 ]

620 Eddy

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Blackmasking

believe the overweight Op could have dodged all the bullets and knives Hammett made him dodge. But the presentation of a “tough” world was realistic enough for postwar America. It was a mood or an attitude people could understand, even if the violence taking place was not right down their own street. The stories that poured out of 620 Eddy also clearly indicate that Hammett enjoyed writing them, and was willing to play with formulas which most of the other ﬁctioneers were taking seriously. His story “The Creeping Siamese” (1926) satirizes the stereotypes of sinister Asians which overpopulate the pulps, as a movie theatre owner claims he has been robbed by a group of “creeping Siamese” and the Op states, “Being around movies all the time has poisoned his idea of what sounds plausible.” In another novelette, “Corkscrew” (1925), Hammett moves the Op into a cowboy town in Arizona in a hilarious sendup of westerns. Some commentators just can’t seem to believe that Hammett was having fun—in Shadow Man Richard Layman says of “Corkscrew” that “throughout, the story borders on parody.” Hey, it crosses the border. One of the great fun reads which made Hammett such a popular draw for Black Mask. Hammett’s daughter Jo once said that she ﬁnds her father’s most characteristic voice in the sardonic humor which enlivens the Op tales. One speciﬁc example she gave comes from the novelette “Dead Yellow Women” from 1925, set in San Francisco’s Chinatown, where Hammett sends up such characters as Fu Manchu in the ﬁgure of Chang Li Ching—and also parodies the typical mysterious Chinatown treatment by having the plot revolve around the politics of China versus Japan, instead of the usual yellow peril hokum. Chang makes fun of the Op almost every time they meet with his exaggerated titles for the detective: The Emperor of Hawkshaws, the Father of Avengers, the Lord of Snares, the Disperser of Marauders, the King of Finders-Out, the Grand Duke of [ 83 ]

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Manhunters. The Op thinks, “This old joker was spoofing me with . . . a burlesque of the well-known Chinese politeness,” but ﬁnally he gets tired of the routine and begins to give it back. And here’s the moment where Jo heard her father’s voice in the words of the Op: “Not knowing who he was until too late, I beaned one of your servants last night. . . . I know there’s nothing I can do to square myself for such a terrible act, but I hope you’ll let me cut my throat and bleed to death in one of your garbage cans as a sort of apology.” Jose Hammett also said during their years in this building that Hammett tried other kinds of writing—the ﬁrst ad copy he did apparently was a blurb written for a shoe store in exchange for a pair of shoes. Needing more money than he was making at ﬁrst from the pulp sales, he placed an ad in the paper asking for any kind of honest work and noted that he could write, and landed a job writing ad copy for Samuels Jewelers. Hammett also took out ads in Writer’s Digest in 1924 which print his name as Dashiell Hammett and this address in 620 Eddy Street, San Francisco—but the four-word service offered is Criticism of Prose Fiction, “One dollar each thousand words.” It’s hard to imagine the ex-Pinkerton’s op hurtling into the thick of his best Continental Op tales while giving advice to aspiring writers on the side. But then in this same era the supernatural horror writer H. P. Lovecraft of Providence, Rhode Island was making a more reliable income in much the same way, by polishing stories and poems from hopeful amateurs rather than by selling his own tales to the pulp Weird Tales. In the 1926 City Directory, his last year in Eddy, Hammett listed himself at this address as “advertising manager of A. S. Samuels Co.” and devoted most of his [ 84 ]

The Puzzle of the Cit y Streets

attention to that job—only three stories saw print in Black Mask early in the year. On July 20, 1926 he was found lying on the ﬂoor of the advertising department unconscious in a pool of blood hemorrhaged from his lungs. Soon he and his wife decided that the best course of action while he healed would be for her to take the girls and visit her relatives in Montana for a few months. After she left, Hammett began a series of moves about San Francisco.

Mrs. Hammett in the City interview distinctly recalled that their landlady in 620 Eddy was a bootlegger. She said, “We used to peek down out the window and see all the cops coming and going.” That was during Prohibition, of course, but in some ways things haven’t changed that much. I thought it was appropriate as I was standing with a tour group on a corner in the Tenderloin that a crazed old guy denizen of the neighborhood stopped and shouted, “Tell them! Tell them! They’re all crack houses! Crack houses!” In the twenties liquor was prohibited and Hammett’s landlady was a bootlegger, today drugs are illegal but you can buy them on street corners all over town. The social reality is much the same. Return to Larkin and turn left. Pause mid-block where Willow alley enters Larkin and contemplate one of the lasting puzzles about Hammett and his work:

The Puzzle of the City Streets

I

n the Op story “Fly Paper” (1929) a woman dies from arsenic poisoning. A man and woman suspected of having knowledge of the crime are interviewed by the Op and a fellow operative of the Continental Detective Agency in an apartment building in 601 Eddis Street. Yes, Eddis. Not Eddy half a block to the south nor Ellis half a block to the north, but Eddis Street.

[ 85 ]

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In the same issue of City of San Francisco magazine with the interview with Hammett’s wife, Joe Gores contributes an article entitled “A Foggy Night,” in which he tries to pinpoint all the buildings used in The Maltese Falcon and as many sites from Hammett’s Op stories as possible. Gores is the author of several crime novels and a host of teleplays going back to Kojak and Magnum, P. I. My favorites among his books is the long-running series about Daniel Kearny and Associates of San Francisco, skip-tracers—based on Gores’ work as a detective, including nine years with David Kikkert and Associates, which is to the Kearny saga what Pinkerton’s is to the Continental Detective Agency. Gores says he became a detective out of his fascination with the Op stories, and later turned to writing. His 1975 novel titled Hammett works under the premise that it is 1928 in San Francisco and Hammett has not worked for Pinkerton’s in something like six years—his manhunting skills have grown rusty. Just as he’s about to make his assault on New York and Hollywood and the really big money to be made as a writer, one of Hammett’s friends is murdered and the ex-detective feels it is necessary to put back on his gumshoes to solve one last case. In 1982 Francis Ford Coppola produced the ﬁlm Hammett based on this book, directed by Wim Wenders, starring Frederic Forrest as Dashiell Hammett—the major early bookend of Gores’ interest in the author of The Maltese Falcon. As I write this, Gores is at work on what might be his concluding bookend, an authorized prequel to the Falcon titled Spade & Archer. In the article Gores discusses the problem of Eddis Street, and notes: “Hammett freaks have argued for years whether this is meant to be 601 Eddy or 601 Ellis.” He concludes that 601 Ellis was the address Hammett intended to be taken for 601 Eddis, saying “in neither Hammett’s day nor our own was there ever a 601 Eddy.” However, it clearly states in the story that the building overlooks Larkin Street. The 700 block of Ellis begins at Larkin; 601 Ellis overlooks Hyde a block to the east. The 600 block of Eddy does begin at Larkin. Many Hammett fans seem to feel that every building in every story was based on an actual place and that if just a little more description had been added you could ﬁnd the building today, presuming it has not fallen before urban renewal. They have cause—the street descriptions in “The [ 86 ]

Blanco’s ♠ DAIN CURSE Cuisine

Whosis Kid” are precise enough for a cartographer, and much of The Maltese Falcon tempts in the same direction. In other stories, however, Hammett becomes very vague— in “The House in Turk Street” (1924) we know the Op is trapped in a single-family house in a residential block of Turk, but no exact cross street is given—it could be any house in a fair number of blocks of Turk. The puzzle of these city streets continues to bother Hammett’s readers, though I don’t know of any ﬁstﬁghts that have broken out between the various disciples. For myself, I think Hammett sometimes went out and plotted the routes the Op follows on foot, or had good recall of a particular building when he needed it. In other cases I think he was trying to get the grocery money for the month together for Jose to pay off their tab at the local market, and wrote, there was a house in Turk Street—and that’s all there was to it, no special house, no particular block. And when he described the scene in 601 Eddis in 1929, looking back three years toward his ﬁrst residence in San Francisco, I think he was still having some fun with the “Black Mask junk,” working a twist on what he’d been up to with all the real names of the streets in story after story, making it that much more interesting for himself.

Other puzzles concerning Hammett will come up—but if you want a real puzzle, then ask yourself why would someone with TB settle in foggy San Francisco? Continue up Larkin, across Ellis (drivers will have to loop around to make a legal approach), until Olive Street opens at midblock. Turn into Olive and go down the alley. On the north side, slightly more than halfway through the block, stands a red brick building, easily spotted because of its huge vent pipe. Near the top of the wall, still discernible, is lettering for:

8

BLANCO’S: Dain Curse Cuisine

—which was a restaurant where the Op eats a meal in [ 87 ]

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Blanco’s in Olive Street, featured in The Dain Curse.

the last Continental Op novel, The Dain Curse. Hammett dedicated this book to Albert S. Samuels, his employer at Samuels Jewelers, and placed about half the action in San Francisco, including the Op’s run-in with a weird religious cult over on Van Ness Avenue—in some ways the novel’s so timely it could have been written yesterday. But if you go around to the front of this building on O’Farrell today, you’ll see that it no longer houses Blanco’s, but now is home for The Great American Music Hall—you may have been at a concert at some point, not knowing you were in what was once a famous restaurant in The City. Hollywood simply was not interested in The Dain Curse in Hammett’s lifetime, though it ﬁnally came to the TV screen in 1978 as a three-part miniseries. The producers of this version had no faith in Hammett’s vision of the Continental Op as a short fat unmemorable sort of character, and one who wishes to remain so deliberately unmemorable that when he tells about his casework he won’t even give the reader his name. For TV, then, you did not ﬁnd a short fat actor as the hero—James [ 88 ]

Blanco’s ♠ DAIN CURSE Cuisine

Coburn, looking more like Hammett himself than like the Op, played the part of detective Hamilton Nash (William F. Nolan once pointed out it does sound much like Hammett, Dash, as the makers of The Dain Curse try for a clear association between author and sleuth, as happened in The Thin Man). Personally, when I think of an actor to match up as the Op, I always picture Charles Durning—short, fat, great performer—with the Op looking like Durning in the movie The Sting, as dressed in a hat and trench coat he chases Robert Redford through a railroad yard. . . . The people doing this TV adaptation clearly were unaware that the way had been opened for them long before to have, at least, an unnamed hero, with the ﬁrst successful ﬁlm version of a Continental Op novel—a movie in many ways as pervasively inﬂuential through popular culture as is The Maltese Falcon starring Bogart, or the ﬁlms of Nick and Nora Charles (which have led to a legion of husband-and-wife detecting teams in novels and television). In 1961, the year Hammett died, Yojimbo (or, The Bodyguard), directed by Akira Kurosawa, gives screenplay credit to Kurosawa and Ryuzo Kikushima and is unmistakably a loose adaptation of Red Harvest. Kurosawa later said that Yojimbo was based on “an American detective story” (in one of the editions of his Movies on TV, Leonard Maltin gets the author right but misidentiﬁes Yojimbo as deriving from The Glass Key). Watching the movie, you can see how well Kurosawa had studied the Hammett tales, in which the Op usually gives his age as late thirties to early forties, and never reveals his name. He will say, of course, something like “I told her my name” or “I told him my name was John Smith,” but his real name remains unrevealed. Toshiro Mifune plays the wandering samurai who comes into a village torn by a war between two rival gangs, as Kurosawa simpliﬁes Hammett’s plot a bit—the town the Op comes into seethes with the struggle between several gangs and a [ 89 ]

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crooked police force. When asked his name, Mifune hesitates, scratches the stubble on his chin (borrowed not from Hammett but from Bogart, whose unshaven face became one of his trademarks in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The African Queen, et cetera). He walks across the room, looks out a window onto a ﬁeld of mulberries, and then says his name is “Kuwabatake (Mulberry Field) Sanjuro (Age Thirty) . . . Going on forty, though.” In the 1962 sequel, Sanjuro, the process is repeated: asked his name, Mifune rubs the bristle, says “My name is . . . ,” looks around, sees ﬂowers, “Tsubaka (Camellia) Sanjuro. But pretty soon I become yonjuro.” Sanjuro—thirty-something; yonjuro—forty-something. Some of the dialog in Yojimbo evokes Hammett precisely, as a man says if you kill one or one hundred, “you only hang once”—one of the three short stories Hammett wrote about Sam Spade was titled “They Can Only Hang You Once.” And three of the Op stories end abruptly with the punchline, They hanged him. Near the end of Yojimbo Mifune tells a corrupt ofﬁcial, “Go hang yourself.” In 1964 another version of Red Harvest appeared, not as a samurai movie but as what soon became known as a spaghetti western: A Fistful of Dollars, directed by Sergio Leone, bringing an unshaven Clint Eastwood to the big screen in the role that would make him an international superstar—pay attention—The Man With No Name. Kurosawa protested the boosting of the exact same plot as Yojimbo, with the two rival gangs at war in a town and the lone gunﬁghter coming in and stirring up trouble, but Leone defended himself by pointing out that the idea of a guy scurrying back and forth between two forces and creating havoc could be traced in Italy back to the mid–1700s and Carlo Goldoni’s Commedia dell’Arte farce Servant of Two Masters. Yes, but it seems Hammett was the writer who brought the concept into the twentieth century and made it violent, as the Op tames that town modeled on Butte, Montana. [ 90 ]

811 Geary

♠

Stalking Sam Spade

Leone went on to direct Eastwood in two sequels, For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966). And I still can’t see why, if Clint Eastwood can get through three movies without having a name, someone in Hollywood couldn’t hire a short fat actor to star as a never-named Continental Op. It may happen yet, as various producers try to clear rights for a direct adaptation of Red Harvest for the screen—at one point, Bernardo Bertolucci had his eye on it as “an American Marxist opera.”

Return to Larkin, turn left. The next site is on the south side of Geary between Larkin and Hyde:

9

811 GEARY: Stalking Sam Spade

This apartment building is where the respected science fiction, fantasy, and supernatural horror writer Fritz Leiber lived for several years, from January 1970, shortly after coming to San Francisco, until 1977, when he moved a couple of blocks down to 565 Geary. During his ﬁrst years in this building he happened to reread The Maltese Falcon, and realized that he was living right on the edge of the action: “Geary Street between Hyde and Market is the spine of The Maltese Falcon—most of the action was on or near it, though once Spade uses the streetcar on Sutter.” In California Living, the magazine supplement of the Sunday San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle for January 13, 1974, Leiber published the ﬁrst article surveying sites used in the novel under the title “Stalking Sam Spade.” Leiber even concluded that Spade lived in an apartment building near Geary and Hyde, because at one point Spade rides the 38 Geary streetcar from downtown, debarks at Hyde, and goes “up” to his rooms—“up” stairs or an elevator, ﬁgured Leiber, though he did not say nor even secretly believe that Spade went up the stairs in 811 Geary where he himself was living. [ 91 ]

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In this same period, from late 1973 through 1975, Leiber also wrote a supernatural horror novel completely set in San Francisco, Our Lady of Darkness, published in 1977. The hero of that book, Franz Westen, also lives here in 811 Geary in room 607, whose description and view exactly matches that of Leiber’s apartment, which was one ﬂoor down in room 507. Following the Hammett model from the Falcon, Leiber used actual buildings and realistic street movements, and compressed the action down to only two days in the mid-seventies—but he worked in ﬂashback sequences to earlier periods in San Francisco’s history, drawing upon such literary ﬁgures as Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, and the poets George Sterling and Clark Ashton Smith. And in a scene from the twenties, Dashiell Hammett comes onstage as an actor in the narrative. You may think it odd: Hammett, hard-boiled detective writer—what’s he doing in a ghost-story novel? Hammett had an interest, though, because in 1931 he allowed his name as editor for the anthology of horror tales Creeps by Night from the John Day Company, which featured supernatural ﬁction by William Faulkner, John Collier, and other well-known authors of the time, and also offered one of the earliest hardcover publications for the horror writers H. P. Lovecraft and Donald Wandrei, whose work had appeared in the pulps. Today researchers debate how much Hammett contributed as “editor,” ﬁguring an inhouse editor may have done most of the story selection for the book, but there seems to be little doubt that Hammett wrote the appreciative introduction for the collection. I talked with Don Wandrei about this issue once, and he said he never had direct dealings with Hammett, only with an editor at John Day.

The next site is one block to the north on the corner of Post and Hyde. Whether you move on foot directly up Hyde or take your machine along Geary, up Larkin, and to the [ 92 ]

891 Post

♠

Sam’s Place

right down Post, you might notice that you are in one of the most authentically 1920s, Hammett-era parts of The City covered by the tour. From the corner of Post and Hyde, in particular, the skyline looking to the north and to the south are very much the same skylines Hammett would have seen, time after time, as he climbed this block from the 38 Geary stop or walked down the hill to pick up the streetcar. (I ﬁnd it hard to believe based on the trafﬁc on the street today, but the 38 Geary streetcars ran both ways up and down Geary until December 1956.) This entire area burned in the ﬁre of 1906, of course, but many of the buildings in this neighborhood did not go up immediately after the cleanup—some of the ones you see today were brand new or under construction when Hammett came to town in 1921. The four-story brick building on the southeast corner of Post and Hyde dates from 1917—it was just a decade old when Hammett took rooms in:

10

891 POST: Sam’s Place

When last seen, Hammett was living in 620 Eddy Street, but in August of 1926 had moved to 20 Monroe Street, closer to downtown—his wife had taken their daughters to visit her relatives in Montana for a few months after his TB ﬂared violently up again and he contracted hepatitis. Returning to San Francisco, they seem to have stopped with him in Monroe very brieﬂy. Jo Hammett remembers her mother telling her about a “dark” apartment plagued by rats—a place she hated—where they stayed with her father after coming back from the trip. Almost immediately Jose and the girls moved across the bay to Marin County, to a place near Fairfax. If you check Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett: 1921–1960 (2001), you’ll ﬁnd a letter dated October 1926 written [ 93 ]

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891 Post, where Hammett lived in apartment 401 (top right corner facing Post Street).

in Monroe Street, but by November Hammett was writing letters from 1309 Hyde, with his family still over in Marin. All current evidence suggests that he stayed in Hyde Street only somewhat longer than he had stayed in Monroe—by May 1927 his mail is coming from 891 Post Street, the Charing Cross Apartments. Hammett will stay at this address until he leaves for New York. In Selected Letters, he is still writing from here on September 12, 1929, but a letter dated on October 18 is posted from New York. After he was found unconscious in the pool of blood on July 20, 1926, his employer Albert Samuels provided Hammett with a letter for the Veterans Bureau which indicated that he was too sick to hold a job, and they granted him 100% disability. Yet soon after he came to Post Street the TB was gone—and would never recur. Only as he returned to full-time ﬁction writing at the urging of the new editor at Black Mask, Joseph T. Shaw, [ 94 ]

891 Post

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Sam’s Place

would Hammett ﬁnally leave Samuels. The December 1927 issue of Western Advertising carried a short notice that “Dashiell Hammett, 891 Post Street, San Francisco, has resigned his position as advertising manager for the Albert S. Samuels Company . . . Hammett has not announced his plans for the future.” At this point Hammett had published around sixty stories and articles, and Shaw was very enthusiastic about buying stories in longer lengths. For the February 1927 issue of Black Mask Hammett provided the novelette “The Big Knockover,” which because of the timing would have to have been written in 1309 Hyde Street, as would the sequel, “$106,000 Blood Money” which appeared in the May issue. These two novelettes comprise his ﬁrst novel, published as a separate book in 1943 under the title $106,000 Blood Money and reprinted later that year simply as Blood Money—in 1948 another reprint appeared under the name The Big Knockover, the title Alfred Knopf used in 1934 when he bothered Hammett “with pleas that we bring The Big Knockover out between covers.” Hammett followed Knockover with another Op novelette, “The Main Death,” and then sat down at the typewriter for almost two years to produce full-length novels. Red Harvest opened in Black Mask in November, 1927, and wrapped in February, 1928; The Dain Curse opened in November, 1928, and wrapped February, 1929. Incidentally, The Dain Curse supports the idea that Hammett actually had an interest in ghost stories—the atmosphere throughout evokes the idea of a supernatural curse hovering over the characters, and in one scene Hammett pictures the Op trapped by the religious cult and gassed—the fat detective hallucinates that he is slugging it out with a ghost as he staggers toward a door. And then Hammett began work on his next novel, one in which he abandoned the Continental Op—no doubt exhausted after two years of nonstop shooting his [ 95 ]

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way through three novels—and created a new detective. The name of the new detective was Sam Spade. The new novel: The Maltese Falcon, the most famous mystery ever placed in San Francisco, and a book that will hold its own in an arm-wrestling match with any other ever set here.

Red Harvest, The Dain Curse and The Maltese Falcon were written in 891 Post.

Hammett told Ellery Queen that the Op was modeled on his Pinkerton’s supervisor in Baltimore, but of his new sleuth he said: Spade had no original. He is a dream man in the sense that he is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been and what quite a few of them in their cockier moments thought they approached. For your private detective does not—or did not ten years ago when he was my colleague—want to be an erudite solver of riddles in the Sherlock Holmes manner; he wants to be a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent by-stander or client. [ 96 ]

891 Post

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Sam’s Place

Not only is 891 Post the building where Hammett created Sam Spade, it also is the building where Spade lives in the course of the novel. In his article “Stalking Sam Spade” Fritz Leiber ﬁgured that the detective lived in an apartment house near Geary and Hyde, because of that moment when Spade steps off the 38 Geary streetcar and goes “up” to his rooms. But in his article “A Foggy Night,” published in City the following year, Joe Gores points out a clue or two Leiber missed. At one point Spade is on the phone with Joel Cairo, and says, “ . . . This is Spade. Can you come up to my place—Post Street—now?” Later in the action Spade goes out to see if Wilmer Cook, Gutman’s boy gunman, is still watching his apartment. The line reads: “Post Street was empty when Spade issued into it.” Obviously, then, Spade lives on Post, and walked one block up Hyde from Geary after leaving the streetcar. Gores notes that correspondence between Hammett and his publisher indicates that a draft of this novel existed by early 1928, about midway through Hammett’s stay here—and what would be more natural, given the existing clues, than that Hammett would place Spade’s apartment in the same building he himself lived in? Of course, if you really want to quibble, you could say that Spade lives in another twenties’ vintage apartment building in this area of Post—the one next door, maybe one up the block, but I think you’d have to be a sap to go for any address other than 891 Post. Tradition in this building has Hammett staying in apartment 401—top corner window overlooking Post, away from downtown. We can be sure Spade’s rooms are on the top ﬂoor because of an incident toward the end of the novel, when Gutman offers Spade $10,000 for the falcon—ten $1,000 bills in an envelope. Spade hands the envelope to Brigid to hold, then gives it back to Gutman at his request; the fat man palms a bill and reports it missing, with the apparent intent of seeing how much Sam Spade actually trusts Brigid O’Shaughnessy. [ 97 ]

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Spade makes Brigid go into the bathroom and remove her clothes, but before he searches her he says to Gutman and Joel Cairo (at that moment Wilmer Cook is unconscious on the couch): “The door will be open and I’ll be facing it. Unless you want a three-story drop there’s no way out of here except past the bathroom door.” A three-story drop places Spade’s apartment on the fourth and ﬁnal ﬂoor.

Living room shared by Hammett and Spade.

A few years ago the architect Bill Arney moved into the apartment and did some on-the-spot research, ﬁguring out that unit 401 matches the clues in the novel better than any other apartment in the building. Arney had taken the Hammett tour in July 1982 and picked up the Sam Spade bug, which lay dormant for over a decade. Some details he uncovered just don’t ﬁt—no unit in 891 Post has a breakfast nook as described in the Falcon, but other details are spot-on, including a bend in the passageway leading into the studio apartment, proximity to the eleva[ 98 ]

891 Post

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Sam’s Place

tor, and the layout of the bathroom which would make the strip search work exactly as Hammett describes it. My favorite of the discoveries Arney made while he lived here is the casual clause which reads “In his bedroom that was a living-room now the wall-bed was up”—if you’re reading quickly along and don’t notice those words, you might think that Spade had a living-room and a bedroom, because throughout the novel when the Murphy bed is folded up into the wall, the term living-room is used. When it is down it is the bedroom—but it’s just one studio room. On March 19, 2005, in celebration of the seventy-ﬁfth anniversary of the publication of The Maltese Falcon in hardcover by Knopf in 1930, a plaque was installed on the front of this building—tagging one of San Francisco’s most important Hammett began to literary sites as a national literary write The Glass Key landmark. It was in his apartment (1931) in 891 Post. here that Spade, at the end of the novel, set the edges of his teeth together and delivered his immortal line to Brigid O’Shaughnessy: “I won’t play the sap for you.”

On hand for the plaque dedication were Hammett fans and scholars such as Joe Gores and Richard Layman, plus Jo Hammett and her children. Jo gave a nice, brief talk to the crowd that gathered, but afterwards one woman edged over to me and whispered: “Why does Hammett’s daughter keep pronouncing his name as Da-SHEEL? Doesn’t she know it’s DASH-ull?” I told her, “Now think about this for a minute—who do you think knows how to pronounce the name—you, or Hammett’s daughter?” (Admittedly, everyone I have ever known—me included—always calls him DASH-ull until [ 99 ]

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Plaque proclaiming 891 Post a national literary landmark.

ﬁnally learning of the proper inﬂection occasioned by the French origins of the name.) Start heading up Nob Hill for the next site near the corner of Clay and Hyde. If you’re on foot and get tired and want to stop for awhile, you might wish to consider during your break:

The Puzzle of Spade and the Falcon

W

hen you think about it for a moment, Sam Spade is a damn fine name for a hard-boiled detective—and the puzzle is, where did Hammett come up with it? How? The “Sam” is obvious—Hammett’s own ﬁrst name, with his wife and the people who knew him in his Pinkerton’s days all calling him by Sam or Samuel. His co-workers at Samuels Jewelers, who knew of all his stories

[ 100 ]

The Puzzle of the Spade and the Falcon

under the name Dashiell Hammett, seem to be the folk who started calling him Dashiell—then, in Hollywood, he became Dash. But Sam without Spade is not enough, that magic is not there; it’s like Arthur Conan Doyle’s initial name for his private consulting detective, Sherrinford Holmes—we can all be glad the name Sherlock came to his mind before the ﬁrst story saw print. In the September 22, 1980 issue of New West, Tim Hunter did a feature article on the making of the Coppola ﬁlm Hammett—which went through a couple of directors, was over half ﬁnished at one point and then re-shot, and which ultimately had over thirty differing versions of the screenplay. Hunter notes that the screenwriters who worked on the project mostly had very little overlap in their treatments, but that “there was one idea that just wouldn’t quit: How did Hammett get the idea for Sam Spade’s name?” One of the versions, Hunter writes, plays on the blond Satan image from the novel, with Hammett then saying “he’s got my ﬁrst name. But his last . . . it’s like it came out of a grave . . . Spade. How’s that, huh? A guy named Sam Spade?” Another treatment had Hammett punning after a shoeshine. Another had a takeoff of the expression “calling a spade a spade.” One of the most impressive explanations I ever heard was that Sam Spade was simply Hammett’s first two names: Samuel Dashiell—with the original name in French being de Chiel, which translates as of the shovel or the spade. Sounds great, but the translation is wrong (I had it checked), with de Chiel at best sounding like words which mean the ladder. And I have met a few people who claim Hammett got the idea from someone in their family he once knew—one note I’ve kept has this guy named Spayde claim that his Aunt Estelle—Essie Spayde—worked for Pinkerton’s at the same time Hammett did, and the family had prided themselves on the fact that Hammett’s famous detective was perhaps named after Aunt Essie. Yeah, sure. As for the falcon, I’m always curious to follow its legendary progress—not the falcon from the novel, which seems to have been based on historic precedent. Hammett probably came up with the idea for the jewel-covered statue himself, but the idea of living falcons in tribute to Charles V has some substance—at least as much as the legends of

[ 101 ]

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Robin Hood. No, my interest is in the falcon statue from the Bogart movie. A few of these props have turned up, with lots of information now available in Richard Layman’s compilation Discovering The Maltese Falcon and Sam Spade (2005), but the one that I try to shadow is the lead statuette that sold at auction at Christie’s in New York in December 1994 for $398,500 to Ronald Winston, of Harry Winston, Jewelers to the Stars. People who attended the auction said that no one could have stood against Winston, who apparently was ready to go up to one million bucks to acquire the black bird. Early in 1995 Winston allowed his acquisition to come to San Francisco for a charity fund-raiser, which also drew in the last surviving cast member from the Bogie Falcon, Elisha Cook, Jr. I vividly recall Bill Arney commenting not so sotto voce as we gazed on the statue, “But it’s a fake!” “Yeah, well—but Bill, it is a fake from the Bogart movie!” The tremendous pop culture appeal of that film becomes more evident every year, and I love the fact that the props representing the bogus bird that Gutman ends up with are worth as much real money as the jewel-covered statue he was seeking. A year or two after the bird blew through the burg, Arney showed me a newspaper clipping he had noticed where it was reported that Winston had sold the prop for an undisclosed sum to an undisclosed buyer, rumored to be somewhere in Europe—or perhaps to an oil-rich Saudi prince. Does this remind anyone else of the plot of one of our favorite novels?

The next site is located on the west side of Hyde between Clay and Washington, but after mentioning Bogart versus Hammett’s original description of Spade as “a blond Satan,” how about a quick look toward the large brick building with the soaring awning that stands on the southwest corner of Washington and Hyde?—the Keystone Apartments, site of a big shoot-out in 48 Hours, the movie which introduced Eddie Murphy to the big screen. The scene ﬁlmed here featured Nick Nolte [ 102 ]

1309 Hyde ♠

Big Knockover

in a gun battle with a couple of bad-guy psycho-killers, played by James Remar and Sonny Landham. As with Charles Durning for the Op, I’ve long thought that Nick Nolte is a perfect match for Hammett’s description of Spade in The Maltese Falcon—no offense to Bogart, who wasn’t blond, large, slope-shouldered or Satan-faced, but who ran off with the role anyway. Worth noting is that the director of 48 Hours, Walter Hill, a protégé of Sam Peckinpah, tried for years to get the go-ahead to make a ﬁlm of Red Harvest, but never could clear the rights. Finally in 1996 he did a variant version under the title Last Man Standing, based on the screenplay for Yojimbo. Bruce Willis played “John Smith,” doing suitable nodding to the nameless ﬁgure of the Op, but didn’t gain enough weight to ﬁnally give us a short fat nameless hero setting the rival gangs against each other that we all need to see on the big screen. But the place you came up the hill to see is:

11

1309 HYDE: Big Knockover

The Locarno Apartments overlooking the spur line for the California Street cable car is the place Hammett moved to from 20 Monroe Street circa November 1926. His wife was living with their children on a farm in Marin County, a break from city life. When Hammett visited them, he took a ferry across the icy waters—the bridge which would span the Golden Gate was a decade in the future. In the thirties and forties Hammett saw his daughters when he was in Hollywood, and spent the summer of 1950 with them. After coming out of prison in 1951, his health no longer permitted him to make the trip from where he was living near Lillian Hellman on the East Coast to the West Coast to visit them, but Mary Jane moved to New York for a few years and Jo also visited him, bringing along his grandchildren. [ 103 ]

[ 104 ]

[ 105 ]

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1309 Hyde, where Hammett wrote his first novel.

By May 1927 Hammett was installed in 891 Post, where he would remain until he left San Francisco for New York City in October 1929. Among his typescripts which have the address 1309 Hyde on them, Vince Emery tells me that the archive of Hammett papers held in the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas in Austin contains two stories—“Faith,” with the typed address 620 Eddy Street crossed out and 1309 Hyde written in by hand, and “An Inch and a Half of Glory,” where the typed address 1309 Hyde is crossed out and 891 Post is added by holograph. But the major works dating from the few months Hammett lived here are “The Big Knockover” and “$106,000 Blood Money,” which put together form Hammett’s ﬁrst novel. Hammett’s most lavish use of San Francisco locales, The Big Knockover features a gang of some one hundred crooks storming into the Financial District, simultaneously robbing two banks which face each other across Montgomery at Pine. The Op tears off after them through virtually [ 106 ]

1309 Hyde ♠

Big Knockover

every neighborhood available to be shot up, including some—such as Holly Circle—which are almost completely unknown even to people who have lived in The City for years. Hammett is having big fun in this story, and in no respect is it more apparent than in his tally of the crooks as the bodies pile up: “There was the Dis-and-Dat Kid, who had crushed out of Leavenworth only two months before; Sheeny Holmes; Snohomish Shitey, supposed to have died a hero in France in 1919; L. A. Slim, from Denver . . . ; Old Pete Best, once a congressman . . . ; Alphabet Shorty McCoy . . . ; Bull McGonickle, still pale from ﬁfteen years in Joliet; Toby the Lugs, Bull’s running-mate, who used to brag about picking President Wilson’s pocket in a Washington vaudeville theatre . . . ; The Shivering Kid . . . ; Happy Jim Hacker; Donkey Marr, the last of the bow-legged Marrs, killers all, father and ﬁve sons; Toots Salda, the strongest man in crookdom, who had once picked up and run away with two Savannah coppers to whom he was handcuffed. . . . ” If you want a three-word argument on behalf of becoming a fan of Hammett’s writing, I’ll give it to you: The Big Knockover. In his editorial notes on this story in Black Mask, Joseph Shaw figured he had better cover the bets against charges of Written 1926–1927, exaggeration, so he pointed out $106,000 Blood Money (also titled The Big that such a large-scale robbery Knockover and Blood was possible, given the gang Money) was first published wars then raging in Chicago as a book in 1943. and that “the big mail truck holdup in Jersey [had] found bandits using airplanes, bombs, and machine guns—and now Mr. Hammett pictures a daring action that is stunning in its scope, yet can [ 107 ]

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anyone be sure it isn’t likely to occur?” I guess Shaw didn’t get out to the movies much, because I’ve long thought that Hammett pulled the idea for The Big Knockover out of a 1920 silent feature starring Lon Chaney called The Penalty. In this ﬁlm Chaney plays another of his famous grotesques, an underworld king whose legs have been lost at the knees because of the carelessness of a surgeon. His plans remain big, though—Chaney is pulling hundreds of crooks into town—and the town is San Francisco—in order to ﬁght off the police as he robs the Mint. Right there you have the germ and more for Hammett’s ﬁrst novel. The Penalty was ﬁlmed in part on location in San Francisco, and features one spectacular dream sequence in which Chaney imagines he once again has legs as he leads his gang up the stairs of the Old Mint at Fifth and Mission Streets. Without question, when Shaw came into the editorship of Black Mask he unleashed the whirlwind, enabling Hammett to write the novels that would cinch his fame. The ﬁrst hardcover from Knopf, Red Harvest, bears a dedication to “Joseph Thompson Shaw” in recognition of his role, but as one novel after another rolled from Hammett’s typewriter, Shaw found that the whirlwind couldn’t be contained—by 1930 the former detective was getting too big for his longtime market. Soon after getting to New York Hammett said goodbye to the Op with the short story “The Farewell Murder,” which appeared in Black Mask for February 1930 just before The Glass Key saw print over the next four issues for March, April, May, and June. One more Op story, “Death and Company,” would see print in the November 1930 issue of the Mask—one of the weakest entries in the series. I’ve long thought that Hammett dug that one out of a stack of rejected stories circa 1924 when he brieﬂy fell into a rut with similarly uninspired stories such as “Women, Politics, and Murder.” As a left-handed favor to Shaw, I think Hammett sold him the “Death and Company” dud [ 108 ]

1155 Leavenworth

♠

Writer at Last

so the editor could run Hammett’s byline one last time. After “Death and Company” Black Mask could no longer afford its star contributor’s work, so Hammett’s new stories debuted in Colliers, Liberty, Redbook.

Head east on Clay one block, turn south down Leavenworth another block to where it intersects Sacramento. The building on the southwest corner is:

12

1155 LEAVENWORTH: Writer at Last

The San Loretto Apartments were long thought to have been Hammett’s ﬁnal address in San Francisco, because the City Directory for 1929 lists him as living here and gives his occupation for the ﬁrst time as “writer.” The thought had been that he moved here from Sam Spade’s rooms by spring 1929, while Jose took the two girls and relocated to the Los Angeles area, so that Hammett would be able to see his daughters after he made his planned assault on New York and then Hollywood.

1155 Leavenworth, where Hammett’s family lived. [ 109 ]

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Largely because of letters that have turned up in recent years, we now know that Hammett kept his residence in 891 Post but moved his family here when they came back to The City from Marin County, and he—or Jose—told the survey folk from the City Directory what he thought they should know. Especially interesting is a pictorial postcard from May 1928 that he directed to his daughter Mary Jane at this address—sent from Los Angeles when he traveled south to sound out the studios about getting work. The card shows the crowded lobby of the “Hotel Alexandria, Los Angeles, Cal.” And Hammett has inked a cartoon of himself into the scene, with a descriptive blurb reading “Papa sitting in the lobby—trying to look like John Gilbert, or Lon Chaney, or both.” Obviously his ambitions were rising rapidly—his ﬁrst novels had yet to appear in hardback from Knopf, yet he had his eye on the movies. His writing shows his interest in cinematic technique—he might have taken a theme from Henry James and The Wings of the Dove, but he wasn’t averse to copping major mob scenes from The Penalty, either. Hammett presented strong visual images, but surpassed those with his dialogue—The Maltese Falcon is a story in which people mostly stand around in rooms talking to each other, yet the dialogue propels it relentlessly forward. Just watch the Bogie version to see that this is true. From one clue alone I think it is safe to say that Hammett was strongly inﬂuenced by ﬁlm, and clearly intended his novels to end up in Hollywood: in the Falcon he actually gives Spade and Brigid O’Shaughnessy a theme song, played once on the phonograph when they are together and hummed later by Spade: En Cuba. His wife also made the move to southern California in part because she had a few relatives in the area, and probably realized that any kind of regular life with her husband was over. The separation which had been growing occurred for any number of reasons, but perhaps the largest was the change in expectations—she wanted a [ 110 ]

1155 Leavenworth

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Writer at Last

relatively normal home life but Hammett literally wanted to go Hollywood and get the money and fame that came with it. In San Francisco Hammett had begun to drink heavily, and she had problems with that. And while he was working for Samuels Jewelers her husband’s attentions wandered to a woman named Peggy O’Toole who was an artist in the ad department—in his introduction to the Modern Library reprint of The Maltese Falcon Hammett wrote that he modeled Brigid O’Shaughnessy in part on this woman, and in part on a woman who came into the Pinkerton’s ofﬁce in San Francisco and hired Hammett as an operative to ﬁre her housekeeper for her—she just couldn’t do it herself. But when he came to dedicate The Maltese Falcon in 1930 the artist was history and the book was presented “For Jose.” Tradition in this building handed down from manager to manager places the Hammett family in apartment 2, a studio bedroom with a small kitchen and bath, and in those days a Murphy bed folding out of the wall. The ﬁrst ﬂoor windows look out over Leavenworth at the south end of the building. And while Hammett may not have been living here, working on the polish draft of The Maltese Falcon, there is no question but that he came up the hill frequently to see his family.

It’s interesting that Hammett waited until his last year in San Francisco to credit himself in the City Directory with being a “writer,” since he’d been supporting himself by writing since 1923, but I suppose he may have thought some people would argue the point—many people, even today, do not consider writing for the pulps to be “real writing.” Yet in 1929 Alfred A. Knopf would release two Hammett novels in hardcover. Haul out a couple of his books published by Knopf and the argument about whether or not he was a real writer would be over for most people. I did have, however, a woman come on the tour who listened patiently enough, but toward the end of the [ 111 ]

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walk asked, “But didn’t Hammett ever try to write any real books?” I replied, “Well, no, he only managed to write stuff like The Maltese Falcon—though you’ve got to consider that 99% of the ‘real books’ of Hammett’s day haven’t been read in sixty years,” but she didn’t get the point. And occasionally people get a little soft in the head and suggest that Hammett himself had some romantic attachment to his days in San Francisco. The facts of the matter are: 1) after he got to Hollywood, Hammett could have afforded to live anywhere on earth he wanted to live; 2) he never came back to live, and returned only a handful of times on visits, usually having his chauffeur bring him up by limo—the longest return visit being “back from a few weeks in San Francisco” as mentioned in a telegram to Blanche Knopf dated April 17, 1931. In the autobiographical fragment Tulip his days in San Francisco get no more attention than his days on Kiska or his time spent as a lunger in Tacoma or in Camp Kearney near San Diego. San Francisco was another place he lived, and because he wrote about what he knew, he set most of his stories here, since he was in residence at the time he wrote them. Looking at the question today, it would be hard to say how large if intangible a part of Hammett’s appeal lies in the fact that Sam Spade is stalking over the hills of San Francisco though the winter night-fog in his hunt for the black bird—and while I think Hammett had enough talent to bring it off, I suspect I wouldn’t enjoy The Big Knockover half so much if it were set in Dubuque, Iowa. Personally, I doubt that Hammett thought of San Francisco much after he left. The only date I would bet money on The City coming to his mind—it would have been hard to miss the news—would have been on his forty-third birthday, May 27, 1937, the day the ribbon was cut to open the Golden Gate Bridge to trafﬁc for the ﬁrst time. Possibly the best summation of Hammett’s ironic dis[ 112 ]

1201 California ♠

Brigid’s Place

tance from The City occurs in a letter written from the Aleutians on October 2, 1944 to “Pru darling”—Prudence Whitfield, wife of fellow Black Mask writer Raoul Whitﬁeld—a wife with whom Hammett had an affair. He wrote to her: Yesterday a man came up to me in a mess hall and introduced himself to me as the motorman of a San Francisco street car that was photographed in the second Thin Man picture. “Old Twenty-one,” he called his car; a bond between us, I dare say.

The next site is only two blocks away, the tall building on the southwest corner of California and Jones:

13

1201 CALIFORNIA: Brigid’s Place

Over the decades about the only “big claim” I ever made for the Dashiell Hammett Tour is that if you survived the climb over Nob Hill and got to the end, you would have seen every single place Hammett is known to have lived in San Francisco—and if a residence someday is discovered out near Ocean Beach or Sea Cliff or the Ingleside, hey, I’m not walking out to it. I was talking with Joe Gores once, and he told me the “big claim” he has for his article in City, “A Foggy Night,” the point about it that he was most proud of: he ﬁgured he was the ﬁrst person to locate three deﬁnitive and important sites from The Maltese Falcon—Sam Spade’s apartment, Sam Spade’s office building, and the apartment building the Coronet, where Brigid O’Shaughnessy stays through most of the novel. In the case of Spade’s apartment and ofﬁce, I completely agree with him—I think Gores nailed them down tight. In the case of Brigid’s temporary residence, well, I have read his argument many times as he tracks Spade’s movements to the Coronet, and I always fall off the cable car some[ 113 ]

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1201 California Street, possibly where Brigid O’Shaughnessy stayed.

where before he ends up of in front of 1201 California. The Coronet in the novel is on California, to be sure, though I always think of it as being west of Van Ness—and some years ago you could stand across the street from this building and look at the letter “C” emblazoned on the awning before the building owners replaced it with a more modern design. The “C” stood for the Cathedral Apartments, but Gores’ idea was to think of it as standing for the Coronet, the place where Brigid summons Sam Spade soon after the murders of Miles Archer and Floyd Thursby. She has told Spade that her name is “Miss Wonderly,” but tells him that she is registered here under the name “LeBlanc.” When he arrives, she tells him that her name really is Brigid O’Shaughnessy—she doesn’t have a kid sister who is in trouble, she’s in trouble herself. She says: “Help me. I’ve no right to ask you to help me [ 114 ]

1201 California ♠

Brigid’s Place

blindly, but I do ask you. Be generous, Mr. Spade. You can help me. Help me.” Spade looks her over and replies: “You won’t need much of anybody’s help. You’re good. You’re very good.” Another reason Gores is attracted to this building is that Brigid is in apartment 1001—so in usual terms you’d need a building like this, ten stories tall or taller, to match that number. But I’ve long thought that some literary symbolism might be going on with that number, a sly reference to Scheherazade and the 1001 Arabian Nights—in those stories Scheherazade tells a new tale every night to keep her head attached to her body, while in the Falcon Brigid tells another lie every time she needs to do so, to keep herself in town and free until the black bird comes into port and she can get her hands on it. And yet another reason Gores opts for 1201 California as the model for the Coronet is that in Hammett’s ﬁrst version of The Thin Man (an unﬁnished fragment set in San Francisco, which features not Nick and Nora but a Sam Spade-like detective named John Guild) the Cathedral Apartments are mentioned by name, proving Hammett was familiar with the building. I lean in the other direction, ﬁguring it is far less likely that Hammett would have used the same real structure as an incidental site twice— even in many Op stories, Hammett seldom returns to any building but the Hall of Justice. In this early version of The Thin Man—ﬁrst published in the issue of City with the other features on Hammett, and reprinted in more recent years in the collections Nightmare Town (1999) and Crime Stories and Other Writings (2001)—he also uses an apartment based on 1309 Hyde for a scene and places another in 1157 Leavenworth, one non-existent number over from his last address from the City Directory. Hammett seems to have started this novel in New York soon after wrapping The Glass Key, only to abandon it when he went on to Hollywood. By 1933 he was so out of touch with the mood and scene that he switched the action to New York [ 115 ]

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and dropped John Guild in favor of Nick “It’s Too Early for Breakfast, I Think I’ll Have a Drink” Charles.

As you cross the summit of Nob Hill, going east on California, you’ll pass Grace Cathedral, and then Huntington Park in the same block as the old James Flood mansion—Jose and the girls had a number of snapshots taken of themselves and some friends from the neighborhood in this setting. A Hammett address book from the 891 Post era, when Jose, Mary Jane, and Jo were living in 1155 Leavenworth, lists 1534 Clay (between Hyde and Larkin) for “Mrs. Patrick” and her kids. Looking at those photos, San Francisco seems decidedly less dangerous than the picture drawn by The Big Knockover.

Mary Jane Hammett, a friend, and Jo Hammett next to the Flood Mansion in 1928.

In the next block east on California you’ll see the Fairmont on the north side of the street and the Mark Hopkins towering up on the south. Hammett’s boss Albert Samuels told William F. Nolan that in the fall of 1929 he loaned Hammett $500 to make his try at New York and Hollywood. After Hammett struck literary gold, he returned to The City by limousine and repaid Samuels [ 116 ]

The Puzzle of the Blocked Writer

before renting a suite in the Fairmont for a week. He looked up everyone he knew and invited them over, dove into every hangout he could ﬁnd and bought the rounds— and at the end of the week needed to borrow another $800 from Samuels to pay his way back to Hollywood. The Mark Hopkins will come up again as a possible model for a hotel in the Falcon, so take note of it. Hammett’s fellow Black Mask writer Raymond Chandler also made the trip up from southern California to San Francisco on occasion, and said in a 1948 letter that the lobby of the Mark “has no trace of style, and the place is full of chisel-eyed characters who look as if they were afraid they might not smile at a producer.” En route to the next group of sites on the far shoulder of the hill, consider this big problem argued among Hammett fans:

The Puzzle of the Blocked Writer

T

hat fragmentary ﬁrst try at The Thin Man may be seen today as a warning shot—in barely more than three years Hammett had written The Big Knockover, Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, and The Glass Key, but then he got his chance at screenwriting money and placed The Thin Man aside. Only when he was broke in 1931 and 32 did he manage to come back to the typewriter for four new short stories (three about Sam Spade), and broke again in 1933, also pound out Woman in the Dark, a very short novel (if you’re even willing to consider it as a full-scale novel and not a novelette), followed by a new version of The Thin Man and ﬁve ﬁnal stories. Then, nothing more—not one ﬁnished short story, and only mere pages of the mainstream novels and plays he planned to write. The screenplay for Watch on the Rhine in 1942 marks the major rally of Hammett’s later career, and then he was adapting a pre-existing work.

[ 117 ]

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In 1934 Hammett as a novelist hit a solid wall of writer’s block. The factors contributing to this block seem clear enough today. For one thing, he was drinking as much as his alter ego Nick Charles, and in his case the liquor may have dropped him. He no longer really needed to write anything after 1934 but for quick screen treatments and come up with high-paying, high-concept ideas such as The Fat Man. If Hammett had not become so successful he would have had less money for partying and may have found it necessary to write more novels, just to pay his way. And an equally large factor in the equation is that he divorced himself in the projected novels from his natural material, the crime story; he discovered sitting staring at the blank sheets rolled into the typewriter that without an element of crime, Hammett novels just did not exist. As years passed and people began asking him about new books, Hammett would reply, usually mentioning the speed of composition—those ﬁve novels in three years, the last third of The Glass Key in one thirty-hour writing session, The Thin Man in two weeks. When he was being glib, he suggested that any writer who had that much control over pure style simply had nothing left to say. When he was being straightforward, he said that he had thought he would be able to do it again, just get away with Lillian Hellman to an island retreat or a farm for a month, maybe two months, and knock out a new book. He could never do it again. One part of the Nick and Nora Thin Man is hotly debated for what it may mean, what it suggests about Hammett’s state of mind at the time he was pounding out the book: the section in chapter 13 where he quotes some 1,500 words on the subject of Alfred G. Packer, who in 1874 was thought to have murdered ﬁve companions while stranded in a blizzard in the wilds of Colorado, and cannibalized them. The section about Packer is an exact quote from Celebrated Criminal Cases of America by Thomas S. Duke, published by the James H. Barry Company in San Francisco in 1910. Readers familiar with Hammett will recall that the only book Sam Spade had in his rooms was a copy of Duke’s Celebrated Criminal Cases—and the author of The Maltese Falcon also refers to Duke’s again in a June 21, 1930 review for the New York Evening Post. Other than his clothing and typescripts, it seems that Duke’s may have

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The Puzzle of the Blocked Writer

been the only item Hammett kept with him as he traveled from San Francisco to New York, New York to Hollywood, and back again to New York. And by the way, Hammett’s obviously strong interest in and knowledge of true crime is reﬂected in yet another aspect of The Thin Man. Colin Evans’ popular survey The Casebook of Forensic Detection: How Science Solved 100 of the World’s Most Baffling Crimes (1996) covers the Edward Keller case from 1914 where “workers digging in the cellar of a vacant Philadelphia warehouse on Kensington Avenue uncovered a packing case. Inside was a trunk that contained a male skeleton, fully clothed, tall and heavyboned. Its features, apart from a few scraps of brown and gray hair, had been obliterated with quicklime.” Evans doesn’t mention that these and other details of the case form the murder mystery that snags Nick Charles’ reluctant attention—the obvious real-life source from which Hammett gathered the clues for his last whodunit. Another sidenote to The Thin Man is this: Jerome Weidman once mentioned a time when he and Hammett were out walking, and he asked Hammett what the section with Packer meant, in terms of the symbolism of the novel. Hammett told him that an in-house editor for the book had asked him for some 1,500 words more than what he turned in, so he just created a brief scene and copied the Packer story straight from Duke’s. Weidman said that he did not believe him—that surely there was more to it than that, but he could not pull any more information out of Hammett. The way Mimi’s family seems intent on symbolically devouring itself does offer food for thought about what the Packer section could mean, and an inscription dated June 11, 1934 that Hammett wrote in a copy of the ﬁrst edition of the novel also seems to contradict what he told Weidman: “For George H. Burr—with earnest assurances that it’s all art. Dashiell Hammett.” So, the puzzle of the blocked writer boils down to this: Does the use of the Packer incident from Duke’s mean any of the things the critics suggest it does when they chew over Hammett’s novels—or after blasting through The Thin Man in a couple of weeks was Hammett so tired of it that he found it easier to lift 1,500 words out of a book at hand than to work on it another day, so he could get back to drinking?

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Wind your way off Nob Hill in the direction of Union Square, one block down to Pine. The Op sees some action a couple of blocks west on Pine between Jones and Leavenworth in the story “Death on Pine Street,” originally published under the title “Women, Politics and Murder” (1924). To continue the tour go east on Pine to the 700 block between Powell and Stockton. On the south side of this block turn into:

14

DASHIELL HAMMETT STREET: Street Cred

Although he only managed to write mysteries and not “real books,” Hammett made the cut when the names for streets were being handed out. The names did not come easily—Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet and co-founder of City Lights bookstore, had the idea in mind for several years before he managed to get some action, and his ﬁrst list of twenty names got trimmed to a dozen. Ferlinghetti lived in Paris for some time, and liked the manner in which the French honored their writers and artists by naming streets after them—Avenue Victor Hugo, for example. So Ferlinghetti nurtured the idea that maybe a street such as Pine—not really a catchy name—might be renamed in honor of Mark Twain or Jack Kerouac. The

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20 Monroe

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Ad Man

major obstacle to that plan is the length of the street, with lots of people who-can-spell-Pine-when-they-sendoff-a-bill-but-might-have-trouble-with-Kerouac living along the way, and street signs for public works to change on every corner for miles. Too high a hurdle. However, take a street that is only a block long, with a minimum number of residents to feel the impact of an exotic literary name, and you have a chance. On January 25, 1988, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors approved Ferlinghetti’s proposal to rename several of The City’s streets after writers and artists. On October 2, 1988 the names of those who received the honors were announced at a ceremony held in City Lights: Mark Twain, Jack London, Frank Norris, Richard Henry Dana, Isadora Duncan, Benny Bufano, Bob Kaufman, Ambrose Bierce, Jack Kerouac, Kenneth Rexroth, William Saroyan, and Dashiell Hammett—and soon after that public works had up all the new street signs.

Halfway down Dashiell Hammett Street on the east side you’ll come to a building in which Hammett lived in those historic times when this block was named Monroe:

15

20 MONROE: Ad Man

Today 20 Dashiell Hammett Street, this is the place where Hammett rented a room after he left 620 Eddy Street in 1926 while his wife took their daughters to Montana for a few months. He was writing ad copy for Samuels Jewelers at this time, though in July he had a serious recurrence of TB—and was found lying unconscious on the ﬂoor of the advertising department in a pool of blood coughed out of his lungs. Two months later Samuels gave him the letter for the Veterans Bureau which allowed him to get 100% disability beneﬁts.

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20 Monroe Street, now 20 Dashiell Hammett Street.

In 1926 only three Op tales appeared in Black Mask in the January, February, and March issues—but Hammett placed an article on ad writing, “The Advertisement IS Literature,” in Western Advertising in October. From all evidence, he devoted most of this year to making it in advertising, although at least one typescript exists with the return address of 20 Monroe on it. “Seven Pages,” comprised of several short vignettes totaling some 800 words, notably features a few lines about the Fatty Arbuckle trials: “I sat in the lobby of the Plaza, in San Francisco. It was the day before the opening of the second absurd attempt to convict Roscoe Arbuckle of something.” By 1927 Hammett would begin his book reviews for The Saturday Review of Literature, still do an occasional piece about ad writing, and in his new rooms in 891 Post Street start serious work on the novels.

Despite the fact that it seems Hammett did not work on any crime ﬁction while residing in 20 Hammett née Monroe, this address fascinates hard-boiled fans because of its tantalizingly close proximity to what today is the most famous Hammett site in San Francisco. Turn left out [ 122 ]

Stockton Tunnel ♠

Death by Night

of Dashiell Hammett onto Bush—just half a block down to the right you’ll see where two flights of stairs emerge at the top of the:

16

STOCKTON TUNNEL: Death by Night

At 2 a.m. the telephone awakened Spade in his apartment in 891 Post. He said, “Hello. . . . Yes, speaking. . . . Dead? . . . Yes. . . . Fifteen minutes. Thanks.” He dressed, phoned the Yellow Cab Company for a taxi, and had it drop him “where Bush Street roofed Stockton before slipping downhill to Chinatown.” Then, “Spade crossed the sidewalk between iron-railed hatchways that opened above bare ugly stairs”—still a perfect description to this day—“went to the parapet, and, resting his hands on the damp coping, looked down into Stockton Street.” Spade gazed over toward a vacant lot on the west side of Stockton Street. Today the steep lot is occupied in part by the building housing the Tunnel Top bar and a grocery and the Green Door massage parlor and in part by the north wing of the tall McAlpin apartments in 429 Stockton Street—a white building smoked gray by exhaust

Above the Stockton Tunnel. [ 123 ]

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The billboard on Stockton, circa 1928.

fumes. To break the McAlpin down visually, notice that it has ﬁve bay window projections fronting on Stockton: the section of the building with the three lines of bay windows closest to Union Square was standing in 1928 when The Maltese Falcon takes place—the two rows of bay windows nearer the tunnel are part of the newer north wing, not yet erected as Sam Spade stared through the fog at [ 124 ]

Stockton Tunnel ♠

Death by Night

the billboard which fenced the empty lot away from the sidewalk on Stockton Street below. If you look under the coping running along the top of the McAlpin, you can spot the more elaborately decorated brackets supporting the coping on the original building, and plain brackets marking where the newer wing begins.

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From his vantage point atop the tunnel the detective saw three men looking around the billboard at something in the lot, and noticed torch beams playing about over the dirt of the steep slope and the side of the McAlpin Apartments further down the block.

And then Spade left the parapet and walked through the night-fog a short distance west on Bush to where a small group of men stood looking into:

17

BURRITT STREET: Crime Scene

Beneath the street sign a bronze plaque tells all, summing up in one sentence why this alley is the most sought-after Hammett landmark in San Francisco: “On approximately this spot Miles Archer, partner of Sam Spade, was done in by Brigid O’Shaughnessy.” The ﬁrst murder in The Maltese Falcon! The crime that led to the other deaths, and put Sam Spade on the trail of a time-lost statue of a mysterious black bird. . . . A classic site for any literary hiker. Attempts to put up a plaque began in the early sixties. Humphrey Bogart had died from cancer of the throat January 14, 1957, and Hammett died from cancer of the lungs January 10, 1961. Hammett-Spade-Bogie fans in San Francisco suddenly realized that in a sense Sam Spade was dead, and The City should do something to commemorate its most famous detective. People talked about putting up a marker, naming a street, something, yet nothing happened until the late sixties when the famous advertising man Howard Gossage heard about the idea. He got together with Warren Hinckle, journalist, a founder of Ramparts magazine. They worded the plaque, ordered it—but before it could be installed, Gossage died. Hinckle, writing, editing magazines, seems to have put the plaque away in his house and [ 126 ]

Burritt Street

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Crime Scene

Burritt Street, a murder scene in The Maltese Falcon.

forgotten about it for some ﬁve years. Until one night, late in 1973, some anonymous literary historian (and it wasn’t me—I wasn’t here in 1973) spray painted the words “Miles Archer Was Shot Here” on the sidewalk in front of the Bush Gardens Japanese Restaurant—located at that time in the building on the northeast corner of Bush and Stockton. The man running the restaurant didn’t know what the words signiﬁed, and was intending to have them painted over, when some mystery fan told him what they meant. He ﬁgured, okay then, let them stay. Herb Caen gave the incident a big write-up in his column in the Chronicle—the daring commando action brought some publicity to the need for a plaque. Completely independent of that, Fritz Leiber was working up his “Stalking Sam Spade” article; in the Sunday paper for January 13, 1974, he wrote, “A few years ago some Falcon fans tried to get permission to put up a brass plaque in Burritt reading ‘Here Brigid O’Shaughnessy [ 127 ]

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shot Miles Archer.’ The permission didn’t come through, but it’s still a nice idea.” With the mentions in the press, Hinckle’s memory was jogged—wait a minute, somewhere around here. . . . He brought out the plaque, the red tape was cut, and the plaque was installed on the Burritt side of the Matabelle Apartments on Tuesday, February 12, 1974, by James Kennedy, the owner of the building; by Marino Nibbi, a contractor; and by hard-boiled City Supervisor Quentin Kopp, later a hard-boiled state senator. Today the street sign reads “Burritt” in black letters on white, but Sam Spade came up to “a uniformed policeman chewing gum under an enameled sign that said Burritt St. in white against dark blue.” The detective walked halfway down the alley to meet Tom Polhaus of the homicide squad. On the left, where the poured concrete section—the newer north wing—of the white apartment building stands, a board fence ran along the alley. Past it “dark ground fell away steeply to the billboard on Stockton Street below.” Fifteen feet down the hill Miles Archer’s corpse lay, lodged between a boulder and the slope of the fog-damp earth. [ 128 ]

The Puzzle of the Billboard and the Brick

The great interest in Hammett’s brief stay in 20 Monroe for people today is the certain realization that walking between his room and his job for Samuels at 895 Market, Hammett would have gone past the future murder scene. Some days he may have hiked the half block west over to Powell Street and boarded a cable car down to the turntable, then cut across to the jewelry store on the southeast corner of Fifth and Market. But at other times he would have gone to the east, down the stairs at the tunnel, walked past the billboard and the lot it screened from the street—or come back that route in the evening after he and his co-workers had wrapped up their drinking session in John’s Grill for the night, when the loneliness of the scene in the midst of The City would have been noted—even if he had stopped writing the Black Mask junk, and as far as he knew at that moment, would never have need for another murder site again. Or, perhaps the tunnel, echoing like a cavernous machine shop with the passage of the Stockton streetcars, the stairs and the billboard meant more to Hammett than a likely place to bump off a sap like Archer who’d trust his red-headed client enough to follow her “up a blind alley with his gun tucked away on his hip and his overcoat buttoned.” I sometimes suspect so, and imagine:

The Puzzle of the Billboard and the Brick

W

hen he wrote his introduction to the Modern Library reprint of The Maltese Falcon, Hammett singled out “The Whosis Kid” and “The Gutting of Coufﬁgnal” as two Op tales where he had “failed to make the most of a situation I liked,” but they were not the only Op shorts from which he lifted elements to rework in the novel about Sam Spade. In his ﬁrst book on the father of the hard-boiled detective tale, Dashiell Hammett: A Casebook (1969), William F. Nolan points out that in “The House

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in Turk Street” (1924) the Op is alone in a room with the bad guys (a fat man, a femme fatale, a gunman) negotiating for his life, a preview of the ﬁnal movement in the Falcon where Spade and the others wait in his apartment for the statue to arrive and debate who’ll be given over as “the fall guy” to the police. Nolan also targets the story “Who Killed Bob Teal?,” published later in 1924—and after reading this story, it is bafﬂing that Hammett neglected to mention it with the others. Bob Teal, one of the regular operatives for the Continental Detective Agency who appears in several stories, is lured behind a billboard by a client, and killed. In his article “A Foggy Night” Gores points out that Teal’s murder scene was “behind a row of wooden signboards on the northeast corner of Hyde and Eddy—it was a vacant lot at the time.” No question but that Hammett kept his eye out for vacant lots and that he did not like to use the same incidental location twice—he needed a fresh billboard-screened lot for Archer’s demise, and had one along that old route he had walked to Monroe. Or did that route mean more to him? In the interview with Jose and Mary Jane Hammett published in City, they mention a low point in Hammett’s career as a shadow man for Pinkerton’s. His wife said, “Another time he was shadowing someone but what he didn’t know was that he was not shadowing one, he was shadowing two and the second one came up behind him and dropped a brick on his head.” His daughter said, “You could feel it in later years. There was a dent in the back of his head like the corner of a brick.” (Lillian Hellman in her memoirs also mentioned “bad cuts on his legs and the indentation in his head from being scrappy with criminals”—the leg scars coming from a ﬁght during World War I when the Pinkertons burst into a house after a bunch of blacks who had stolen some dynamite, with Hammett in the ensuing fracas unaware for a few moments that while he was slugging it out toe-to-toe with one thief that another gang member was lying on the ﬂoor with a knife, carving up his legs.) When he recounted the brick episode in the biography Shadow Man, Richard Layman put it this way: “Hammett was led by his suspect into an alley where the partner slammed him over the head with a brick.” But Jose Hammett did not mention an alley. And she said the brick was dropped on his head. To leave the dent described by [ 130 ]

111 Sutter

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Spade & Archer

his daughter and Hellman, a free falling brick seems more likely than a brick swung by hand. And if Miles Archer had “too many years’ experience as a detective to be caught like that by a man he was shadowing,” I very much doubt that Hammett in his last year with Pinkerton’s would have followed his man into an alley—Miles only walked down Burritt because Brigid O’Shaughnessy was there, his client, whose sexual lure was like the pool of the Lorelei. And then the issue comes up of where in San Francisco in the twenties or today could a crook spot the shadow on his partner, trail along, improvise a bit when he spotted some bricks, and get into a position to drop a brick on the shadow’s head? It’s lucky for Hammett that in the twenties everyone wore a hat, because a brick dropped on an unhatted head as it went down the stairs to the Stockton tunnel, or let go off the coping on top, could kill a guy. What I wonder is this: Did Hammett in 1928 when he had Miles Archer’s corpse roll down the dirt hill behind the billboard have in mind that time in 1921 when he himself had been played for a sap?—and was the place where Hammett was dropped by the brick on the street side of that billboard from the spot where Sam Spade’s partner got his?

The next stop on the tour is four blocks away from where Bush roofs Stockton, on the southeast corner of Sutter and Montgomery:

18

111 SUTTER: Spade & Archer

The Hunter-Dulin Building is the site tagged by Joe Gores in “A Foggy Night” as the ofﬁce building of Sam Spade and Miles Archer in The Maltese Falcon. A casual reading of the novel easily spots the ofﬁce in this vicinity, and some people have argued that Spade worked out of the impressive glass-fronted Hallidie Building across the way at 130 Sutter. Gores’ argument in favor of 111 Sutter is painstaking and matches the street directions given in [ 131 ]

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the novel perfectly—with the clincher being the moment when Spade slips out of his ofﬁce “by way of an alley and a narrow court” over to Post and Kearny, where he ﬂags a cab. Gores points out that the alley is Lick Place—and the only building that fits Spade’s route is the Hunter-Dulin. He has me convinced—and you can still trace that route today, although you have to go through the Galleria complex to do so. Of course, the Hunter-Dulin is much larger and more opulent than I ever imagined Spade’s ofﬁce building to be, but then a lot of that negative expectation comes from Hollywood and the ﬁlm noir of the forties and ﬁfties, where it seems the detective usually keeps an ofﬁce someplace in a run-down warehouse district, or a building with neon motel signs blinking outside the window. The grainy black-and-white cinematography of the period reinforces The Spade & Archer offices this visual patterning. But in 1928 were in 111 Sutter, the when The Maltese Falcon takes Hunter-Dulin Building. place you had a shortage of rundown warehouse districts in San Francisco where a sleuth could rent an ofﬁce—with the exception of a very few buildings, every structure in downtown San Francisco had burned to the ground twenty-two years before, from the waterfront west to Van Ness and south to Market, and in some areas beyond. This part of town was almost brand new. The Hunter-Dulin itself only dates from 1926. In any case, Sam Spade wasn’t the kind of detective who would work out of a dump; he wasn’t a romantic sap [ 132 ]

111 Sutter

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Spade & Archer

like Chandler’s detective Philip Marlowe, who would get offended by his clients’ lack of ethics, return their retainer fee, and often go on to solve the case for free. Spade would match up against any yuppie lawyer on the make today—he had an ofﬁce in a swell new building because he wanted to draw in clients with money. He didn’t shortchange himself whenever mazuma passed from hand to hand, and only forked over the $1,000 bill he had taken from Gutman to the cops because he knew that it, and someone to give them as the murderer so they could close the casefiles on Archer and Thursby, would put him in the clear. He talked tough to the D.A., but he knew he wouldn’t be able to pull anything out of the deal without giving someone to the law, even if it was Brigid, even he did love her. He told Gutman that he’d have to deal with Sam Spade, like it or not, because San Francisco was his burg, but Spade had only been in The City about a year. Spade tells Brigid: “In 1927 I was with one of the big detective agencies in Seattle.” There is no doubt that his 1926 artist’s vision of the run-in with her and the fat then-unfinished Hunterman occurs in December Dulin Building. 1928. Yes, he talked tough, he had his lawyer ready, yet the only other job that comes his way that week the Maltese falcon is due to arrive in town is a penny ante case of employee pilfering of the cash receipts at a small movie theatre. In The Maltese Falcon Spade is the “hard and shifty fellow” Hammett said he [ 133 ]

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The opulent entrance to 111 Sutter.

was, but I don’t think he was quite “a dream man”—that interpretation on the author’s part probably owes more to the fact that in 1932 he sold three high-pay Sam Spade short stories to the slicks, where Spade just waltzes through the mysteries, than to the picture of the detective in the novel begun in 1928. Spade skates right up to the edge in the Falcon, and the fact that he doesn’t go over is no proof that he came out of the case unbloodied.

Before heading west up Sutter, make sure you check out the bird motifs on the Hunter-Dulin, running around the outer walls about the mezzanine level. Since Hammett clearly went to some effort to accurately describe Spade’s movements to and from this particular building, I wonder if in his search for an ofﬁce that would “ﬁt” a detective like Samuel Spade for the novel he had in mind, if it wasn’t the bird emblems that made him settle on 111 Sutter? Again, an unknown. [ 134 ]

111 Sutter

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Spade & Archer

Another unknown is what happens between Spade and Iva Archer at the end of the novel—Mrs. Spade’s son has been having an affair with his partner’s wife, but he has grown tired of her. One of the crueler rumors that circulated among inner circles of hard-boiled fans when I began doing the tour was that Ross Macdonald’s detective Lew Archer was not Miles’ issue, but the illegitimate son Spade fathers on Iva. Ross MacDonald said he took his dick’s name from Miles Archer—yet who would name his detective after a loser like Miles Archer and not expect a little ridicule?

Hunter-Dulin Building (detail).

As you cross Kearny on Sutter, keep in mind that Spade’s lawyer, Sid Wise, of Wise, Merican, and Wise, had his ofﬁce in room 827 of a corner building at this intersection, corner unspeciﬁed. And take a look at the Grand Hyatt standing on the southwest corner of Sutter and Stockton—the site occupied in Hammett’s era by the old Plaza Hotel. This is where Hammett wrote in the short “Seven Pages” that he saw Fatty Arbuckle come “into the lobby. He looked at me and I looked at him. His eyes were the eyes of a man who expected to be regarded as a monster but was not yet inured to it.” You’ll hear about the Plaza Hotel again at the next stop on the southwest corner of Sutter and Powell. [ 135 ]

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SIR FRANCIS DRAKE HOTEL: Gunsel and Gutman

In “Stalking Sam Spade” Fritz Leiber writes, “Casper Gutman and Wilmer Cook are staying at the Alexandria on Geary,” but does not attempt to pinpoint an actual hotel as a model for the fat man’s abode. No hotel under that name existed in San Francisco—but remember the postcard Hammett sent to his daughter Mary Jane during his exploratory trip to Hollywood in May 1928? The one where Hammett inked in the cartoon of himself staking out the lobby of the Alexandria Hotel in Los Angeles? In “A Foggy Night” Joe Gores selects the Drake here as his ﬁrst choice for “the Alexandria” in San Francisco. Catch that “ﬁrst choice.” His follow-up selection is on Geary—the Clift. The indication that the Alexandria may be on Sutter comes during the scene where Wilmer Cook, the fat man’s gunsel, meets Spade outside the detective’s ofﬁce building. Cook has guns in both pockets of his coat. He tells Spade that Gutman wants to see him. It is only a short walk up Sutter to the Alexandria—that would be the four blocks you just traveled from 111 Sutter to the Drake. Spade and Wilmer ride an elevator to the twelfth ﬂoor—so the building has to be twelve stories high or higher. As they go down the hallway Spade slips behind Wilmer, tackles him and takes his guns. When they enter Gutman’s suite, Spade quips: “A crippled newsie took them away from him, but I made him give them back.” (A line indicating the novel’s origins in the Op story “The Gutting of Coufﬁgnal,” which featured Hammett’s very best crippled newsboy scene.) But when Spade ﬁrst went into Gutman’s suite earlier in the book, it said: “Doors in three of the room’s walls were shut. The fourth wall, behind Spade, was pierced by two windows looking out over Geary Street.” To go with the [ 138 ]

St. Francis Hotel ♠

Fatty Arbuckle

Drake, you have to presume that Hammett is describing a view out past Post Street and over Union Square—but he did not tend to be loose with his words, so that he’d skip over a street or not mention the park, which would have to be visible in this scenario. And then, too, with this set of clues you have another possible contender from that era in the Plaza, where the Grand Hyatt is today, located a block closer to Spade’s ofﬁce. The Plaza’s main entrance even opened onto Union Square.

File this case until we get to the Clift. Head down Powell to Union Square and the building that fronts the park on the west:

20

ST. FRANCIS HOTEL: Fatty Arbuckle

In The Maltese Falcon Miles Archer shadows Brigid O’Shaughnessy and Floyd Thursby from the lobby of the St. Mark Hotel, to his death in Burritt alley. If based on an actual hotel in San Francisco, logically the St. Mark would be modeled either on the St. Francis here or the Mark Hopkins on Nob Hill, based on the name and the general description of the hotel as ﬁrst class. For his part, Joe Gores goes for the St. Francis because the St. Mark is treated in the novel as an obvious landmark, an institution in The City—which the St. Francis was in 1928, having opened its doors in 1904 and quickly rebuilt after the gutting by the ﬁre of 1906. When Hammett was working on the Falcon, the St. Francis was considered San Francisco’s number one hotel, closely followed by the Palace on Market Street. Gores notes that the Mark Hopkins did not open its doors for customers until December 1926—barely more than a year before Hammett started the book. Even if it is big and is situated on Nob Hill, a year isn’t long enough in this burg to become an institution—the Mark Hopkins was no more an institution at one year than the [ 139 ]

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Union Square and the St. Francis Hotel in 1928.

detective practice of Sam Spade would have been: both were just starting out. If you enter the main doors of the St. Francis on Powell and go into the red-carpeted lobby (in the 1920s a circular registration desk ushered in the guests, but today check-in services are in the St. Francis Tower addition, beyond the original lobby), you’ve probably done as much as you can do to recreate the feeling that you’re in the same sort of vast room where Miles Archer had set himself on stakeout so he could tail Floyd Thursby after the gunhawk met Brigid there at 8 p.m. The most famous case Hammett claimed to have worked on as a Pinkerton’s operative in San Francisco originated here in the St. Francis, when the famous Hollywood silent comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle had a party Monday, September 5, 1921, in a suite of three top-f loor rooms—1219, 1220, and 1221—overlooking the corner of Powell and Geary Streets. After the party [ 140 ]

St. Francis Hotel ♠

Fatty Arbuckle

Arbuckle was accused of raping the young actress Virginia Rappe; she died on September 9, and Arbuckle found himself on trial for murder in one of the most sensational cases ever to rock Hollywood and America. Hammett said that he worked on this case gathering evidence for Arbuckle’s lawyers. In the City interview both his wife and oldest daughter said they did not think he worked on the case at all—yet in another interview in the same issue, an old guy named Phil Haultrain claimed that he had worked with Hammett for the Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency here in 1921, and that both he and Sam Hammett were on the Arbuckle assignment. Without question, Hammett at least was in town at the time—his opinion that Arbuckle was framed “by some of the corrupt local newspaper boys” carries that much authority. In the vignette “Seven Pages” he wrote while living in 20 Monroe Street, Hammett says that as Arbuckle came into the Plaza Hotel, kitty-corner across Union Square from the entrance to the St. Francis, that he “made my gaze as contemptuous as I could. He glared at me, went into the elevator still glaring. It was amusing. I was working for his attorneys at the time, gathering information for his defense.” The image of Arbuckle at over three hundred pounds seems to have stayed with Hammett deep into his career as a writer, with fat men outweighing thin men by far in his work—they outnumber them, too. And it is interesting to note that D.A. Bryan in The Maltese Falcon clearly is modeled on San Francisco D.A. Brady who went after Arbuckle with everything he had—in a book about the Arbuckle incident, The Day the Laughter Stopped (1976), David Yallop presents good evidence that, to make sure his case stuck, Brady imprisoned witnesses in the homes of his assistant district attorneys and forced them to say what he wanted them to say. Arbuckle was going to be his “fall guy,” guilty or not, and the publicity would be used [ 141 ]

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to further his career. Reading about actual politics in San Francisco at the time makes it very clear why Sam Spade had to have someone to take the rap for the murders when the falcon proved to be a fake—he would not have the money to get away clean, and the D.A. was already after him as someone he could try and convict for the killings of Archer and Thursby. The first two juries were hung on the question of Arbuckle’s guilt, but the third jury panel completely acquitted him of any wrongdoing. The scandal, however, ruined his career—he was unofficially blacklisted in Hollywood for some fourteen years and not allowed to act in movies (though his protégé Buster Keaton brought him without credit into his movie Go West in 1925 in drag, giving Fatty a very funny chance to show the people in Hollywood what he thought of them). Some studios allowed Arbuckle to direct ﬁlms in this blacklist period, though he could not use his own name—one of the great myths that have grown out of this case has it that Arbuckle directed the movies under the name “Will B. Goode.” Today Arbuckle’s name carries the taint of the scandal more than the cleared air of the acquittal, and his ﬁlms rarely are shown. Before the trial he was the highest-paid star in Hollywood, making about three million a year and only Charlie Chaplin approached him for pure popularity. He died of a heart attack in the thirties before he could reestablish himself with a few short subjects. I have heard both sides many times—he was innocent—he was guilty as hell—but I wasn’t there, so I do it like this: the fact that Hammett thought he was innocent doesn’t count for much with me—Hammett also had it that criminals were making jailbreaks towing along Ferris wheels. I like Buster Keaton a lot, and Keaton thought Arbuckle was innocent—but then Arbuckle was Keaton’s mentor and gave him some of his ﬁrst ﬁlm work. The opinion that starts to do it for me is this: Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy thought he was innocent; if Laurel and Hardy think you’re innocent, I ﬁgure [ 142 ]

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Fatty Arbuckle

you must be innocent. But the one that does it is that Doug Fairbanks and Mary Pickford thought he was innocent, and the ofﬁcial policy of the Dashiell Hammett Tour is that if Doug and Mary say you’re innocent, you’re innocent.

Head west on Geary from Powell. On the east side of the three hundred block, across from the St. Francis Tower, you might note the Handlery Hotel in 351 Geary—formerly the Stewart, where Earl Derr Bigger’s sleuth Charlie Chan stops in the beginning of the novel Behind That Curtain (1928), which takes place completely in San Francisco. The Biggers book is a good example of the classical puzzle-style mystery, an entertaining enough read—but if you want a test case to see exactly what Hammett did with the mystery novel in San Francisco and in America, read Behind That Curtain from 1928 and follow it immediately with the book Hammett was writing that year, The Maltese Falcon. You’ll see how thoroughly Hammett blew the competition out of the water for any serious consideration as literature. (There is another immensely educational comparison you might make: Read the Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton” from 1904, then read the Op story “The Scorched Face” from 1925. I was attending a meeting of a local Holmes fan club one night when a woman mentioned that she had by chance read these two stories back-to-back, and she thought surely Hammett was working his own spin on the same plot Conan Doyle used. No question in my mind about it—what’s interesting is to see how Hammett handles the matter of blackmail and compromising photographs versus Doyle’s treatment—in one you have the genteel detective tradition in the hands of one of its best practitioners, but in Hammett you have a story as uncompromising as a blackjack, with a gut-punch waiting at the end. No better, shorter education in the classic mystery story versus Hammett will be found.) [ 143 ]

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The next site is at 415 Geary, on the south side of the street, where the banners for the American Conservatory Theatre hang in front of the ornate façade of the:

21

GEARY THEATRE: Pound of Flesh

The Geary Theatre.

Here the perfumed rogue Joel Cairo, so well-played by Peter Lorre in the Bogart movie of The Maltese Falcon, had tickets to see a play. Since Cairo and Spade at one point pause outside this theatre in front of a poster of the actor George Arliss in the costume of Shylock, the play must have been The Merchant of Venice with its appropriate “pound of ﬂesh” scene (certainly Spade hands more than a pound over to the law at the end of the novel). I don’t think it is coincidence that Cairo is a Levantine, either—Hammett works the references to Shakespeare adroitly, with my favorite occurring in the next-to-last chapter, as Cairo tries to comfort Wilmer Cook, and Wilmer smashes him savagely [ 144 ]

Clift Hotel

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Sherlock Slept Here

in the mouth. Spade, standing against the wall, comments: “The course of true love.”

It was a professor, William Godschalk, who pinned the date of the action in The Maltese Falcon down to six days in December of 1928, using several clues from the novel, paramount among them the fact that Arliss was on stage as Shylock at the Geary Theatre at that time. The Thin Man likewise occurs in real time—from Christmas Eve 1933 through New Year’s Day 1934. Dates for the action in the other novels are probable, though no one has figured them out as yet—they are as time-lost as the statue of the falcon had been until the Greek dealer turned it up again in 1911. At the end of this same block on the southeast corner you’ll see:

22

CLIFT HOTEL: Sherlock Slept Here

Gores’ second choice for the fat man’s hotel, the Alexandria. It has windows overlooking Geary, but is by no stretch of reasoning a short walk up Sutter from the Hunter-Dulin Building. I ﬁgure one of two situations is occurring here: 1) the easy answer; Hammett did not have a speciﬁc hotel in mind, hence the contradictions between Geary and Sutter, so forget about it; 2) he did intend for a hotel on Sutter such as the Plaza or the Drake to serve as the model for the Alexandria, but when he went to write “the fourth wall . . . was pierced by two windows looking out over Sutter Street” he wrote Geary by accident and it got into print. Whatever the explanation, a definitive model for the Alexandria is impossible to name. [ 145 ]

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While looking at the Clift, it’s worth recalling that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, stopped here the one time he came to San Francisco—from May 30 through June 6, 1923, at which time Hammett had three stories in print, and would begin pounding through Continental Op tales within a month. Doyle was giving public lectures on the subject of spiritualism, which became the major interest of his last years after the sudden death of his son. If you know The City well, you may have seen the large plaque at the entrance to 2151 Sacramento, across from Lafayette Square, which reads, “This house, built in 1881, was once occupied by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.” A publicist who once owned that house put that up—one morning during his week here Doyle visited Dr. Albert Abrams, who lived at the address at the time, for a couple of hours, and then spent the rest of the day with his family on an excursion to Mount Tamalpais and Muir Woods before returning for an evening lecture. So, yes, Doyle did “occupy” 2151 Sacramento Street for a couple of hours. It is unknown if Hammett went to any of the talks or if his path otherwise crossed Doyle’s—at the least, he went into some of the same buildings, because Doyle’s lectures were delivered in Dreamland Arena (later the rock ’n’ roll venue Winterland, at Post and Steiner, where Martin Scorsese ﬁlmed The Last Waltz). Hammett begins the Op story “The Whosis Kid” with the never-named gumshoe sitting in the stands at Dreamland, watching the ﬁghts.

On the southwest corner of Geary and Taylor stands a hotel currently named the Monaco, formerly the:

23

BELLEVUE HOTEL: Cairo’s Place

In “Stalking Sam Spade” Fritz Leiber noted that Joel Cairo stays “at the Hotel Belvedere—possibly Hammett’s name [ 146 ]

Bellevue Hotel

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Cairo’s Place

for the Bellevue.” Gores in “A Foggy Night” echoes this opinion: “The Belvedere is almost surely the Bellevue.” The proximity to the Geary Theatre is cited by Gores as support for this hotel being Cairo’s—since he was living in deadly fear early in the novel of encountering “the fat man,” it makes sense that he would scurry from his rooms to a theatre close by and not risk staying on the streets for long. Otherwise, no evidence comes out of the book that points to a model for Cairo’s hotel—and there is the datum that in Baltimore, the city Hammett grew up in, you’ll ﬁnd the Belvedere Hotel, which when it opened its doors in December 1903 was the largest hotel in that burg. The more years I spend on the streets with the tour, the stronger my doubts become that Hammett had any real hotels in The City in mind as models for the Alexandria, the Belvedere, and the Coronet, perhaps even for the St. Mark. An arresting stylistic device in The Maltese Falcon is that every hotel in which a character stops is given a fake name: no such hotels ever existed in San Francisco. Yet every place where a character eats in the novel, when given a name, was an actual restaurant. That point goes against the Belvedere/Bellevue, because the restaurant in this hotel remains unnamed, indicating it was not authentic. Of course, it gets even more confusing—when Sam Spade goes to have lunch in the Palace Hotel (real enough—look down Geary and you’ll see it at the foot of the street, across Market), Hammett names the Palace, but that seems to be because it is a place where someone is going to eat, not a hotel where someone is staying. He does not, however, cite which of the several restaurants in the Palace the sleuth may have favored—the Garden Court, or one of the smaller ones? Perhaps naturally, when confronted with this problem most people resolve it by reasoning that cuts the Gordian Knot, in the form of the Free Meal Theory. I have profound doubts that a mention in a pulp magazine serializa[ 147 ]

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tion would have brought Hammett many free meals—and by the time the novel was out in hardcover, Hammett had left The City, only to return for a few short visits. (Sure, you may say—to collect on his free meals.) No, I think Hammett in this case was having some fun like he did when he created 601 Eddis Street—all the hotels will be fake, all the restaurants real. Lately, I am tempted toward a purely literary interpretation of the hotel names, figuring Hammett may have used them subliminally to evoke the back story of the Crusades in the Holy Land and the misty historical origins of the black bird. Even as Spade enters a hotel, we are subtly reminded of the exotic Middle East, palaces, and kings. The Coronet. The Alexandria—suggesting the ancient city founded by Alexander the Great and the burning of its library, lost to history. The Belvedere—hinting at the sculpture the Apollo Belvedere from classical antiquity, also lost for centuries but like the Maltese falcon, rediscovered again, in the ﬁfteenth century. The St. Mark—with Mark the Evangelist believed to be the founder of Christianity in Africa by the Coptic Orthodox Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church, as the ﬁrst patriarch of Alexandria. Even the actual Palace Hotel at Market and New Montgomery where Spade eats a couple of meals ties in with this idea because of the name—although I also suspect it marks yet another example of Hammett having some fun with his ﬁction. In the Op tales the Palace is the obvious model for the Montgomery Hotel, where the short fat detective does a stint as the house dick in the 1923 story “Bodies Piled Up.” Since he had used it under a fake name, why not ﬂip it in this case and use the real name?—the only real hotel in San Francisco to appear in The Maltese Falcon.

Another point worth noting in connection with this stop is the pronounced presence of homosexual characters in [ 148 ]

Floyd Thursby’s Apartment

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Dead Gangster

The Maltese Falcon. When Hammett gave the book a thorough touch-up from its serial appearance in Black Mask for the 1930 hardcover publication from Alfred A. Knopf, he changed one bit of dialogue to make it a bit more subtle but nonetheless understandable: in the book Spade asks Luke, the house detective in the Belvedere, about Cairo. “‘Oh, that one!’ The hotel detective leered.” In Black Mask Luke’s reply left nothing to the imagination: “‘Oh, her!’” The most discussed aspect of this facet of the novel is the term “gunsel,” which many people assumed for years meant a gunman, since it was applied to Wilmer Cook. Spade tells Gutman: “Keep that gunsel away from me while you’re making up your mind. I’ll kill him.” Erle Stanley Gardner was the one who pointed out that it was a homosexual term for a kept boy—when Gutman agrees to give Wilmer up for the fall guy at the end of the novel, he is giving up far more than just a hired hand. (The sexual overtones surrounding Gutman are amazingly complex—and more credit to Hammett. One aspect of the novel which gets little attention is Gutman’s daughter—since John Huston cut her presence from the ﬁlm version as extraneous, many people don’t remember her even after reading the book. She comes into the action overdosed on drugs, and serves to delay Sam Spade. But one fellow pointed out to me that in all likelihood she is no relative of the fat man—she travels as his “daughter,” but like Wilmer, is along to serve his appetites.) Of the five people gathered in Spade’s apartment waiting for the black bird to be brought in, three—Cairo, Gutman, Wilmer Cook—are pictured as homosexuals (or, if the woman is not Gutman’s daughter, bisexual). So, you can read Hammett today and not worry that he didn’t know about what goes on in the world. Before moving on, you might notice that the brackets supporting the top cornice for the Monaco still carry the “B” for Bellevue from its prior incarnation. The next site [ 149 ]

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is two blocks west on Geary at Leavenworth, a place so brieﬂy referenced you cannot determine which building may have housed:

24

FLOYD THURSBY’S APARTMENT: Dead Gangster

Thursby is one of the great mystery men in mystery ﬁction. We hear a few things about him—how he was a bodyguard for Chicago gangster Dixie Monahan; how when the States became too hot for him he hopped a freighter to the Far East; how he crumpled sheets of newspaper on the ﬂoor about his bed at night, so no one could ease up on him as he slept. Yet in The Maltese Falcon we never once see Thursby “onstage”—he is always referred to by others, never seen. Even his death, in front of his apartment described only as at “Geary near Leavenworth,” occurs offstage. Thursby is Brigid’s partner, but a partner she feels she can do without. She goes to Spade and Archer with the story that Thursby has seduced her sister away from their home in the east. She needs to get her sister back from Thursby and returned to their home before their parents return from a European vacation. (Neither of the detectives believes this story very much.) Brigid is hoping that Thursby will have a run-in with the gumshoe shadowing him and that in the confrontation Thursby will be killed by the detective—or the detective will be killed and Thursby arrested for his murder. She decides to help matters along by stealing Thursby’s gun to frame him for the murder of Miles Archer, but when she learns Thursby has been gunned down in front of his rooms (by Wilmer Cook), she goes back to Spade, knowing she will need help against the fat man.

Now we drop back toward Union Square, then south toward Market, to the next site located on the northwest corner of Ellis and Powell Streets: [ 150 ]

114 Powell

25

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120 ELLIS: Tying the Knot

120 Ellis, Hammett’s first known residence in San Francisco.

Known as the Woodstock Rooms when Hammett stayed here, immediately before he and Josephine Dolan were married July 7, 1921—the ceremony took place in the rectory of the old St. Mary’s Cathedral at 1115 Van Ness, a cathedral that was razed by ﬁre many years ago.

Directly across Powell from the former Woodstock Rooms, on the northeast corner of this same intersection, you’ll see:

26

114 POWELL: Wife to Be

Now the Hotel Union Square, in 1921 it was called the Golden West Hotel, and this is where Josephine Dolan [ 151 ]

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114 Powell, where Jose Dolan stayed before marrying Hammett.

stayed before the marriage. In 1982 this place recognized Hammett’s role in its history by opening Dashiell’s Bar off the lobby, though Dashiell’s closed about 1988. The bartender once told me that soon after it had opened a guy came in saying he was Joe Gores and then regaled them with all kinds of arcane lore about Hammett. An entertaining fellow, the only problem was that he wasn’t Joe Gores—they had a copy of the novel Hammett at the bar with a photo of the author on it, and this guy did not look like that author. At one time this hotel also opened two deluxe penthouse suites in honor of the connection with Hammett. The “Dashiell Hammett Suite,” as another indicator of the author’s lasting fame, was easy to comprehend, but the “Lillian Hellman Suite” put some furrows in the brow, since Hammett’s wife is the one who stayed here, not Lillian Hellman. More recently they have tricked out [ 152 ]

114 Powell

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Wife to Be

a room in the style of Sam Spade’s apartment, and always stay solidly involved in Hammett activities—the launch party for the San Francisco celebration of the seventyﬁfth anniversary of the publication of the Falcon in 2005 took place in the lobby. When the movie prop of the black bird purchased at auction by Ronald Winston rolled through town early in 1995 to raise money for charity, one of the most startling moments occurred here. Management for the hotel decided to start a Walk of Fame in front of the hotel similar to the one in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. San Francisco personalities would be featured with hand prints set into cement blocks of the sidewalk outside the lobby, with Jo Hammett being ﬁrst up, representing her father and the whole Sam Spade legacy. I guess it is a metaphor for that moment in time, but something went awry with the mix on the cement and within a couple of months the hand prints were effaced by people walking past the hotel—the whole idea of a Walk of Fame was shelved. I believe it was the morning of April 28, 1995 when at least eighty people assembled on the sidewalk for the ceremony. Jo Hammett knelt on a plush pillow, her hands pressed into wet cement. And then Elisha Cook was wheeled out. Cook was born in San Francisco on December 26, 1903, and once told an audience during a tribute to his work at the Roxie Theatre that one of his very ﬁrst memories was of going with his family on picnics to the top of Bernal Heights and watching The City burn to the ground during the ﬁre of 1906. His ﬁlm roles are legend, of course, with parts in Shane and the Bogart The Big Sleep only two of many standout performances. As the ﬁnal surviving cast member from the 1941 ﬁlm of The Maltese Falcon, his appearance during the beneﬁt carried almost equal weight to the presence of the statuette—and might have carried more except that a stroke in 1990 had [ 153 ]

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resulted in loss of speech and further problems conﬁned him to a wheelchair. Since he couldn’t talk easily, I decided I wouldn’t bother Cook with questions, but as far as I could tell he seemed perfectly happy to be back in town during an earlier photo op in Mayor Frank Jordan’s ofﬁce. I guessed that the two women and one man with him were handlers from a nursing home, and it was one of the women who wheeled him out of the hotel for the Walk of Fame dedication. A frail little old guy huddled in his wheelchair, Cook had his head down, his face shaded by a baseball cap with a Magnum, P.I. logo on it—one of his last recurring roles was “Ice Pick” on Magnum in the eighties. His right hand trembled as it lay on his leg. Suddenly he began yelling in a high voice, “Noooooo!” “NOOOOOooooooo!” The woman leaned over beside him, took his jaw in her hand and pushed it shut and said in his ear as she moved her hand up over his mouth, “Shut up, Cookie.” Slightly more than two weeks later, on May 18, 1995, little Cookie died. I contemplate the meaning, if any, of the incident from time to time. Is it a case of a guy making one last appearance and going down with his boots on? Is it abuse of the elderly? Both? All I’m sure of is that relating the story on the tour has enabled me to ﬁgure out who the most hard-boiled people are around today. The police chief of a major city in Ohio, a nice guy even though he’s shot people, was horriﬁed by the anecdote. “Oh, man, that’s terrible!” he said. But on another walk with a group of R.N.s, one listened impatiently until the story ended, and then commented, “Yeah, yeah—old people. You have to do that. They won’t cooperate.”

The ﬁnal stops for the tour all occur around the next block—easily done on foot, if you want to check your machine into the garage on Ellis between Powell and [ 154 ]

Samuels Street Clock

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Diamond Days

Stockton, or you can whip your wheels carefully around the block until you get a good look at these sites. By foot, move south down the ﬁrst block of Powell toward the cable car turntable. The Powell Hotel on the west side of this block, incidentally, is where Charles Willeford stayed when he was researching his ﬁrst published novel, The High Priest of California (1953), a noir episode concerning a used car salesman on Van Ness. Willeford was one of a new generation of writers—Jim Thompson, John D. MacDonald—who emerged in the forties and ﬁfties writing “paperback originals,” novels which saw ﬁrst publication in paperback, with covers as lurid as the ones which had graced the pulp magazines. I have three personal favorites in the crime writing arena: Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Charles Willeford. By the time Willeford began, Hammett was solidly established as paramount in the ﬁeld, but Willeford wasn’t a writer who ignored challenge—another of his novels, Pickup, also takes place in San Francisco and is a tour de force booklength exploration of the theme Hammett worked in his short story “Night Shade.” On Market, turn east and walk half a block until you see looming on the sidewalk before 856 Market the:

27

SAMUELS STREET CLOCK: Diamond Days

Sometime after quitting his job as an operative with Pinkerton’s early in 1922, Hammett began to look for a job writing ad copy—either to supplement his income from pulp ﬁctioneering or possibly with an eye to getting out of the pulp jungle into an easier way of life. He landed a job with the Albert S. Samuels Jewelers, which at that time was located in 895 Market on the southeast corner at Fifth Street in the old Lincoln Building. Nordstrom occupies the space once ﬁlled by the Lincoln—as it faces on Market, it presents much the same height if a far more [ 155 ]

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modern aspect. When you look down the large sheets of plate glass on the ground ﬂoor level in Nordstrom, Samuels Jewelers would have occupied the space behind the last pane, right at Fifth. Samuels Jewelers moved from its original location to 856 Market in 1943, but on March 15, 1990 it closed, with various businesses occupying the storefront since then. The only solid link with Hammett’s days in the advertising department (“A Samuels Diamond Will Put You on Top of the World!”) is the street clock, a San Francisco landmark. It was installed in front of the original store at Fifth and Market in February 1915, to coincide with the world’s fair being held in The City—the Panama-Pacific Exposition, which celebrated the rebuilding of this town after the Hammett saw the 1915 1906 ﬁre as well as the opening Samuels clock on days he worked for Samuels Jewelers. of the Panama Canal. When Samuels moved to this side of the block, the clock came too, and now is the last holdover from that time.

One door west from the street clock you will ﬁnd the cavernous front entrance to:

28

870 MARKET: Pinkerton’s Man

The James Flood Building is where Hammett worked in San Francisco for the Pinkerton’s National Detective [ 156 ]

870 Market

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Pinkerton’s Man

The cavernous Market Street entrance to the James Flood Building.

Agency under Resident Superintendent Philip Geauque out of suite 314. He was paid $105 a month salary and was on call twenty-four hours a day, every day. If crime was afoot, the operatives would be at its heels. If not, they would sit idle, waiting for a client to come in and hire them for the next case. From this building Hammett went out to ﬁre that housekeeper, to shadow the man whose partner dropped the op with a brick, to interview people on behalf of Fatty Arbuckle’s attorneys, to look around Stockton for a jewel thief. Hammett quit detective work because his health no longer permitted him to continue. He gave a dramatic story about the particular incident that spurred his resignation, of course—and as usual there is doubt about [ 157 ]

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Door to Suite 314, the Pinkerton’s offices in Hammett’s day.

whether or not Hammett personally was involved in this case. (Hammett seems to have embellished his history with the Pinks. The biographer Richard Layman points out that Hammett claimed he worked on the Nicky Arnstein bonds and securities swindle on Wall Street in 1921—when Hammett is ﬁrmly placed in San Francisco. In Hollywood, after he came to know Fanny Brice, the Ziegﬁeld Follies star who was Arnstein’s wife in 1921, he told people that he had been assigned to shadow her around New York City a decade before as they kept tabs on Arnstein—and apparently he would caution everyone he told never to mention it to her.) The particular case Hammett said caused him to throw over his detective career was this: The oceanic liner Sonoma on a run from Sydney, Australia to San Francisco in fall 1921 had $125,000 in gold specie stolen from its strongbox. When the ship docked, the Pinkerton’s opera[ 158 ]

870 Market

♠

Pinkerton’s Man

tives and local police were all over it instantly, and all but $20,000 was recovered, with the major amount of the haul hidden in shipboard ﬁre hydrants or strapped to oil cans ﬂoating near the liner in San Francisco Bay. The Sonoma was readying for the return trip, and Hammett claimed that Geauque assigned him to travel with the ship back to Australia to recover the last of the specie en route. They ﬁgured the thieves somehow were moving it around ahead of the search parties, and that Hammett might be able to ﬁnd it by the time the ship reached Hawaii—if not, then he would be on the case all the way across the Paciﬁc. Hammett thought this was a great plan, the way he talked about it—his imagination opened up to the possibility of riding to Australia, getting a new job, sending for his wife and new daughter. But on December 1, 1921, a ﬁnal search was made aboard the Sonoma. Lillian Hellman claimed Hammett told her years later that he climbed to the top of a smokestack, looked in, saw the gold, yelled out that he’d found it—and right then ﬁgured he was just too dumb to continue as a detective. If he’d kept quiet until he was out to sea, at least he’d have had an expense paid trip to Hawaii and back. But he also said he found the missing gold under scuppers on a lower boat deck. In any event, within a couple of months of the recovery of the Sonoma’s missing gold, Hammett resigned from the agency. From casual clues dropped in the ﬁrst Op novel, The Big Knockover, it is apparent that Hammett intended for the Flood Building to house his ﬁctitious Continental Detective Agency—said to be located in a major Market Street ofﬁce building some seven blocks from the intersection of Pine and Montgomery, following the route the Op takes from Continental to the scene of the big bank robbery that kicks that novel into overdrive. Sure, you could pick another ofﬁce building—the Phelan, perhaps—but [ 159 ]

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as in the case of Sam Spade’s apartment, it seems logical that Hammett would place his detective in the same place he himself worked from given a clue that takes you so close. The Continental agency is directly modeled on Pinkerton’s, of course, and the Op’s boss, known only as the Old Man, is thought to have been modeled on Philip Geauque.

Flood Building lobby gumshoed by Hammett and the Continental Op.

If the building lobby is open when you do the tour, a walk from the front entrance on Market to the rear entrance in 71 Ellis Street will carry you across marble ﬂoors personally gumshoed by both Hammett and his nameless short fat detective.

Heading from the entrance of the Flood Building back around to the last stop in John’s Grill, you might consider another great mystery of Hammett’s life: [ 160 ]

The Puzzle of the Jobs and the Years

The Puzzle of the Jobs and the Years

I

n dealing with Hammett’s jobs before his novels threw the limelight his way, I think it is very safe to say that he did work for the Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency. It’s safe to say that Hammett wrote advertising copy for Samuels Jewelers in San Francisco in the 1920s. Beyond those general statements, you’re in trouble. How many years did Hammett work as a Pink? How many years, or was it only months, did he come past the Samuels street clock to 895 Market to write ad copy? In 1990 the Court of Historical Review in The City chose as topic for its sixty-ﬁfth session the question of whether or not Hammett ever worked for Pinkerton’s. This subject came up because of a 1975 letter to the Hammett enthusiast Hugh Eames in which W. C. Linn, Pinkerton’s vice president, indicated that they had no records verifying that the author of The Maltese Falcon had ever been an employee of the agency. During the hearing held in City Hall, Joe Gores testiﬁed that he had received a letter from the Pinkerton’s agency on February 23, 1973, which said that all the records of that era had been destroyed by the agency. In the early 1970s, another Hammett fan named Jack Kaplan, who worked in the West Coast Pinkerton’s ofﬁces, tried to track down case ﬁles from the teens and twenties; he said that his researches ended with the information that those records had been destroyed by accident in a warehouse ﬁre. Unless you have some compelling reason to think that Hammett’s wife would lie in the City interview, no good reason exists to doubt that Hammett worked for Pinkerton’s. Sure, you can say you doubt that he was approached to assassinate Frank Little, you doubt the Ferris wheel story, you don’t think Hammett sleuthed around for Fatty Arbuckle’s lawyers, or that he was the one who turned up the missing loot aboard the Sonoma. But you’d have to argue with the people who knew Hammett best if you said he did not have a dent in the back of his head or scars on his legs or a knife tip embedded in the heel of his thumb. Hellman in her memoirs mentions the dent but doesn’t know about the brick that caused it—if you like conspiracy theories, I guess Lillian Hellman and Jose Hammett should have gotten the story straight.

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The real issues that the Court of Historical Review should have addressed would be why doesn’t Pinkerton’s have the records anymore—why were they destroyed? And how long did Hammett work for the agency? The records wouldn’t be a worry at all, but for the fact that Pinkerton’s preserved the paperwork concerning its pursuit of Jesse and Frank James and the Younger Brothers from the 1800s, which suggests that it had a better grasp on handling their caseﬁles than its lack of knowledge about Hammett’s employ indicates. But even as Pinkerton’s ops were chasing the James Gang, the outlaws were living legends—the great historic interest was obvious. Hammett in the teens and twenties worked for Pinkerton’s as a grunt; most of his assignments were routine. The reports were not signed by name but by the operatives’ code numbers, and were edited by ofﬁce secretaries before ﬁnal copy was prepared to give to the client. He did not begin to get really famous until 1930, when the Falcon saw hardback print— eight years after he left the agency—and did not become an overwhelming presence on the literary scene until 1934—twelve years after he last worked for Pinkerton’s. It’s doubtful that anyone in the agency would even associate mystery writer Dashiell Hammett with operative Sam Hammett by that time. The idea that the records of Hammett’s era were just tossed out in a regular clearing of the warehouse or destroyed in a ﬁre isn’t hard to credit. If you like sensation, however, imagine that Pinkerton’s knew exactly who Hammett was and kept track of his association with the agency—and then about 1951 when he was going to prison for refusing to name names, went through their records and purged all references. I’ve heard that theory, but if you like that one, try this: it is far more likely when Pinkerton’s, Burns, and other major national detective agencies were pulled before Senator Bob La Follette’s committee in the 1930s to ask them about their union-busting activities that at that point they went through the incriminating evidence piled high in storage and burned everything from the teens and twenties, when strike-breaking was their bread-and-butter. Hammett’s regular claim was that he was employed by the Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency for eight years. Richard Layman in Shadow Man accepts 1915 as the year Hammett began as an op; this is the date Hammett gave under oath during one of his court appearances in the [ 162 ]

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1950s. He may have started in 1916 or even 1917. He quit in San Francisco early in 1922. You get the ﬁgure of eight years if you count from 1915 through 1922, which perhaps is the way Hammett ﬁgured it. Of course, he took a year off in World War I, and spent several months after that hospitalized with TB. At most you can credit him with ﬁve or six years on active assignment, with maybe as much as eight months of that time working out of the San Francisco ofﬁce. The job for Samuels Jewelers is fraught with equal controversy. When William F. Nolan was writing Dashiell Hammett: A Casebook (1969), he conducted the only interview concerning Hammett with Albert Samuels, Senior, Hammett’s boss at the store, who told him that the ex-detective had worked for him about four years. Based upon Veterans Bureau documents relating to his disability pay, in Shadow Man (1981) Richard Layman states that “Hammett’s full-time employment at Samuels had lasted about half a year”—some six months in 1926, the period he listed himself in the City Directory as advertising manager for the company. In Dashiell Hammett: A Life (1983), Diane Johnson places Hammett in August, 1927, having lunch with Albert Samuels Sr. and his young son, Albert Jr., in the St. Germaine Café opposite John’s Grill on Ellis Street (where the Ellis-O’Farrell Garage stands today), and talking business. The December 1927 issue of Western Advertising reports that he had just resigned from his position with Samuels, and he was still contributing articles on ad writing to the trade papers in early 1928. At one time I met R. G. McMaster, one of Hammett’s coworkers in Samuels Jewelers. Aware of this puzzle, I asked McMaster exactly how long he recalled Hammett working for Samuels. He said that Hammett was at the store for at least a year while he himself was working there, and he was under the impression that Hammett had worked for Samuels at least a year before McMaster began his job. If we accept McMaster’s estimate of two years, along with the known years 1926 and 1927, supplemented by the evidence of the trade magazine articles from late 1926 into early 1928, then 1926–27 are nailed down solid. Of course, it was in July, 1926, that Hammett was found lying unconscious on the ﬂoor of the advertising department in a pool of his own blood, and later that year that Samuels gave him a letter which enabled him to get 100% disability pay [ 163 ]

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Samuels Jewelers in the 1920s. from the Veterans Bureau. There is no indication in his Veterans records that once he had quit Pinkerton’s he held a job in San Francisco other than the months in 1926 at Samuels. But Samuels himself thought he had employed Hammett for four years. My feeling is that Hammett did not report his ﬁrst period working for the store to the Veterans Bureau, enabling him to keep the partial disability payments he was drawing because of the TB. As soon as he got the 100% disability, the TB was gone—with that money, plus a job on the side writing ad copy, Hammett had enough income to give him the freedom to work on the novellength ﬁction which would take him on to New York and Hollywood. Hammett’s loose reporting of his earnings eventually got him in deep trouble with the IRS in the early ﬁfties—he wasn’t above this sort of practice, and in the mid-twenties needed all the money he could get, with a wife and two children to support. The hurdle with this scenario is drawing Albert Samuels Sr. into the deal—did

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he give Hammett a letter saying that Hammett was unable to hold a job and then employ him well into the next year, and maybe the year after that? Yeah, I think he did. My major reason for thinking so is the story told about Samuels making Hammett a loan of some $500 in 1929 so he could travel to New York and from there jump to Hollywood. That was the exact period when the stock market crashed, and only $1,000 could carry you easily for a year. A lot of money to extend to a guy who had worked for you for about six months, three years before. I can’t see it. But for a guy who had worked for you for years, who you knew and liked well enough to front a letter to the Veterans Bureau for, I think that’s a real possibility.

The last stop for this tour will be found in 63 Ellis Street between Powell and Stockton:

29

JOHN’S GRILL: Chop House

In her fascinating 1937 book Eating Around San Francisco, Ruth Thompson relates how W. J. Girard—“a French-Canadian born in Massachusetts but raised on a farm near Montreal, Canada”—became a prominent local restaurateur: “It was during his second visit to San Francisco, just after the ﬁre, that he met John Monaco, a restaurant man who was looking for a partner. The two decided to go together, and thus John’s Grill was opened at what was then 57 Ellis Street, and next door to what is 63 Ellis Street today, where John’s Grill is still in operation.” Thompson reports that “no sooner were the partners started and ﬂourishing for one year than an accident took the life of John Monaco,” but Girard carried on and thrived “because he had the good sense to employ those who knew what he did not about the business. . . . In fact so successful was John’s Grill that in 1910 Mr. Girard opened a restaurant under his own [ 165 ]

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name, and furnished the same type of food at this new Girard’s at 134 Maiden Lane.” In the early 1930s he also opened Girard’s French Restaurant in 65 Ellis Street “next door to John’s, as he had taken a lease on the entire building.”

John’s Grill, hangout of Dashiell Hammett and Sam Spade.

Opened in 1908, of all the restaurants named in The Maltese Falcon, John’s Grill is the grand survivor of the decades that have passed since Miles Archer cashed in his detective’s license in Burritt alley. At 7 p.m. on January 16, 1976, John’s Grill ofﬁcially recognized its part in literary history by converting the second ﬂoor into the Maltese Falcon Dining Room. Around the walls roll still photos and dialogue captions from the Bogart ﬁlm, and a glass case contains a selection of books by and about Hammett, and even a facsimile of the fabled black bird itself. The Hammett fan Jack Kaplan was the fellow who talked the new owners of the grill, Gus and Sydna [ 166 ]

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Chop House

Konstin, into opening a room in honor of its most famous patron. In the mid-seventies Hammett was clearly “in the air”—or in the night-fog. That anonymous person with the can of spray paint at Bush and Stockton was not the only one who was active. Fritz Leiber in 1973 was doing the research toward his article, and would use Hammett as a character in Our Lady of Darkness. Joe Gores was hard at his heels, researching Hammett’s life in San Francisco as background for his novel Hammett. A third ﬂoor Hammett Den was opened Wednesday, May 12, 1982, with a Brigid O’Shaughnessy dance ﬂoor. This room features photos of Leiber and Gores and William F. Nolan, Hammett and Hellman, and real San Francisco detectives such as Hal Lipset, David Fechheimer, and Josiah “Tink” Thompson, author of the autobiography Gumshoe: Reflections in a Private Eye. Disaster struck the night of January 14, 1983, when a ﬁre broke out in the kitchen, causing more than a million dollars worth of damage. The Konstins rallied and rebuilt, and John’s opened again September 14, 1983, to celebrate seventy-ﬁve years in business in this same building—and in 2008 celebrated its centennial. Since it is one of the few old-style grills left in The City and the only place serving as a Hammett museum anywhere in the country, San Franciscans and mystery fans visiting Sam Spade’s burg can only hope John’s Grill thrives for another seventy-ﬁve or one hundred years. You’ll ﬁnd a plaque over the entrance dedicated on June 27, 1997, which marks John’s as a literary landmark, but someone got a bit carried away and eased in a line about John’s being the place where Hammett wrote The Maltese Falcon, instead of in 891 Post Street. A couple of coincidental connections—if you believe in coincidence—deserve mention. First, Gus Konstin is an immigrant from Greece, and it was a Greek named Charilaos Konstantinides in The Maltese Falcon who turned up the black bird after it had been lost to history [ 167 ]

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for seventy years, only to be murdered, the statue stolen. When Gus came to the states he Americanized the spelling of his name, Konstantinides, as Konstin. Next, when Gus arrived in San Francisco in 1952, he got his very ﬁrst job in The City as a busboy in Lambo’s at 315 Bush Street. Lambo’s was owned by Blackjack Jerome, the businessman who gave Hammett his ﬁrst job in San Francisco as a Pinkerton’s strikebreaker on the docks in 1921. Blackjack Jerome, whom Gus recalls as a real tough guy, died in 1953. Gus says Blackjack always had a big .45 tucked into his belt. Always. John’s—now managed by Gus’ son John Konstin, bringing an actual John back to the grill after all these years since John Monaco died—serves a special drink, “the Bloody Brigid,” which comes in a souvenir glass with a falcon emblazoned on it. And they offer “Sam Spade’s Chops”: rack of lamb, baked potato, and sliced tomato. In The Maltese Falcon Spade drops into John’s Grill immediately before going by hired car on the wild goose chase down to 26 Ancho in Burlingame. Spade phones the car company and asks: “Can you let me have a car with a driver who’ll keep his mouth shut? . . . Have him pick me up at John’s, Ellis Street, as soon as he can make it.” Then, “he went to John’s Grill, asked the waiter to hurry his order of chops, baked potato, and sliced tomatoes, ate hurriedly, and was smoking a cigarette with his coffee” when the driver came in to tell him he had the car gassed up and ready to roll. ♠

J

ohn’s Grill is a good place to rest up, although in recent years they cut their once beautiful little bar in half to make room for more dining tables—as far as I’m concerned here on the Dashiell Hammett Tour, cutting your bar down is always a mistake. But if you can ﬁnd an open seat, you may as well have a drink and ponder various [ 168 ]

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Chop House

other puzzles of Hammett’s life and writings—for example, did Hammett make up the word “shamus”? Erle Stanley Gardner looked into it at one time, and became convinced that Hammett created the word in a story, just threw it out, and after that other writers, following his lead, picked it up and in time it became part of the language—and eventually the title of a 1973 movie starring Burt Reynolds. If Hammett in 1950 ﬁgured that “this hard-boiled stuff is a menace,” what if he had lived to see Shamus? My favorite puzzle is one that was brought to my attention by a woman on the tour—for years I had been leading people around, showing them the sites described in this book, places that are real, places that are shadowy and may be based on real buildings or may not, and other places that clearly were invented—601 Eddis Street and its ilk. I tend to be a beer-drinker, so I ignore the metaphysical as often as not, but I couldn’t ignore it when this woman hit me over the head with it like a brick dropped off the Stockton tunnel. The puzzle is this: In the literary world Hammett created in The Maltese Falcon and his tales of the Continental Op, he was the ﬁrst writer to give the mystery story the cutting edge of reality. His detectives seldom look for “Truth”; they aren’t naïve. They work in the real world of facts—of rumors—and of lies. The Op, the most incorruptible ﬁgure in Hammett’s universe, often uses methods no more noble than those of the criminals he is hunting. The lie and the half-truth are well-polished tools of his trade, though he manages to carve his own sort of morality out of the corrupt society he lives in, and with that and his .38 special he goes on with his job. Sam Spade is more lured by the temptations offered him than is the nameless short fat detective. If the black bird had been the actual rara avis described in Gutman’s history of the Maltese falcon, and if Spade could have set up a fall guy for the murders of Archer and Thursby, would he have settled for the spoils, including Brigid, and let murder lie? [ 169 ]

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That possibility lurks over the story like the night-fog. So: is the metaphysical landscape of Hammett’s stories and novels through which his characters travel mirrored in the physical world in which they live and work? The San Francisco of Spade and the Op is literally built of truths, rumors, and lies: places like John’s Grill that are as real as a dime; places such as Spade’s apartment and ofﬁce, described just enough so they may be deduced—with a shadow of doubt hanging on a ﬁrm conclusion; and places such as the Alexandria Hotel or Eddis Street which have never appeared on any map of The City. Hammett’s detectives move across this imagined grid of reality, rumor, and falsehood—a mysterious and dangerous San Francisco created in the pulp magazines of the 1920s that has not lost its fascination or its hold on our imaginations.

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Off-Tour Hammett Sites

It is impossible to travel more than a few blocks in San Francisco without crossing Hammett’s trail. If you want more:

A

PICKWICK HOTEL: Black Bird Hideaway

You can look up the Pickwick Hotel in 85 Fifth Street at the corner with Mission, the last remnant of the name Pickwick Stage Terminal, where Sam Spade put the black bird in overnight storage. The actual bus terminal was in nearby Jessie Street—the garage entrance in Jessie behind the hotel is the last vestige of that era, a past now overshadowed by the new Westﬁeld San Francisco Centre.

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The Pickwick Stage Depot in 1929.

B

OLD MINT: Big Knockover Inspiration?

Across Fifth Street on the northwest corner with Mission you might take note of the Old Mint, the large colonnaded stone structure which Lon Chaney planned to storm in The Penalty, seven years before Hammett plotted out the heist for The Big Knockover.

C

REMEDIAL LOAN: Brigid Hocks Her Jewels

Less than half a block from the steps of the Mint is Remedial Loan in 932 Mission, the place Spade tells Brigid O’Shaughnessy will give her the best price for hocking her jewelry—which he insists she does. [ 172 ]

Off-Tour Hammett Sites

D

JULIUS’ CASTLE: Spade’s Other Lunchspot

Or you might someday hike up Telegraph Hill to Julius’ Castle in 1541 Montgomery, the restaurant where Spade and his secretary Efﬁe Perrine eat lunch in one of the three short stories about the Satan-faced sleuth, “A Man Called Spade” (1932).

Julius’ Castle has provided sweeping Bay views to diners since 1922.

E

WAVERLY PLACE & SPOFFORD ALLEY: Chinatown Action

In Chinatown you’ll find Waverly Place and Spofford alley running north and south between Stockton and Grant and Washington and Clay, setting for much of the action in the Op adventure “Dead Yellow Women” from 1925. [ 173 ]

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PORTSMOUTH SQUARE: Stevenson Monument

A couple of blocks from these still-atmospheric alleys you might wander into Portsmouth Square off Washington Street and ﬁnd the monument to Robert Louis Stevenson in the northwest corner of this little park. The monument grabs a mention in another Op yarn, “Zigzags of Treachery” from 1924—the Hall of Justice from Hammett’s era in The City stood across Kearny from the park, where the tall Hilton Hotel stands today.

G&H

The Robert Louis Stevenson Monument in 1929.

I

FERRY BUILDING and PIER 35: On the Waterfront

A long the waterfront you might wander from the Ferry Building, referenced in The Maltese Falcon and various Op tales, north to Pier 35, where the Sonoma docks in the Sam Spade novel.

HOLLY CIRCLE: Big Flora’s Hideout

And for the truly ambitious, grab a copy of Hammett’s tour de force exploration of San Francisco’s streets, The Big Knockover, and run around to every block mentioned in that action extravaganza—if you make it all the way out to Holly Circle off Cortland and Mission, you’ll realize that the creator of Sam Spade and the Continental Op knew this burg like the back of his own hand. [ 174 ]

A F T E R W O R D

Notes from Thirty Years Up and Down the Mean Streets

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efore the tour begins its roller coaster romp over the hills of San Francisco, I usually tell people who have shown up for the walk about how it began in 1977 as a free class for a “free college” called Communiversity. People I met that year were hosting classes for Communiversity, and I got caught up in that irresistible urge to keep up with the Joneses. I felt I should do a class, too—with the only activities of interest to me, then or now, being to lead folk through all the great alleys I know or talk about certain writers I like. Put those two things together and the Dashiell Hammett Tour was born. As far as it goes, that origin story is completely true. In 1979 I broke off from doing the tour free with [ 175 ]

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Don Herron leading the Dashiell Hammett tour atop the Stockton Tunnel.

Communiversity, registered as a small business in City Hall, and began charging for it. Thirty years and hundreds of walks later, though, I am well aware that I would never have been tempted to do any sort of class for Communiversity except for the fact that many of the people involved—Gary Warne, John Law—also were active in the clandestine urban adventure group the Suicide Club. In 1977 the Suicide Club was the draw for me, Communiversity a mere sidetrack. Launched early that year, the Suicide Club gave Gary Warne the perfect vehicle to create the ﬁrst series of Chinese New Year’s Treasure Hunts, and inspired John Law to lead one team of climbers after another to the tops of the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges. Explorations through the storm drains of Oakland, pranks, games played out by night in the streets of Chinatown—the Suicide Club had a grand run until it folded in 1982. When I think of the secret origins of the Hammett tour, I never see it as merely a literary walk that happened to start up. I see it as an integral part of those years when I was climbing in the night-fog along the [ 176 ]

Notes from Thirty Years Up and Down the Mean Streets

girders running underneath the Golden Gate Bridge, the surging waters of the bay hundreds of feet below. Danger. Excitement. The mean streets. But while the Suicide Club ended, to be replaced in some senses by much tamer urban adventure groups such as the Cacophony Society, the Dashiell Hammett Tour—always fun to do—took on a life of its own. ♠

O

ne of the high points in the history of the tour was meeting Jo Hammett, who ﬁrst did the walk with her pal Marj Smith on Wednesday May 8, 1985. Ordinarily I don’t often do tours on Wednesday, but when Jo called up and told me she’d be in town that day I believe my response was For Hammett’s daughter, I’ll do the tour any time you want. On Sunday March 14, 1993, I guided Jo on another prowl around her childhood haunts, this time with one of her own daughters and a granddaughter. It seems that every occasion I spend a few hours in her company, some new tidbit of information is revealed. In 1995 we stepped into the compact elevator in 891 Post to ride up to Sam Spade’s apartment and Jo said, “This could be where my father got his claustrophobia.” I’d never heard about Hammett having claustrophobia before, but when I was rereading the Op stories in order after that I noticed one slighting reference in “Dead Yellow Women,” when the short fat detective is crawling around in the dark and tells us “I don’t like narrow holes.” The creator of Sam Spade had a touch of claustrophobia. Who knew? And one of the great pleasures of hanging out with Jo is the occasional terse Hammettian comment, surely rooted in the same genes that knocked out line after terriﬁc line for Black Mask. In 1997 I was visiting various friends in the Los Angeles area, and Jo and I decided to see the new [ 177 ]

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Quentin Tarantino ﬁlm, Jackie Brown. When we reached the scene where Robert De Niro, as ex-con Louis Gara, couldn’t ﬁnd where he’d parked his car in a sprawling mall garage one of my favorite one-liners popped out. Bridget Fonda, as surfer girl Melanie Ralston, kept ragging De Niro relentlessly. He turned and told her, not one more word. Of course she kept ragging, and he shot her. Twice. Jo leaned toward me and whispered, “A case of justiﬁable homicide if I ever saw one.” ♠

W

ho knows how many writers may have come on the tour over the years? I’d recognize a Hemingway or Kurt Vonnegut, but short of that level of fame you’d pretty much have to tell me who you are and that you’re a writer, which is exactly what Charles Willeford did. Among other crime writers known to have walked the walk are Elizabeth Foote-Smith, author of Gentle Albatross, K. K. Beck, Ace Atkins, and Gordon DeMarco, creator of the Riley Kovachs mysteries. William J. Martin co-authored the non-fiction book The Crime of the Century, concerning the murder rampage by Richard Speck. Peter Corris, sometimes called the Raymond Chandler of Australia, went on the tour twice over the years, and had me pull a cameo in one of the short stories about his private eye Cliff Hardy under the name “Dan Swan”—close enough so there’s no confusion. The proliﬁc comic book writer Roy Thomas came out as well, and had the tour make another cameo in a Jonni Thunder four-issue miniseries he was writing for DC Comics. Pulitzer Prize-winner Jerome Weidman made the scene. Poets Stanley McNail, Donald Sidney-Fryer, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti climbed up the hills, as did Terrance Dicks of Dr. Who fame—best known for writing dozens of paperback novelizations of that cult favorite TV show. [ 178 ]

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In July of 1996 the tour had another sort of literary encounter, as we bumped into novelist Herb Gold walking on Nob Hill—I know Gold casually, and will say for the record that I personally have seen him prowling the streets of San Francisco more often than any other writer. We stopped and I introduced him, and he told us standing there on the sidewalk about how he was invited to a party in Lillian Hellman’s house on Martha’s Vineyard in the 1950s. As he looked for a bathroom, he accidentally walked into a room where Hammett was tucked away reading. They exchanged a few words, Hammett was polite enough, but it was obvious that he wasn’t going to emerge to join the party. ♠

I

had never heard of Charles Willeford before he showed up for the tour in September 1984, introduced himself and told me he was a writer. His breakthrough book Miami Blues had just appeared earlier that year, and he wasn’t quite the cult favorite he soon became—four more years would pass before the Village Voice pronounced him “the Pope of Psycho-Pulp.” Willeford stood the little group to a round of drinks in Dashiell’s Bar after the walk. In the article he wrote for the Miami paper he said that we discussed Hammett, but the way I remember it I was sitting there getting a crash course in Willeford. He told me about working on his ﬁrst novel in the Powell Hotel only a block away, and about how the Roger Corman production of his novel Cockfighter was the only movie Corman ever released that lost money. It turned out that Willeford had acted in that ﬁlm, which starred Warren Oates and Harry Dean Stanton. One intriguing piece of information followed another, and eventually I wrote an entire book on Willeford—say what you will about the Hammett tour, but it brought one of my all-time favorite writers straight to me. [ 179 ]

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I suppose I should comment on the line in Willeford’s tour article which reads, “Herron, who moved to San Francisco from St. Louis during the giddy Haight-Ashbury migration of the mid-1960s and taught for a while at San Francisco State University, started the tour for college students.” If you know Willeford, it is quite possible he was just making all that up for fun, and it is also possible that taking notes he jumbled up some of the info—for example, the free college Communiversity originally started as an extracurricular activity at San Francisco State but had been kicked off campus by the time I got involved with it. Maybe someone else on that walk came from St. Louis. I don’t know, but I personally have never taught at San Francisco State or any other college, I came to San Francisco from Tennessee in 1974, and I’ve never been to St. Louis in my life. Even after writing the book Willeford, I’m still trying to ﬁgure out a few angles, with that intriguing reference to St. Louis big among them. I’m pretty sure Willeford was wrapping me up in some literary game that he had invented, where St. Louis ﬁgures, somehow. In the stillunpublished experimental novel A Necklace of Hickeys the hero is named Charles Willeford, but isn’t quite the actual Willeford, and this Willeford says, “All I owned were some clothes, a portable Underwood typewriter, a half-dozen Flintstone jelly glasses, and a few books. I also had ten boxes of books, some old manuscripts, and a few odds and ends stored in St. Louis, but I had never gotten around to sending for this stuff. Perhaps I never will see any of it again. Who knows or cares?” As far as I know after writing a book about him, Willeford was never in St. Louis, either. ♠

T

oday Willeford is an iconic ﬁgure in hard-boiled literary circles, but I concede that there are icons and

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then there are icons, and I missed the major one to cross the tour’s trail. The group was topping Nob Hill. I was walking in the lead, talking with a few front-runners, with the bulk of the tour trailing a half block behind. We passed the Huntington Hotel and were approaching Mason Street when the group caught up with us. “Did you see her?! Did you see her?!” they exclaimed. “See who?” I asked. “Lauren Bacall!” Bacall, in town with the play Woman of the Year, swept out of the lobby of the Huntington into a limo just as most of the tour group came up, and from what they told me they fell to their knees and worshipped her on the spot. I missed out completely. I guess it was around 1993 that one woman took the tour for her birthday, dragging three of her pals with her—at ﬁrst the friends didn’t seem to think they were going to enjoy the experience, but they had more fun than most, and ran up and grabbed me at almost exactly that same spot on Nob Hill. “Did you see him?! Did you see him?!” they cried. “Who?” “Jeff Bridges!” Talking with people in the front of the group, I had completely ignored Jeff Bridges—in town shooting the Peter Weir ﬁlm Fearless—as he walked past. The birthday crew stayed with the walk till the end, but as soon as it was over they made no secret that they were off to hunt down Jeff Bridges. I did notice John Leguizamo—in the burg with a oneman show—pass behind the group in Union Square in recent years, and on September 1, 1985 a guy on the walk told us that he had spotted Buddy Ebsen on the sidewalk ahead of us. I was skeptical, but we were headed in that direction anyway, so I quick-paced up to this very tall older man, with about thirty hard-boiled tourists on my trail. [ 181 ]

Afterword

I was trying to see if it was the original Tin Woodsman when Ebsen sensed us behind him and turned around. Seeing thirty people right on his heels, he drew back in surprise, but I immediately stuck my hand out and said, “Mr. Ebsen, we’re all big fans of yours!” He chatted and shook hands for a few minutes, a nice guy—turned out the longtime hoofer was in town with a dance performance. ♠

I

think the tour is fun, but some people somehow end up having more fun than I could have imagined—such as the birthday crew hunting down Jeff Bridges. One guy from Scotland told me he saved up for six years to do the tour that fell closest to Hammett’s centennial birthday, May 27, 1994—he was on time for the walk on Saturday May 28, 1994 and seemed to get more satisfaction out of it than was humanly possible. If you could have bottled that enthusiasm and joy. . . . On August 27, 1994 a guy in the group noticed a woman with a copy of the Dashiell Hammett Tour book lurking about a block away, taking photos. She shadowed the entire walk, shooting photos, trailing a block or so behind, which seemed to freak out a couple of people, but what the hell—as a former member of the Suicide Club I thought it was pretty amusing. She came over when we reached John’s Grill and introduced herself—the possibilities opened up by the tour might be endless. Shadows upon shadows. One of my personal favorite walks was hired out for just one man, a raspberry farmer from Monroe, Washington— each year he reads all the ﬁction of and several books about a writer he has chosen, just immerses himself in the work and life. The year before he’d chosen Jane Austen, but Hammett was the meat this time. I really envied him the leisure to take on one writer a year, and while I know I wouldn’t be happy raising raspberries, I ﬁgure that’s about [ 182 ]

Notes from Thirty Years Up and Down the Mean Streets

the most romantic scenario for indulging in reading I can think of, and I hope he’s still at it. I don’t think most of the years I’ve been doing the tour that I’d even have had time to be in a monthly reading group, where everyone reads one book and then meets to talk about it. But I have done tours for many such groups over the years, getting a touch of that activity at secondhand. One group of women had a cool name for their book club—Rapunzel, because when they got together they let down their hair. ♠

I

n July 2005 one fellow brought his father on the tour, and they told me that the dad knew Willeford from his Florida years, so the Hammett tour has been around long enough now it’s become self-referential. Well, why not? Interesting bits of information still come to light. A couple of years ago a man named Eric Solomon called in to a radio program devoted to Hammett and mentioned that many years before he’d been on the walk with Harold Varmus, who later won the Nobel Prize for cancer research. Nobel winners, Pulitzer winners—I’d never know if someone didn’t spill. And on one of the ﬁrst walks for 2007 a guy mentioned that he’d been a math major at UC Berkeley in the day, and one of his profs was Theodore Kaczynski. He didn’t think the Unabomber was all that great as a teacher, but he made a spectacular conversation starter. ♠

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robably the most exciting moment to date on the tour happened during one of the ﬁrst walks in 1977, when the group ran down a criminal who had boosted a wallet from the front seat of a car. Honest, don’t leave valuables in plain sight on the front seat of your car. We [ 183 ]

Afterword

chased him for three blocks, tackled him, and got the wallet back. The victims ran up after us, took the wallet, said thanks and walked off. With no cops to hand and the victims gone, we shoved the perp off to steal another day like the modern-day counterpart of the Dis-and-Dat Kid that he was and resumed the walk. As another acknowledgement of the reality of the mean streets which Hammett sketched so authoritatively, in June 2005 about half the tour group watched as a guy stood in a doorway near 811 Geary bagging up balloons of black tar heroin. They were all quite impressed, but the other half of the group looking away from the doorway saw nothing and didn’t seem willing to believe the others when they mentioned what they had witnessed. ♠

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nd finally, in answer to the obvious question, when I began the Dashiell Hammett Tour in 1977 there is no way on earth I ever thought I would lead the walk for thirty years. As long as I’m in striking distance of the hills of San Francisco, I suppose I’ll keep offering the tours, but another full three decades trailing in the wake of Sam Spade and the Op look kind of doubtful.

[ 184 ]

S O U R C E S

Annotated Bibliography

W

ith Hammett, you look for the best sources, and then work on ﬁguring out which version of “the truth” you prefer. Even people who had the opportunity to talk to Hammett in person faced the same dilemma. Which version of any given story best ﬁts the known facts and the psychology of those involved? I’ve presented my arguments already, with some of the information they are based upon gleaned and collated from the following books and articles: [Arney, Bill]. 891 Post Street. Privately printed, San Francisco, 2005. An eight-page chapbook detailing twelve clues which suggest Sam Spade lives in the same building where Hammett roomed when he created the detective, issued in connection with the Charing Cross Apartments being [ 185 ]

Sources

honored with a plaque on March 19, 2005 by the Friends of the Library, U.S.A., declaring it a National Literary Landmark. Bentley, Christopher. “Murder by Client: A Reworked Theme in Dashiell Hammett.” The Armchair Detective, vol. 14, no. 1, winter 1981. An article brieﬂy showing how Hammett took the detective-killed-by-his-client-behind-a-billboard theme from the Op story “Who Killed Bob Teal?” for The Maltese Falcon. Bentley does not mention the incident with the brick, which seems the most likely set-up for the scenario from Hammett’s sleuthing days. And it should be noted that he is stating the obvious—William F. Nolan in Dashiell Hammett: A Casebook and Joe Gores in “A Foggy Night” had made the point already. Brady, Matthew. “Sam Spade City . . . just around the corner.” Hyatt on the Square, vol. 3, no. 1, date unknown (but mid-1970s). A short article on Hammett sites within easy walking distance of the Hyatt on the Square, currently the Grand Hyatt, crediting Howard Gossage for his role in placing the plaque in Burritt. Chandler, Raymond. “The Simple Art of Murder.” The Finger Man. Avon, NY, 1944. Or more easily found in the paperback collection entitled The Simple Art of Murder. The best argument ever made in behalf of the hardboiled detective story as a literary form, by one of the ace practitioners. Emery, Vince. “Notes” to Lost Stories by Dashiell Hammett. Vince Emery Productions, San Francisco, 2005. Under the name “Ellery Queen,” Frederic Dannay assembled nine paperback collections of Hammett’s short ﬁction, distinguished by a fascinating set of notes—Dannay was about the only person who ever asked Hammett the questions fans of his detective fiction want answered, and I cannot give him enough credit for doing so. It is obvious that Vince Emery likes the Dannay model, too, because he surrounds the stories in this book with enough wordage—like Fred Dannay on steroids—to form a short biography of the creator of Sam Spade and Nick and Nora Charles. The ﬁrst biographical effort to appear in the wake of Hammett’s Selected Letters, he includes many more accurate details than the cluster of 1980s biographies, and is especially strong in giving a picture of Hammett, [ 186 ]

Annotated Bibliogr aphy

stricken by TB, nonetheless pushing through with story after story during his ﬁrst years living and writing in San Francisco. Fechheimer, David. “Mrs. Hammett is Alive and Well in L.A.” City of San Francisco, vol, 19, no 17, Nov. 4, 1975. The interview with Josephine Dolan and Mary Jane Hammett. Francis Coppola published City during his years in San Francisco, with this issue devoted to Hammett—something of an announcement for the movie Hammett which was just then getting underway. In addition to the interview with Jose Hammett, this number contains the fragmentary original draft of The Thin Man, Gores’ “A Foggy Night,” and spotlights a painting of Hammett on the cover, among other features. Fechheimer at that time was a partner in the late Hal Lipset’s detective agency (today he has his own agency), and was largely responsible for pulling this issue together. As far as I’m concerned, serious scholarship into Hammett’s life did not begin until Fechheimer came on the case; he found Hammett’s wife and interviewed her for the ﬁrst time, and dug up much of the public documentation (such as the marriage license, with the marriage taking place July 7, 1921; since his ﬁrst daughter was born October 15, 1921, Hammett usually backdated the marriage to December 27, 1920). ———. “We Never Sleep” and “I Slept with Man O’ War.” Also in City, Nov. 4, 1975. Interviews Fechheimer conducted with ex-Pinkerton’s operatives Phil Haultrain and Jack Knight. The motto of the agency was “We Never Sleep;” the always-watching eye Pinkerton’s used for its logo is thought to have been the inspiration for the term private eye, and I wouldn’t argue the point. When he addressed the ﬁrst meeting of the Maltese Falcon Society in 1981, Fechheimer mentioned that these ex-Pinks told him that the term “operative” was pronounced by the ops on the ground in that era as op-er-RAY-tive. Geranios, Nick. “Hammett’s Sam Spade might have come from Butte lynching.” The Missoulian, Oct. 26, 1982. Associated Press wire service article covering Butte bookstore owner Robert Green, and his theory that Hammett may have participated in the lynching of Frank Little. Green takes his theory to the conclusion that guilt over his involvement led Hammett to create Sam Spade, whom Green sees as “highly moral” and incorruptible. [ 187 ]

Sources

Gores, Joe. “A Foggy Night.” City, Nov. 4, 1975. The most thorough survey of possible sites from Hammett’s San Francisco stories to date, repeating the ones from The Maltese Falcon previously located by Fritz Leiber, with the addition of several others, plus all the locations Gores could ﬁnd from the Op series. A cornerstone work. ———. “Author’s Note.” Hammett. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, NY, 1975. Mentions sources used in preparing this novel, many of which turned out to be unreliable—this novel must be read strictly for its worth as ﬁction, and not taken as a fund of useable biographical information. To be brief about it, Gores states in regard Hammett’s years in San Francisco that “the wife who shared some of them is dead.” Later in 1975 Fechheimer interviewed her. ———. “Hammett the Writer.” Xenophile no. 38, March–April, 1978. The best short critical statement on Hammett’s writing from the point of view of a hard-boiled fan. Gores sees Hammett as “a private detective learning about writing . . . not worried about Literature [but] worried about paying the rent.” He singles out Spade’s speech to Brigid in which he says “Don’t be too sure I’m as crooked as I’m supposed to be. That kind of reputation might be good business—bringing in high-priced jobs and making it easier to deal with the enemy.” That professional manhunter’s take on the enemy, Gores suggests, is the subconscious state of mind “which separates his work from that of Chandler or [Ross] Macdonald or their followers.” Gores has revisited and revised the subject of this essay a couple of times, most recently in his introduction to the Hammett collection Lost Stories (2005), but I prefer his primal statement. There are many points in favor of Gores’ thesis, but I think it stops short of the area in which Hammett’s writing jumps over into the realm of Literature—the psychological effects their adherence to the manhunting code has on his characters. The Op in Red Harvest knows he is going “blood simple.” The ending of The Maltese Falcon partakes of tragedy—hell, it’s depressing. (And Charles Willeford once told me as a ﬂat statement of fact that all great literature is depressing.) Hammett, Dashiell. “Introduction.” The Maltese Falcon. Modern Library, NY, 1934. Regarding the origins of the novel and the people he modeled his characters on, except for Sam Spade, who “had no original.” [ 188 ]

Annotated Bibliogr aphy

Hammett, Jo. Dashiell Hammett: A Daughter Remembers. Carroll & Graf, NY, 2001. The most detailed look at Hammett’s family life and without close second the largest and ﬁnest collection of photos and memorabilia, including a great many shots that had never appeared anywhere before. On page 38 you will ﬁnd Jo noting that I “kept insistently urging” her to look for the rumored stash of materials left by her mother and sister—a genuine treasure trove, even photos of Hammett in his Pinkerton’s days. I didn’t know if anything would turn up or not, but I had a very good feeling about it. Even if I didn’t know Jo, I would consider this one of the essential books about her father. Hammett, Richard T. “Mystery Writer Enigmatic Throughout Life.” Baltimore News-American, Aug, 19, 1973. Hammett’s nephew gives information on his family history. Hellman, Lillian. An Unfinished Woman. Little, Brown, NY, 1969. Many anecdotes of Hammett from their almost thirty years, off-and-on, together. ———. “Introduction.” The Big Knockover by Dashiell Hammett. Random House, NY, 1966. The ﬁrst memoir by Hellman concerning Hammett, which presents her picture of his life and work and code of honor, also reprinted as the last chapter of An Unfinished Woman. Since then various people have disputed many of the particular points, and Richard Layman prefaces his Hammett biography by referring to the “clouded personal image of the man” she developed after Hammett’s death. It is easy to see that Hellman romanticized Hammett—and that clearly is the point to take from her memoirs. ———. Scoundrel Time. Little, Brown, NY, 1976. An account of her testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, with information on Hammett’s trial and imprisonment and the political atmosphere of the time. (As an example of the kind of error Hellman gets tagged for, on page 48 she has it that Frank Little “was lynched with three other men in what was known as the Everett Massacre;” I’ve given the details of Little’s lynching and the Everett Massacre, a separate incident, in the short biography for this book.) Huberman, Leo. The Labor Spy Racket. Modern Age Books, Inc., NY, 1937. Based on the Subcommittee of the Committee on Education and Labor of the United States [ 189 ]

Sources

Senate hearings conducted in the 1930s by Senators Bob La Follette and Elbert D. Thomas (popularly called the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee), this is the book to go to if you want to ﬁnd out what detective work was all about in Hammett’s day. Sure, I’ve looked into James D. Horan’s book The Pinkertons: The Detective Dynasty that Made History (1967) and others, but this is the one that rang the bells. Anyone familiar with Hammett’s Op and his casework should ﬁnd the following exchange from Huberman’s book of interest, as Senator Thomas questions a Mr. Burnside, assistant superintendent in Pinkerton’s Detroit ofﬁces: SENATOR THOMAS: How many names have you used in your occupation for covering yourself, Mr. Burnside? MR. BURNSIDE: Oh, I have used a great many names, Senator. I have been in the agency a great many years and necessarily our work requires using an alias a great many times. SENATOR THOMAS: Name some of them. MR. BURNSIDE: Well I have used the name of Bronson and I have used the name of Brunswick—oh, a number of them. I generally use a name with the same initials as mine, because it makes it easy to remember. It is customary in detective practice. Hunter, Tim. “The Making of Hammett.” New West vol. 5, no. 19, Sept. 22, 1980. A feature article on the film Hammett, with the tile-page teaser: “A Coppola masterwork in progress. Or is it?” This ﬁlm, which many people at the time expected to be a terriﬁc culmination of the new interest in Hammett that started going in the seventies, bombed. It cost something like twenty-two million dollars to produce and made about half a million back at the box ofﬁce. Johnson, Diane. Dashiell Hammett: A Life. Random House, NY, 1983. The biography authorized by Hellman, proﬁting by having some access to materials held by her, as well as letters provided by Hammett’s daughters. I think it is particularly good when it comes to Hammett’s last decade, and in dealing with his relationship with his family, but it just slides over the ﬁction. After Hellman died, though, Johnson added an afterword titled “Obsessed” to reprint [ 190 ]

Annotated Bibliogr aphy

editions detailing how many roadblocks were thrown in her path by Hammett’s ex-lover. No one of the major biographies to date pulls ahead as the deﬁnitive one to read—each has good points (this one reprints in full “From the Memoirs of a Private Detective” from 1923, and complete letters to Blanche Knopf, et cetera) and they all have weaknesses. Layman, Richard. Shadow Man: The Life of Dashiell Hammett. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, NY, 1981. The ﬁrst of the major biographies to appear, and the one that packs in the most facts. Both David Fechheimer and William Godschalk abandoned tentative plans they had had for books about Hammett and turned their research over to Layman. This book also includes complete typescripts of Hammett’s two required appearances during the McCarthy era. I think the biggest drawback here is that Layman summarizes all of Hammett’s writings and never gets across the idea that the best work is fun to read, which really drags this book down. He agrees with Hammett that “The Gutting of Coufﬁgnal” isn’t very good, whereas every Hammett fan I know thinks that Hammett, even though he wouldn’t admit it, was writing at a brilliant level in that story and achieving white heat. Layman ought to get another shot at it, however, since he is working on a revised and expanded edition. ———, with Julie M. Rivett. Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett. Counterpoint, Washington, D.C., 2001. A massive collection of Hammett’s correspondence, with an introduction by Jo Hammett titled “A Reasonable Amount of Trouble.” Essential reading for anyone interested in Hammett’s life, but the mail fans of his fiction really wanted to see—letter after letter talking in detail about which stories he’s writing for the pulps and what’s going on in his mind as he’s sitting at the typewriter—aren’t here, and probably never were written. A few short notes to his wife when they were separated by TB and letters to Blanche Knopf may be about all we’ll ever have to give personal moments of insight into that creative process. But the many other letters track his biography at ﬁrst-hand and show his sardonic wit in full gallop—the letters written from prison comprise one of several highpoints. ———. Discovering The Maltese Falcon and Sam Spade. Vince Emery Productions, San Francisco, 2005. A compilation [ 191 ]

Sources

of articles, reviews, photos and news clippings related to the novel and its Satan-faced protagonist, including info on the movie versions and radio series. Reprints part of Joe Gores’ “A Foggy Night” amid many other items. Leiber, Fritz. “Stalking Sam Spade.” California Living, Jan. 13, 1974. The ﬁrst survey of sites from The Maltese Falcon, and the cornerstone work for this sort of thing. Beﬁtting its importance, this essay has been in print in the menu at John’s Grill since 1976. Mertz, Stephen. “W. T. Ballard: An Interview.” The Armchair Detective, vol. 12, no. 1, winter 1979. In this interview, Ballard, who wrote for Black Mask and knew several of the other writers, states that at one point—and it would have had to have been the twenties—Hammett “shared an apartment in San Francisco” with Horace McCoy (now famous for his novel They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, and another Black Mask alumnus). Other than this one reference, there is no evidence for Hammett and McCoy sharing a place, in The City or elsewhere. The reference books usually put McCoy in Dallas, Texas in the twenties, anyway. I suspect this is another one of those loose statements, like Lillian Hellman referring to “the girl across the hall on Pine Street,” which can’t easily be proved or disproved. There is no evidence Hammett ever had a room in Pine Street, either. Myers, Laura. “Semi-ofﬁcial: SF ‘judge’ rules Hammett was a Pinkerton op.” The Santa Rosa Press Democrat, August 31, 1990. An A.P. wire article re: the Court of Historical Review session which looked into the issue of whether or not Hammett worked for Pinkerton’s. This write-up notes: “After a 70-minute hearing the judge ruled: ‘It is the opinion of this court that Dashiell Hammett did indeed actively work for the Pinkerton Agency on and off for a period of eight years in San Francisco.’” Oops. Eight months, maybe, in The City—eight years, maybe, nationwide. Nash, Jay Robert. “The Joy of Sax.” Chicago Tribune, Feb. 28, 1982. Article on jazzman Bud Freeman, with an interview which covers the days in the Aleutian chain when Freeman served with Hammett and thought he was “a super guy.” Nolan, William F. Dashiell Hammett: A Casebook. McNally & Loftin, Santa Barbara, 1969. The first book-length [ 192 ]

Annotated Bibliogr aphy

survey of Hammett’s life and writing, though ﬂawed as a biography because it appeared before a lot of Hammett’s most revealing letters were available, and before Fechheimer did his remarkable research into Hammett’s San Francisco years. Joe Gores has praised it for its tone, and it is highly interesting in the sense that the picture it gives of Hammett is the one that hard-boiled fans wanted to believe almost a decade after his death—this book was awarded an Edgar Allan Poe award by the Mystery Writers of America for best non-ﬁction of its year. ———. Hammett: A Life at the Edge. Congdon & Weed, NY, 1983. Another of the major biographies. Not as fact-ﬁlled as Layman, not as good on Hammett’s family life and last years as Johnson, but perhaps a smoother read than either, if you only have the inclination to go with one of the bios. Considering Nolan’s long-standing interest in Hammett, I had hoped for a hotter book than this one proved to be—still, it recovers much of the material from the Casebook, combined with the upgraded info about Hammett’s life that had become available. Like Layman with his Hammett biography, in recent years Nolan has done a complete revision and expansion of his text—said to run circa six hundred pages with another three hundred pages of detailed notes. No word on possible publication of that opus as this much shorter guidebook goes to press. ———. The Black Mask Boys. William Morrow, NY, 1985. One of several books which collect stories from Black Mask, and a good one to start with—contains a history of the magazine, with a capsule biography for each of the eight authors featured—Erle Stanley Gardner, Horace McCoy, Carroll John Daly, et cetera. The Hammett selection is “Bodies Piled Up.” (I’ve had a quibble with Nolan for some time, though, on his praise for Paul Cain’s Fast One as “the coldest, swiftest, hardest novel of them all.” Understand, he’s welcome to that opinion. But personally I do not think that Fast One would exist in the form it is in today if Hammett had not shown the way with The Glass Key, which pioneers that stripped-down style. Glass Key appeared in Black Mask in 1930, with the hardback in 1931; Fast One saw print in the Mask in 1932, with the hardback in 1933.) [Peters, Nancy]. Names of Twelve San Francisco Streets Changed to Honor Authors and Artists. City Lights Books, [ 193 ]

Sources

San Francisco, 1989. A commemorative chapbook issued in connection with the renaming of the various streets after Hammett, Twain, and company, giving background and details on the project. I had almost nothing to do with it, but did make one major suggestion to Lawrence Ferlinghetti as he sought out streets with Hammett associations—I steered him to Monroe Street. At ﬁrst, he had his eye on Burritt alley, but Burritt is mentioned by name in The Maltese Falcon, with even the blue and white street sign of that era described. To bring a tour group into that alley with the name “Dashiell Hammett Street” would be too, well, Disneyland-like for me. Flip the coin and Burritt is one of the world’s great murder scenes, not a tourist trap, so I pushed for Monroe and got it. Petrie, Glynn. “The Looting of the Sonoma.” The Californians, Nov.—Dec. 1985. An article on “the 1921 enigma of the Sonoma’s stolen treasure,” quite detailed. The author does not believe that Hammett could have been involved in the recovery of the gold in the way he said he was. Reprinted in Layman’s Discovering The Maltese Falcon and Sam Spade. Samuels, Albert S. Jr. “A. Samuels tells the story of the famous Samuels street clock.” San Francisco Examiner, June 3, 1980. The title says it all. Stabiner, Karen. “The Greatest Stories Never Told.” New West, Feb. 1981. An article on nine novels that Hollywood has had in development with no success for years, including Red Harvest. Symons, Julian. Dashiell Hammett. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, NY, 1985. In the HBJ “Album Biography” series—lots of photos, although nowhere near as many as in Jo Hammett’s book on her father. A full-length biography, though less than half the weight of those by Layman, Nolan, and Johnson. Symons, an English mystery writer and critic, senses the contradictions in the other books about how long Hammett worked for Samuels, but doesn’t go so far as to push the suggestion that Hammett worked for the jeweler for longer than “the best evidence would seem to show.” I have a major disagreement with his idea that The Maltese Falcon’s “effectiveness rests in part in the realization, fuller and richer than in the short stories, of San Francisco’s streets [ 194 ]

Annotated Bibliogr aphy

and scenes.” You want San Francisco, you are much better off going to the Op tales. Wolfe, Peter. Beams Falling: The Art of Dashiell Hammett. Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1980. The ﬁrst purely critical book on Hammett, with the title coming from that part of The Maltese Falcon (dropped from the ﬁlm version by Huston) in which Spade tells Brigid the story about a man named Flitcraft who, when a beam falling from a construction site almost hit him, ran away from his average sort of life only to end up soon after leading almost exactly the same sort of life under another name, in a different town. (I’ve heard countless explications of what this story means to people who have come on the tour, but unfortunately I listened over beers after the walk—the explanation I recall best goes like this: Spade is telling Brigid that people tend to stay the way they are, a beam falls near them, they get excited, try to do something different, but inevitably get drawn back into the comfortable patterns. It is a warning to her—she is like a beam falling into his life, the idea of the jeweled falcon is far outside his experience [much different than a missing person or pilfered cash]—he may go off to try a new life for awhile, but if it doesn’t work out, he’ll soon go back to the old pattern.) Wolfe has a chapter called “Sam Spade and Other Romantics,” which I’ve always disliked—Spade is about as romantic as a nail. I suspect that people get confused on this topic because of Bogart—who ﬁrst played Sam Spade, then went on to play Chandler’s romantic detective Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep, and the archromantic ﬁgure of Rick (“Richard Blaine, American”) in Casablanca. One line in particular from this book I like to quote as the single most nonsensical statement about Hammett’s work: “Prophetic insight led Hammett to set The Maltese Falcon (1930) in what was to become America’s most sophisticated city.” The fact is that Hammett, living in San Francisco, already had set more than half his stories in the streets he saw every day. All I’m saying, when you get off into the areas of Hammett and Art and the Critics, watch out for beams falling. Yallop, David. The Day the Laughter Stopped. St. Martin’s Press, NY, 1976. A book-length account of the Fatty Arbuckle case, before, during, and after the trials. [ 195 ]

Sources

♠

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believe word-of-mouth has brought me as much information on Hammett and San Francisco as the print sources listed above—certainly my impressions of Hammett as a person come from talking with people who knew him. Doing what I’m doing, people come to you. They phone too. One guy phoned up about three times over a two-year period concerning the Webley-Fosbery, the “automatic revolver” used to gun down Miles Archer in Burritt Street. First time: “Don!” “Yeah?” “Hammett got it wrong!” “What?” “The gun Miles Archer is shot with—it doesn’t exist!” “Er . . . okay. Sorry.” Second time: “Don . . . uh, I owe you and Hammett a profound apology, that gun, it is a rare type. He had it right.” Third time: “Don!” “Yeah, yeah.” “In the movie John Huston has the wrong kind of gun!!!” “Yeah, hey, listen—how about calling John Huston and waking him up?” Someone will have an odd bit of info about a building or a disused street-car route—somebody told me once that after Blanco’s closed it became Charles’ Restaurant, and was vacant for awhile between Charles and the current venue of the Great American Music Hall. This person said that in the interim the place was rented by the Mitchell Brothers and used as the shooting set for the notorious trapeze sequence in Behind the Green Door. A woman came out who had been in one of Hammett’s writing classes at the Jefferson School of Social Science— she didn’t recall any speciﬁcs, but retained the impres[ 196 ]

Annotated Bibliogr aphy

sion of Hammett as a wonderful teacher. Another guy had encountered Hammett in Anchorage, when he was about to bail out of the army in WWII; he tried to talk to him about the novels but got only clipped words, and was left with the impression that Hammett was nothing but a bitter drunk. Another fellow said that he was a big fan of Lillian Hellman, beginning in the late ﬁfties, and that once about 1960 he saw her walking with a very frail old man in Central Park. He went over, said a few words, but paid little attention to the companion. In the sixties he started to read Hammett, and liked his work even more than Hellman’s—and realized that he probably had met Hammett that day walking with Hellman, and had ignored him. Another man came on the walk who had known Ricardo Cortez, the actor who portrayed Sam Spade in the 1931 ﬁlm of The Maltese Falcon. Cortez’s real name was Jacob Kranz. This man said that “Jake” was very excited when he heard about the new version John Huston was shooting with Warners and desperately wanted to play the part of Spade—since he had introduced the character, he felt a proprietary interest in the role. By that time, Cortez’s career was well over its peak and Bogart’s was starting to climb, so Jake Kranz didn’t have a chance at reprising the role. The late Richard Ellington, an old-line Wobbly, told me about the Frank Little lynching and game me the title of the I.W.W. history in which I looked up the account of the Everett Massacre. His opinion of Robert Green’s theory about Hammett’s participation in the killing was that it was “interesting in an annoying kind of way. That description could ﬁt several thousand of Butte’s residents at that time.” The detail that the Op is reading M. P. Shiel’s The Lord of the Sea was noticed by Phil De Walt, who told the Shiel devotee John D. Squires, who then told me. When Squires went on the tour that took place on Hammett’s birthday in 1984, I made a big point out of explaining to the others in [ 197 ]

Sources

the group who Shiel was and what he wrote. It would be very hard to locate a more esoteric writer for Hammett to be reading—or calling “a magician” over twenty years later. (Although if you want another odd little literary connection, Shiel was an associate of the Welsh mystical writer Arthur Machen, whose name is dropped—along with that of James Branch Cabell—by Hammett in The Dain Curse. Cabell and Machen were hot items in the 1920s, with Machen’s vogue backed up by a popular run of titles published by Knopf. Machen is another of my favorite writers, and when I visited London I made a point of tracking down the buildings in Gray’s Inn where both Machen and Shiel resided in the 1890s—Machen in 4 Verulam Buildings and Shiel in 3 Gray’s Inn Place, tucked away at the end of a walk-in, up Warwick Lane, off Holborn.) The late Stan Old tested me with quizzes from The Maltese Falcon for years. Which cab company did Spade call to get to the Stockton tunnel overpass? Did he go to Burlingame in a cab or a hired car? What was the name of Spade and Brigid’s theme song? If I said, “Huh?” he had the answer ready. Stan is the guy who went poking around in some photo ﬁles and came up with the shot of the billboard on Stockton Street which screened Miles Archer’s corpse from casual passersby. Talks with him honed my perceptions on the Falcon more than all the books and articles put together. Jerome Weidman went on the tour on December 7, 1980. At the end the fellow who came along with him nudged him and said, “Tell him you knew Hammett.” I recall asking him, “So, how did I do?” and him answering, “Pretty good, I thought.” Brigid O’Shaughnessy’s daughter came out—and that’s pushing the edge of the envelope even for me. This is to say that the daughter of the woman who worked in the art department at Samuels with Hammett came on the walk. She said that her mother told her that almost every day after work, she and Hammett and the other employees [ 198 ]

Annotated Bibliogr aphy

at Samuels would adjourn to John’s Grill for drinks. In the City interview Jose Hammett mentioned that while he was working at Samuels Hammett “got confused. . . . I think he probably started to drink at that time because they were inviting him out here and there.” But especially they went to John’s Grill. In 1982 I was on a panel about Hammett’s life with Lester Cole, one of the Hollywood Ten. No doubt but that the Maltese Falcon Society which I helped found was a major fund of oral information—David Fechheimer and E. Hoffmann Price addressed the ﬁrst meeting on May 20, 1981, and Diane Johnson, William F. Nolan, Jerome Weidman and many others appeared as speakers. Sitting at the bar, talking with regulars like Mike Keene or Kermit Sheets or Skip Peterson never hurt any. After I met Hammett’s daughter, Jo, I asked her to speak; as it turned out, her talk coincided with the ﬁfth anniversary meeting for May 27, 1986, which was also the last—and it could not have ended better. Several of her remarks I have included in this book, but I have saved the last question I asked her during the talk for the wrap-up. People on the tour for many years would ask me about what exactly Hammett thought of the Bogart version of The Maltese Falcon, directed by John Huston. I’d never read any remarks people remembered him dropping at the time, so I asked Jo—over twenty years ago now—if she knew of any opinion pro or con her father had expressed about this movie. “No,” she answered, “but what’s not to like?” One of her classic Hammett born and bred lines. Indeed, what’s not to like? However, if you check the Selected Letters you can ﬁnd a note to his wife Jose dated October 20, 1941, among the trove of material unearthed in recent years, asking, “Have you seen The Maltese Falcon yet? They made a pretty good picture of it this time, for a change.” Yeah. Pretty good. [ 199 ]

Index of Streets and Addresses

Address numbers are underscored. Ambrose Bierce Street, 121 Ancho Avenue (Burlingame) 26, 168 Bob Kaufman Street, 121 Burritt Street, 5, 10, 128, 139, 186, 194, 196 Bush Street, 10, 123, 131 315, 168 California Street, 116 1201, 10, 115 Clay Street, 109 1534, 116 Cortland Avenue, 174 Cushman Street, 116 (photo) Dashiell Hammett Street, 5, 194 Eddis Street, 9, 86, 170 601, 85, 87, 169 Eddy Street, 1, 4, 6, 9, 68, 130 601, 9, 86 620, 2 , 9, 14, 31, 63, 68, 78, 85, 93, 106, 121 Jo Hammett slept in drawer, 2

rental cost, 68, 74, 78, 80 Ellis Street, 9, 87, 154, 163 57, 165 63, 165

65, 166 71, 160 120, 11, 151 601, 86 Fifth Street, 108, 155, 156, 172 85, 170 Franklin Street, 9, 72 , 77 Frank Norris Street, 121 Geary Street, 138, 140, 143, 145, 146, 150 351, 143 565, 91 811, 4, 92 , 184 Golden Gate Avenue, 9 Holly Circle, 107, 174 Hyde Street, 4, 9, 91, 93, 102 , 130 1309, 10, 14, 94, 95, 106, 115 Isadora Duncan Street, 121 Jack Kerouac Street, 121 Jack London Street, 121 Jessie Street, 170 Jones Street, 113 Kearny Street, 9, 71, 132 , 135, 174 Kenneth Rexroth Place, 121 Larkin Street, 9, 62 , 67, 79, 85, 87, 91 200, 3, 7 [ 201 ]

Index of Streets and Addresses Leavenworth Street, 150 1155, 10, 111, 116 1157, 115 Lick Place, 132 Maiden Lane 134, 166 Market Street, 11 856, 156 870, 5, 11, 160 895, 129, 155, 161 Mark Twain Plaza, 121 McAllister Street, 62 , 72 580, 3, 9, 72 , 77 Mission Street, 108, 170, 174 932, 172 Monroe Street, 194 20, 10, 14, 93, 94, 103, 122 , 129, 141

Montgomery Street, 106, 131, 159 1541, 173 O’Farrell Street, 88 Olive Street, 10, 87 Pine Street, 106, 159, 192 Polk Street, 71 Post Street, 14, 93, 132 , 139 891, 10, 99, 106, 116, 123, 177, 185 chapbook about, 185 Jo Hammett’s first visit to, 4 Jo Hammett’s reaction to interior, 4 Richard Layman’s reaction to interior, 5

[ 202 ]

Powell Street, 11, 62 , 129, 135, 140, 143, 150, 151, 154 114, 5, 154 Redwood Street, 73, 77-78 Richard Henry Dana Place, 121 Sacramento Street, 109 2151, 146 Spofford Lane, 173 Stockton Street, 123, 128, 131, 198 Sutter Street, 135, 138 111, 10, 134, 138, 145 130, 131 600, 25 Taylor Street, 146 Turk Street, 9, 79, 87 408, 9, 14, 79 Van Ness Avenue, 9, 25, 72 , 78, 88, 114, 155 1115, 151 Via Bufano, 121 Washington Street, 102 , 174 Waverly Place, 173 William Saroyan Place, 121

Index

A Abrams, Dr. Albert, 146 Adakian, The, 51, 52 “Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton, The,” 143 Adventures of Sam Spade, The book, 48 radio series, 47 Adventures of the Thin Man, The, 47 “Advertisement IS Literature, The,” 122 “After School,” 35 After the Thin Man, 43, 113 Alexandria Hotel, 138, 145, 148, 170

Another Thin Man, 44 Arbuckle, Fatty, 122 , 135, 140, 142 , 157, 161, 195 Archer, Iva, 135 Archer, Lew, 135 Archer, Miles, 5, 10, 61, 126, 128, 129, 130, 131, 135, 139, 140, 196, 198 Arliss, George, 11, 144 Arney, Bill, 4, 5, 98, 102 , 185 Arnstein, Nicky, 158 “Arson Plus,” 81 Asian Art Museum, 62 Asta, 39 Astor, Mary, 46

Atkins, Ace, 178 Autumn Garden, The, 44, 54

B Bacall, Lauren, 181 Baker, Russell, 37 Ballard, W. T., 192 Battle of the Aleutians, 51 Beams Falling, 195 Beaumont, Ned, 36, 40 Beck, K. K., 178 Behind That Curtain, 143 Behind the Green Door, 196 Benson Murder Case, The, 35 Bentley, Christopher, 186 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 91 Best Short Stories of M. P. Shiel, The, 53 Bierce, Ambrose, 92 Bigger, Earl Derr, 143 “Big Knockover, The,” 42 , 95, 106 delayed book publication of, 42 Big Knockover, The, 13, 42 , 43, 49, 53, 56, 95, 106, 107, 112 , 116, 159, 172 , 174, 189 “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot,” 30 Black Mask, 15, 18, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32 , 34, 35, 42 , 49, 53, 58, 59, 69, 70, 82 , 83, 85, 94, 95, 107, 108, 109, 113, 122 Hammett’s first sale to, 32 [ 203 ]

Index Black Mask Boys, The, 30, 193 Blanco’s, 10, 88, 196 Blood Money, 43, 95 “Bodies Piled Up,” 82 , 148, 193 Bogart, Humphrey, 46, 47, 59, 90, 126, 199 Brady, Matthew, 141, 186 Brice, Fanny, 43, 158 Bridges, Jeff, 181 Brief Stories, 27 Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross, The, 56 Bryan (district attorney), 141 Burlingame, Sam Spade in, 168

C Cabell, James Branch, 28, 198 Cacophony Society, 177 Caen, Herb, 127 Cain, Paul, 193 Cairo, Joel, 11, 77, 97, 98, 144, 146 homosexuality of, 149 origin of character, 17 Casebook of Forensic Detection, The, 119 Celebrated Criminal Cases of America, 118 Chan, Charlie, 143 Chandler, Raymond, 26, 27, 30, 31, 33, 53, 59, 133, 155, 186, 188

on Mark Hopkins Hotel, 117 Chaney, Lon, 108, 110, 172 Charles, Nick, 4, 14, 38, 44, 45, 55, 116 detective with TransContinental Detective Agency, 39 photo of Hammett as, 74 Charles, Nora, 14, 38, 44, 45, 55 Children’s Hour, The, 41, 44 Christie, Agatha, 53 City Lights bookstore, 120 City Streets, 35 Civic Center Park, 3, 69, 71 Clift Hotel, 5, 146 Coburn, James, 89 Cohn, Roy, 57 Cole, Lester, 199 Collinson, Peter, 27 Colodny, Robert, 51 Communist Trial, The, 54 Communiversity, 175, 180 Conan Doyle, Arthur, 101, 143, 146

Continental Detective Agency, 14, 16, 17, 160 [ 204 ]

Continental Op, 3, 9, 10, 14, 28, 32 , 35, 48, 53, 61, 70, 72 , 74, 75, 77, 78, 81, 82 , 88, 91, 95, 106, 108, 188 first Op stories, 27 inspiration for, 96 James Coburn as, 88 literary remarks by, 28 origin of character, 17 Yojimbo inspired by, 89 Continental Op, The (book), 48 Cook, Elisha, 102 , 153 Cook, Wilmer, 4, 77, 97, 138, 144, 150

homosexuality of, 149 origin of character, 17 Cooper, Gary, 35 Coppola, Francis, 86, 101, 187, 190 “Corkscrew,” 83 Corris, Peter, 178 Cortez, Ricardo, 36, 40, 197 Count of Monte Cristo, The, 28 Court of Historical Review, 161, 162 , 192 “Creeping Siamese, The,” 83 Creeps by Night, 92 Crime of the Century, The, 178 Crime Stories and Other Writings, 115 “Crooked Souls,” 27 “Crusader, The,” 81

D Dain Curse, The, 10, 14, 28, 30, 34, 36, 45, 95, 198 Blanco’s Restaurant in, 88 movie version, 89 Daly, Carroll John, 32 , 193 Daniels, Bebe, 36 Dannay, Frederic, 17, 48, 49, 52 , 186

Dashiell, Annie Bond, 14 Dashiell Hammett: A Casebook, 129, 163, 186, 192 Dashiell Hammett: A Daughter Remembers, 189 Dashiell Hammett: A Life, 30, 163, 190 Dashiell Lounge, 11 Dashiell’s Bar, 152 , 179 Davis, Bette, 41, 45, 51 Day of the Locust, The, 38 Day the Laughter Stopped, The, 141, 195 “Dead Yellow Women,” 83, 173, 177

“Death and Company,” 108

Index Death in the Afternoon, 45 Dell mapback, 73 Del Ruth, Roy, 36 DeMarco, Gordon, 178 De Niro, Robert, 178 Detective Story, 53 Dicks, Terrance, 178 Dillinger, John, 16, 41 Discovering The Maltese Falcon and Sam Spade, 102, 191, 194 Dr. Who, 178 Duff, Howard, 47 Duke, Thomas S., 118 Dupin, C. Auguste, 31 Durante, Jimmy, 34 Durning, Charles, 89, 103

E Eames, Hugh, 161 Eastwood, Clint, 90, 91 Ebsen, Buddy, 181 Eisenhower, Dwight, 57 Emery, Vince, 106, 186 En Cuba, 110 Evans, Colin, 119

F Fairmont Hotel, 116 “Faith,” 106 “False Burton Combs, The,” 32 “Farewell Murder, The,” 108 Fast One, The, 193 Fat Man, The, 48, 52 , 118 movie version, 55 Faulkner, William, 42 , 59, 74, 92 Fechheimer, David, 167, 187, 188, 191, 193, 199 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 16, 59 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 120, 178, 194 Ferry Building, 174 Fistful of Dollars, 90 Flitcraft parable, 195 Flood mansion, 116 Flynt, Josiah, 27 “Fly Paper,” 28, 85 “Foggy Night, A,” 86, 97, 113, 130, 131, 138, 147, 186, 187, 188 Fonda, Bridget, 178 Foote-Smith, Elizabeth, 178 For a Few Dollars More, 91 Ford, Ford Madox, 28 Forrest, Frederic, 86 48 Hours, 102

Freeman, Bud, 52 , 192 “From the Memoirs of a Private Detective,” 18, 19, 191

G Garbo, Greta, 36 Gardner, Erle Stanley, 42 , 69, 149, 169, 193 Geary Theatre, 11, 145, 147 Geauque, Philip, 157, 159, 160 Geranios, Nick, 187 Gide, Andre, 23 Glass Key, The, 30, 34, 35, 36, 40, 108, 115, 118 partially written in San Francisco, 14 Godschalk, William, 145, 191 Golden Gate Bridge, 112 , 176, 177 Golden Gate Park, 2 , 68 Gold, Herbert, 179 Good Soldier, The, 28 Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, The, 91 Gores, Joe, 4, 86, 97, 99, 113, 115, 130, 131, 138, 139, 145, 147, 167, 186, 187, 188, 192 , 193 Daniel Kearny and Associates series, 86 experience as detective, 86 imposter posing as, 152 novel Hammett, 86 novel Spade & Archer, 86 testimony for Court of Historical Review, 161 Gossage, Howard, 126, 186 Grace Cathedral, 116 Grand Hyatt, 135, 139, 186 Grant, Maxwell, 69 Great American Music Hall, 10, 88 Green, Richard, 22 Green, Robert, 187, 197 Greenstreet, Sidney, 46 Guild, John, 115, 116 Gumshoe: Reflections in a Private Eye, 167 Gutman, Casper, 5, 10, 32 , 77, 139 daughter of, 149 origin of character, 16 sexual overtones, 149 “Gutting of Couffignal, The,” 28, 53, 74, 75, 129, 138, 191

H Hallidie Building, 131 Hall of Justice, 9, 71, 174 [ 205 ]

Index Hammer, Mike, 34 Hammett movie version, 101, 190, 187 novel by Joe Gores, 86, 167, 188 Hammett: A Life at the Edge, 46, 193 Hammett, Dashiell Academy Award nomination, 51 ad man, 84, 155, 156, 161, 163, 165

Army service in WWI, 23 Army service in WWII, 50, 51, 52 , 192 as cook, 68, 71 Autumn Garden and, 44, 54 birth of, 13 blacklisted, 55 brand of cigarettes smoked, 4 Children’s Hour and, 41, 44 claustrophobia, 177 creative writing teacher, 52 death of, 13, 58, 126 detective with Pinkerton’s, 16, 25, 130, 160, 161, 162 , 187, 189, 190, 192 Fatty Arbuckle case, 140 salary as, 68 early jobs, 15 editor of Adakian newspaper, 51 education of, 15 FBI and, 43, 59 Ferris wheel story, 18 fictional character in novel Our Lady of Darkness, 92 fictional character in novel 100 Percent, 22 first detective character, 32 first sale to Black Mask, 32 Frank Little and, 21, 22 in Baltimore, 14, 18, 45, 96, 147 in Montana, 18, 20, 21, 22 , 23, 187, 197 in Philadelphia, 14 lawsuit over Sam Spade, 48 learns to type, 25 literary ambitions of, 28 Little Foxes and, 44, 45 met his future wife, 24 Midget Bandit and, 17 paperbacks of stories, 48, 49, 55, 59 photo on cover of The Thin Man, 39, 73 political views, 43, 50, 51, 52 , 54, 57, 58 prison sentence, 54 radio shows, 45, 47, 48, 52 , 55 regard for M. P. Shiel, 28, 29, 53, 197, 198 [ 206 ]

residences in Hollywood, 35, 44, 53, 110, 138 residences in New York, 35, 38, 45, 54, 56, 58 San Francisco and arrival in, 13, 24, 61 departure from, 13, 34, 61, 94, 106 his feelings about, 2 , 113 timeline of residences in, 60 works written in, 13 Secret Agent X–9 and, 39, 43 speechwriter, 50, 52 tuberculosis, 3, 9, 24, 25, 26, 51, 63, 79, 85, 87, 93, 94, 112 , 121, 163, 164, 187 uncompleted novels, 42 , 56 use of Celebrated Criminal Cases of America, 118 use of penname, 27 wedding of, 25, 151 writer for movies, 35, 36, 40, 43, 44, 50, 53, 110, 117 writing The Thin Man, 38 wrote book reviews, 35 Hammett Den, 167 Hammett, Jo, 6, 25, 54, 66, 71, 83, 93, 99, 103, 116, 153, 177, 178, 189, 194, 199, 212 birth of, 68 first meeting with Don Herron, 3, 177 first visit to John’s Grill, 6 friendship with Konstin family, 6 introduction to Selected Letters, 191 reaction to interior of 891 Post, 4 slept in dresser drawer, 2 Hammett, Jose, 2 , 5, 9, 24, 53, 63, 68, 79, 80, 81, 84, 85, 93, 110, 111, 116, 130, 141, 161, 187, 199 in Marin County, 93 residence prior to marriage, 151 wedding of, 25, 151 Hammett, Mary Jane, 2 , 3, 21, 68, 78, 81, 103, 110, 116, 130, 138, 141, 187 birth of, 68 Hammett, Richard T., 14, 15, 189 Handlery Hotel, 143 Haultrain, Phil, 141, 187 Hellman, Lillian, 20, 21, 22 , 35, 38, 39, 42 , 43, 45, 49, 50, 51, 53, 54, 56, 58, 103, 118, 130, 152 , 159, 161, 167, 179, 189, 190, 197 Children’s Hour, The, 41 Little Foxes, The, 44, 45

Index Hemingway, Ernest, 34, 45, 59, 74 Herron, Don, 1, 3, 6, 7, 8, 211-212 fictionalized as Dan Swan, 178 first meeting with Jo Hammett, 3, 177 moved to San Francisco, 180 High Priest of California, The, 155

Hill, Walter, 103 Hilton Hotel, 174 Hinckle, Warren, 126 Hitchcock, Alfred, 53 Hitler, Adolf, 50 Holmes, Sherlock, 31, 96, 101, 143, 146 Hoover, J. Edgar, 16, 43, 59 Horan, James D., 190 Hotel Stewart, 143 “House in Turk Street, The,” 87, 130

House Un-American Activities Committee, 20, 57, 189 Huberman, Leo, 19, 20, 189 Hudson, Rock, 55 Hunter, Tim, 101, 190 Hunting Boy, The, 42 Huntington Park, 116 Huston, John, 45, 46, 47, 149, 196, 199

I “Inch and a Half of Glory, An,” 106

J James, Henry, 29, 110 James, Jesse, 16, 162 Jefferson School of Social Sciences, 52 Jerome, Blackjack, 24, 168 John’s Grill, 5, 11, 61, 71, 129, 163, 169, 170, 182 , 192 , 199 featured in The Maltese Falcon, 168

Hammett Den, 167 Jo Hammett’s first visit to, 6 Maltese Falcon Dining Room, 166

originally at 57 Ellis St., 165 Johnson, Diane, 30, 163, 190, 199 Jonni Thunder, 178 Julius’ Castle, 173

K Kaplan, Jack, 161, 166 Kearny, Daniel, 86

Keaton, Buster, 142 Keller, Edward, 119 Kennedy, James, 128 Kerouac, Jack, 120 Keystone Apartments, 102 Kikkert, David, 86 Kikushima, Ryuzo, 89 Knight, Jack, 187 Knopf, Alfred, 28, 30, 39, 42 , 73, 95, 111 Knopf, Blanche, 28, 112 , 191 Kober, Arthur, 35 Kojak, 86 Konstantinides, Charilaos, 167 Konstin, Gus, 6, 167 Konstin, John, 6, 168 Konstin, Sydna, 167 Kopp, Quentin, 128 Kurosawa, Akira, 89, 90

L Labor Spy Racket, The, 19, 189 Lafayette Square, 146 La Follette, Bob, 19, 162 , 190 Last Man Standing, 103 Lawford, Peter, 55 Law, John, 176 Layman, Richard, 22 , 52 , 53, 83, 99, 102 , 130, 158, 162 , 163, 191, 193, 194 reaction to interior of 891 Post, 5 Lee, Manfred B., 17 Leguizamo, John, 181 Leiber, Fritz, 4, 8, 92 , 97, 138, 146, 167, 188, 192 Leone, Sergio, 90 Library, old Main, 9, 67 Linn, W. C., 161 Lipset, Hal, 167, 187 Little Foxes, The, 44, 45 Little, Frank, 21, 22 , 50, 161, 187, 189, 197 London, Jack, 92 Lord of the Sea, The, 28, 74, 197 Lorre, Peter, 46, 144 Lost Stories, 186, 188 Lovecraft, H. P., 84, 92 Lowe, Edmund, 40 Loy, Myrna, 39 Lukas, Paul, 51

M MacDonald, John D., 155 Macdonald, Ross, 135, 188 Machen, Arthur, 198 Madvig, Paul, 36 [ 207 ]

Index Magnum, P. I., 86 “Main Death, The,” 95 Maltese Falcon Dining Room,

Munson School for Private Secretaries, 25, 26, 78 “Murders in the Rue Morgue,”

Maltese Falcon Society, 199 Maltese Falcon, The, 7, 9,13, 14, 30, 34, 36, 61, 76, 91, 96, 99, 110, 113, 129, 141 dates during which novel’s actions occur, 145 dedicated to Jose Hammett, 111 first movie version, 36, 197 homosexual characters in, 149 hotel names in, 147, 148 Modern Library edition, 29,

Murphy, Eddie, 102 Myers, Laura, 192 “Mystery of Marie Roget, The,”

166

74

origins of characters, 16, 17 prequel Spade & Archer, 86 purchase of movie rights, 38 restaurant names in, 147, 148 second movie version, 40 sequels, 36, 40, 47, 48 Shakespeare references in, 144

source of idea for statue, 29 Spade in D.A.’s office, 71 third movie version, 45, 46, 47, 144, 149, 153, 199 Hammett’s opinion of, 199 statuette from, 102 Maltin, Leonard, 89 “Man Called Spade, A,” 173 “Man Called Thin, A,” 26 Marion, George, 54 Mark Hopkins Hotel, 116, 139 Raymond Chandler on, 117 Marlowe, Philip, 33, 133 Martin, William J., 178 Mason, Perry, 42 , 69 Maurois, Edouard, 76 McAllister, Hall, 72 McCarthy, Joseph, 20, 54, 57, 59 McClellan, John, 57 McCoy, Horace, 192 , 193 McMaster, R. G., 163 McNail, Stanley, 178 Merchant of Venice, The, 11, 144 Mertz, Stephen, 192 Miami Blues, 179 “Midget Bandit,” 17 Mifune, Toshiro, 89 Mint, Old, 108 Miss Lonelyhearts, 38 Mister Dynamite, 40 Mitchell Brothers, 196 Monaco Hotel, 146, 148 Monaco, John, 165, 168 Monahan, Dixie, 150 Montgomery Hotel, 148 [ 208 ]

31

31

N “Nails in Mr. Cayterer, The,” 26 Nash, Hamilton, 89 Nash, Jay Robert, 192 Necklace of Hickeys, A, 180 New Adventures of the Thin Man, The, 47 New York Evening Post, 35 Nibbi, Marino, 128 Nightmare Town, 115 “Night Shade,” 37 Charles Willeford novel based on, 155 Nob Hill, 10, 100, 113, 116, 120, 139 Nolan, William F., 30, 46, 89, 116, 129, 163, 167, 186, 192 , 193, 199 Nolte, Nick, 102 Nordstrom, 155 Notes of an Itinerant Policeman, 27

Nye, Russell B., 30

O Old Man, the, 160 Old Mint, 108, 172 Old, Stan, 198 100 Percent, 22 $106,000 Blood Money, 42 , 95 “$106,000 Blood Money,” 42 , 95, 106 On the Make, 40 operative, pronounciation of the word, 187 O’Shaughnessy, Brigid, 4, 5, 10, 77, 97, 126, 139, 172 apartment, 113 daughter, 198 inspiration for, 111 theme song, 110 O’Toole, Peggy, 111 Our Lady of Darkness, 92 , 167

P Packer, Alfred/Alferd G., 118, 119 Palace Hotel, 139, 147, 148 Parker, Bonnie, 41 “Parthian Shot, The,” 27

Index Peckinpah, Sam, 103 Penalty, The, 108, 110, 172 Perelman, Laura, 39 Perelman, S.J., 38, 39 Perrine, Effie, 173 origin of character, 17 Peters, Nancy, 193 Petrie, Glynn, 194 Phelan Building, 159 Pickford, Mary, 143 Pickwick Stage Terminal, 170 Pier 35, 174 Pinkerton, Allan, 16 Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency, 5, 11, 16, 19, 61, 157, 161, 162 , 187, 190 early history, 16 Hammett’s career with, 25 San Francisco offices, 160 Pinkertons, The, 190 Pinkerton, William, 16 Plaza Hotel, 122 , 139, 141, 145 Poe, Edgar Allan, 31 Polhaus, Tom, 128 Portsmouth Square, 9, 71, 174 Powell Hotel, 155, 179 Powell, William, 4, 39, 40 Price, E. Hoffmann, 30, 70, 199 pulps, defined, 37 “Purloined Letter, The,” 31

Q Queen, Ellery, 17, 48, 49, 55, 96, 186

S Samuels, Albert, 88, 94, 116, 121, 155, 163, 165, 194 Samuels Jewelers, 3, 9, 30, 84, 88, 100, 111, 121, 129, 155, 156, 161, 163 Sanjuro, 90 Satan Met a Lady, 40 Saturday Review of Literature, The, 35 “Scorched Face, The,” 81 compared to Sherlock Holmes story, 143 Scoundrel Time, 20, 189 Secret Agent X-9, 39, 43, 73 Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett, 93, 186, 191, 199 “Seven Pages,” 122 , 135, 141 shadowing, rules of, 82 Shadow Man, 22 , 52 , 83, 130, 162 , 163, 191 Shakespeare, William; references in The Maltese Falcon, 144 Shamus, 169 Shaw, Joseph T., 30, 31, 70, 94, 107, 108 Shiel, M. P., 28, 53, 197 Shumlin, Herman, 51 Sidney-Fryer, Donald, 178 “Simple Art of Murder, The,” 26, 31, 186 Sinclair, Upton, 22 Sir Francis Drake Hotel, 10, 139, 145

R Raft, George, 40, 47 Rappe, Virginia, 141 Raymond, Alex, 39 Red Harvest, 13, 22 , 28, 30, 34, 35, 36, 41, 82 , 91, 95, 103, 108, 188, 194 inspired Fistful of Dollars, 90 inspired Last Man Standing, 103 inspired Yojimbo, 89 movie versions, 34 Remedial Loan, 172 Return of the Continental Op, The, 48 Dell mapback, 73 Rise of Ruderick Clowd, The, 27 Rivett, Julie, 4, 191 Rivkin, Allen, 46 “Road Home, The,” 32 Roadhouse Nights, 34 Runyon, Brad, 48, 55

“Slippery Fingers,” 27 Smart, J. Scott, 55 Smart Set, The, 18, 26, 27, 81 Smith, Clark Aston, 92 Smith, Marj, 1, 3, 5, 177 Sonoma, 158, 161, 174, 194 Spade & Archer, 86 Spade, Sam, 4, 5, 9, 10, 14, 32 , 42 , 59, 71, 77, 96, 99, 125, 126, 169, 170, 172 , 187 Celebrated Criminal Cases of America and, 118 George Raft as, 47 Howard Duff as, 48 Humphrey Bogart as, 46, 47 influence on Yojimbo, 90 in movies, 36, 40 inspiration for, 96, 133 John’s Grill and, 6 offices of, 134 radio series, 48 short stories, 36, 117 source of name, 100 theme song, 110 [ 209 ]

Spillane, Mickey, 34 Spivak, Lawrence, 42 Stabiner, Karen, 194 “Stalking Sam Spade,” 91, 97, 138, 146, 192 Stein, Gertrude, 43 Sterling, George, 92 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 8, 174 St. Francis Hotel, 11, 40, 141 St. Germaine Cafe, 163 St. Mark Hotel, 10, 139, 148 St. Mary’s Cathedral, 25, 151 St. Mary’s Church, 2 St. Mary’s County, 13 Stockton Tunnel, 10, 126, 131 Strangers on a Train, 53 Suicide Club, 176, 177 Symons, Julian, 194

T Tarantino, Quentin, 178 Telegraph Hill, 173 There Was a Young Man, 42 “They Can Only Hang You Once,” 90 They Drive by Night, 47 Thin Man, The, 4, 30, 41, 73, 118 cannibalism in, 118, 119 dates when novel occurs, 145 first version set in San Francisco, 115, 117, 187 inspired by Keller case, 119 movie versions, 39, 73 origin of name Asta, 39 photo of Hammett on cover of, 39, 73 radio series, 45, 47 sequels, 43, 44, 45, 47, 55 television series, 55 writing of, 38 Thin, Robin, 26 Thomas, Elbert D., 190 Thomas, Roy, 178 Thompson, Jim, 155 Thompson, Josiah, 167 Thompson, Ruth, 165 “Thou Art the Man”, 31 “Three Gun Terry,” 32 Thursby, Floyd, 139, 140, 150 Treacher, Arthur, 41 True Detective Stories, 70 Tulip, 56, 112 Twain, Mark, 120

V Valley Sheep are Fatter, The, 42 Van Dine, S. S., 35 Van Dyke, W. S., 39

W Waite, Arthur Edward, 56 Wallis, Hal B., 50 Wandrei, Donald, 92 Warne, Gary, 176 Warner, Jack, 46 Watch on the Rhine, 50, 117 Watson, Dr. John, 31 Webley-Fosbery revolver, 196 Weidman, Jerome, 43, 119, 178, 198, 199 Weird Tales, 84 Wenders, Wim, 86 Western Advertising, 95 Westfield San Francisco Centre, 170

West, Nathanael, 38, 42 Whitfield, Prudence, 113 Whitfield, Raoul, 113 “Who Killed Bob Teal?”, 70, 130, 186 “Whosis Kid, The,” 3, 9, 72 , 74, 76, 78, 87, 129, 146 Willeford, Charles, 11, 178, 179, 180, 183, 188, 212 novels set in San Francisco, 155 Willis, Bruce, 103 Wings of the Dove, The, 29, 110 Winston, Harry, 102 Winston, Ronald, 102 , 153 Wise, Sid, 135 Wobblies, 20, 21, 23, 197 Wolfe, Peter, 195 Woman in the Dark, 37, 117 movie version, 39, 73 “Women, Politics, and Murder,” 70, 108 Wray, Fay, 39 Wright, Jimmy, 17 Wright, Willard Huntington, 35 Writer’s Digest, 84 Wyler, William, 53

Y Yallop, David, 141, 195 Yojimbo, 89, 103

U Unfinished Woman, An, 189 Union Square, 124, 139, 141, 150

Z “Zigzags of Treachery,” 81, 82 , 174

About the Writers

About the Writers

Don Herron has led the Dashiell Hammett Tour in San Francisco since 1977, becoming a living institution in the City by the Bay. He is the author of The Literary World of San Francisco, a neighborhood-by-neighborhood guide to places where writers have lived in The City, covering everyone from Jack London to Jack Kerouac, as well as Willeford, a biography of crime writer Charles Willeford. Best-selling author John Jakes called Herron’s book The Dark Barbarian, about writer Robert E. Howard, “Serious, scholarly, yet entertaining throughout—a superior job.” Herron’s Hammett tour has been covered regularly by the media, and he has appeared frequently on radio and television in America, Great Britain, Japan, and Germany, including NPR and BBC radio, and PBS and BBC television. Herron ﬁgures he reached the peak of his fame when his tour turned up on the TV quiz show Jeopardy!. Category: American Cities. “The city in which Don [ 211 ]

About the Writers

Herron leads the Dashiell Hammett Tour.” The button is hit. “What is San Francisco?” Of course. Jo Hammett was nominated for an Edgar Award for her biography Dashiell Hammett: A Daughter Remembers. She was editorial advisor for Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett, 1921–1960, and wrote its introduction, “A Reasonable Amount of Trouble.” She lives in southern California. Charles Willeford (1919–1988) is best known for his bestselling hardboiled novels about Miami police detective Hoke Moseley. Willeford served as a soldier in the Army and Army Air Corps for twenty years. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge and earned the Bronze Star and the Silver Star for bravery, the Purple Heart with oak leaf cluster, and the Cross of Luxembourg. He was associate editor of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, mystery critic for the Miami Herald, and taught at Miami-Dade Junior College and the University of Miami. Three of Willeford’s sixteen novels have been made into movies.

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Lost Stories by Dashiell Hammett

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Featured Alternate Selection, The Book-of-theMonth Club.

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Featured Alternate Selection, Mystery Guild.

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P R O D U C T I O N S

Otto Penzler, New York Sun: “A hugely important book. It belongs on the shelf of every detective ﬁction reader and collector. It is a book to be read with pleasure.” Peter Handel, Pages: “A marvelous collection of previously unpublished works by the ever intriguing Pinkerton detective-turned-writer. What makes the compilation a cut above the usual is Emery’s annotations to each story, placing it in a speciﬁc context of Hammett’s life at the time of writing. Great fun, but historically important, too.” Hardcover, $24.95. ISBN 978-0-97-258981-9

Hammett’s Moral Vision by George J. “Rhino” Thompson •

Selected by January Magazine as one of the best books of the year.

Tom Nolan, The Wall Street Journal: “Hammett aﬁcionados will be grateful for George J. ‘Rhino’ Thompson’s erudite Hammett’s Moral Vision, a work that offers fresh insights into this author’s ﬁve classic novels.” Hardcover, $24.95. ISBN 978-0-97-258983-3 [ 213 ]

Discovering The Maltese Falcon and Sam Spade Edited by Richard Layman •

Edgar Award nominee, Best Critical/Biographical Book of the Year.

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Selected by the Los Angeles Times as one of 10 recommended gifts for movie buffs.

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Selected by The Wall Street Journal as one of 10 books recommended as Christmas gifts for mystery fans.

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Selected by Thrilling Detective.com as one of 9 books recommended as Christmas gifts for private eye fans.

Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times: “A treasure beyond price for fans of both the classic Hammett novel and the three (that’s right, three) ﬁlm versions of the doomed quest for a black bird. An incredible amalgam of photos, memos, letters, reviews, whatever, this will make fans of the book or the ﬁlm gasp as one unexpected delight succeeds another. With this book, wonders really do never cease.” Discovering The Maltese Falcon and Sam Spade uncovers a wealth of treasures about Hammett’s masterpiece, his detective Sam Spade, three ﬁlm versions of the novel, stage adaptations, radio shows, even comics. The book provides hundreds of rare documents and original materials, with more than 200 illustrations and photos. Many are previously unpublished. Contributors include Dashiell Hammett, Jo Hammett, Richard Layman, Mary Astor, Dorothy Parker, John Huston, Joe Gores, and more than ﬁfty additional writers. Paperback, $19.95. ISBN 978-0-97-258986-4 [ 214 ]