Expanded and revised, this 30th-anniversary edition guides readers over the fog-shrouded hills stalked by Sam Spade, the Continental Op, and other legendary characters created by San Francisco’s most famous mystery writer, Dashiell Hammett. Detailing locations of interest, including all of Hammett’s known residences and the majority of settings from The Maltese Falcon, this guidebook contains maps, self-guided tours, and photographs of Hammett-related locations from both then and now. A new preface by Jo Hammett, the detective writer’s daughter and Edgar Award–nominated writer, is also included.
Expanded and revised, this 30th-anniversary edition guides readers over the fog-shrouded hills stalked by Sam Spade, the Continental Op, and other legendary characters created by San Francisco’s most famous mystery writer, Dashiell Hammett. Detailing locations of interest, including all of Hammett’s known residences and the majority of settings from The Maltese Falcon, this guidebook contains maps, self-guided tours, and photographs of Hammett-related locations from both then and now. A new preface by Jo Hammett, the detective writer’s daughter and Edgar Award–nominated writer, is also included.
Dashiell Hammett Tour: Thirtieth Anniversary Guidebook
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Dashiell Hammett Tour: Thirtieth Anniversary Guidebook
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Overview
Expanded and revised, this 30th-anniversary edition guides readers over the fog-shrouded hills stalked by Sam Spade, the Continental Op, and other legendary characters created by San Francisco’s most famous mystery writer, Dashiell Hammett. Detailing locations of interest, including all of Hammett’s known residences and the majority of settings from The Maltese Falcon, this guidebook contains maps, self-guided tours, and photographs of Hammett-related locations from both then and now. A new preface by Jo Hammett, the detective writer’s daughter and Edgar Award–nominated writer, is also included.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780972589871 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Vince Emery Productions |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2009 |
| Series: | The Ace Performer Collection Series |
| Edition description: | Thirtieth Anniversary Edition |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Product dimensions: | 4.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Don Herron is the author of The Dark Barbarian, The Literary World of San Francisco, and Willeford. He has led the Dashiell Hammett Tour in San Francisco since 1977. He lives in San Francisco. Jo Hammett is the author of the Edgar award–nominated biography Dashiell Hammett: A Daughter Remembers. She served as the editorial advisor for Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett. She lives in Los Angeles. Charles Willeford was the author of 16 novels, including the bestselling Hoke Moseley series. He was literary critic for the Miami Herald and taught at the University of Miami.
Read an Excerpt
The Dashiell Hammett Tour
Thirtieth Anniversary Guidebook
By Don Herron
Vince Emery Productions
Copyright © 2009 Don HerronAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-9825650-0-1
CHAPTER 1
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 Hammett's day, though — including the roll call of authors' names chiseled into the stonework under the large second-floor windows facing Larkin Street.
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 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.
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.
CHAPTER 2CIVIC 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 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 aboutThe 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 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 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 — anyonecan 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 couldbake."
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:
CHAPTER 3CITY 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 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 rapid-fire 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:
CHAPTER 4580 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 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 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 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?"
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.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Dashiell Hammett Tour by Don Herron. Copyright © 2009 Don Herron. Excerpted by permission of Vince Emery Productions.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Page,
Dedication,
PREFACE - Back Where I Might Have Been,
INTRODUCTION - Hammett's San Francisco: On the Trail of Sam Spade,
PART ONE - Dashiell Hammett: A Brief Biography,
PART TWO - The Dashiell Hammett Tour,
1 200 LARKIN: Hammett's Reading Room,
2 CIVIC CENTER PARK: Kids' Playground,
3 CITY HALL: Politics and Murder,
4 580 McALLISTER: Whosis Kid Gundown,
5 REDWOOD ALLEY: Unexpected Palm Tree,
6 408 TURK: TB Flare-Up,
7 620 EDDY: Blackmasking,
8 BLANCO'S: Dain Curse Cuisine,
9 811 GEARY: Stalking Sam Spade,
10 891 POST: Sam's Place,
11 1309 HYDE: Big Knockover,
12 1155 LEAVENWORTH: Writer at Last,
13 1201 CALIFORNIA: Brigid's Place,
14 DASHIELL HAMMETT STREET: Street Cred,
15 20 MONROE: Ad Man,
16 STOCKTON TUNNEL: Death by Night,
17 BURRITT STREET: Crime Scene,
18 111 SUTTER: Spade & Archer,
19 SIR FRANCIS DRAKE HOTEL: Gunsel and Gutman,
20 ST. FRANCIS HOTEL: Fatty Arbuckle,
21 GEARY THEATRE: Pound of Flesh,
22 CLIFT HOTEL: Sherlock Slept Here,
23 BELLEVUE HOTEL: Cairo's Place,
24 FLOYD THURSBY'S APARTMENT: Dead Gangster,
25 120 ELLIS: Tying the Knot,
26 114 POWELL: Wife to Be,
27 SAMUELS STREET CLOCK: Diamond Days,
28 870 MARKET: Pinkerton's Man,
29 JOHN'S GRILL: Chop House,
30 Off-Tour Hammett Sites,
AFTERWORD - Notes from Thirty Years Up and Down the Mean Streets,
SOURCES - Annotated Bibliography,
About the Writers,