The Lost Detective (16 page)

When
Red Harvest
was published in February 1929, Herbert Asbury in
The Bookman
called it “the liveliest detective story that has been published in a decade,” and doubted “if even Ernest Hemingway has ever written more effective dialogue.” The book was hailed by a number of reviewers for its portrait of corruption and for its starkly savvy prose. Others had a more contemplative picture of how a detective should behave, and did not wish to slog about in the underworld, even with as charismatic a guide as Hammett’s Op. Nevertheless, by the end of the year, the first edition of
Red Harvest
had sold out and was optioned by a film company—not Fox, but Paramount Studios.

Six months after publication of his first novel, Knopf brought out
The Dain Curse
, in July 1929, a mystery that expands on the sinister California theme of cults built around sex and drugs that Hammett had sketched out in “The Scorched Face,” only this time the Op was not searching for a rebellious “wandering daughter” but trying to save one who had been convinced she was evil, the inheritor of a false family curse. (As such a wide-ranging reader, Hammett may even have been inspired by an old Wilkie Collins story about inherited mental illness, “Mad Monkton.”)

The book, which had also been serialized in
Black Mask
, was Hammett’s last starring his Op. It featured a lean, “sorrel-haired” writer as a villain, drew a little on the knowledge of jewels Hammett had gained during his brief advertising career,
and contained some other inside jokes about the office. It was dedicated to Albert Samuels.
^†
Few reviewers thought it as good as
Red Harvest
, including Hammett, who later found the story “silly,” but
The Dain Curse
did sell out its first three printings and was full of memorable lines from his wisecracking detective. It also gained Hammett his first review mention in the
New York Times
, as part of a Christmas roundup of books.

Hammett was now writing as well and as quickly as he ever would. By the time Knopf published
The Dain Curse
, he had already submitted his third novel, what he introduced as “by far the best thing I’ve done so far.” After experimenting with other physical types for sleuths in some non-Op stories (including a fat, hyperbolically ugly PI named Alexander Rush), he had developed a new detective worthy of the long haul of starring in his own novel. He was taller, looked and acted a little like a “blond Satan,” and answered to no one but the client—not to an Old Man of the office, not even to his business partner, for whom he showed his contempt by bedding his wife. Sam Spade was about to come snarling to life.

*
Clark, who beat Marcus Daly in the dirty campaign over a state capital, owned the Butte streetcar system that brought visitors to his thirty-four-room Victorian mansion. For an entertaining account of the battles between the magnates, see C. B. Glasscock,
The War of The Copper Kings
(New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1935).

**
In later years, as he continued to be compared to Ernest Hemingway—who also wrote sparely about tough guys but was never labeled a genre writer—Hammett would insist to friends that “Ernest” did not create convincing female characters—none as lifelike as Dinah Brand, anyway.

†
With three of his books,
The Maltese Falcon
,
The Dain Curse
, and
The Glass Key
, the honoree got the dedication once Hammett had moved on.

The contemporary novelist’s job is to take pieces of life and arrange them on paper. And the more direct their passage from street to paper, the more lifelike they should be
.

—D
ASHIELL
H
AMMETT
, 1934

If you go around town looking for it, you’ll find boasts that Dashiell Hammett wrote
The Maltese Falcon
in all corners of San Francisco. At the Flood Building on Market Street, where he worked for Pinkerton’s before he ever wrote anything, a proprietary caption accompanies the black bird on display in the lobby; around the corner, at John’s Grill on Ellis Street, the menu reprints Fritz Lieber’s “Stalking Sam Spade,” and the marker out front (
HOME OF THE MALTESE FALCON
) suggests he scribbled some of his masterwork here among the beer glasses and T-bones. (The waiters somehow all know this for a fact.) John’s Grill, with its marvelous long neon sign and three floors decked out with
Falcon
memorabilia, has served as a headquarters for Hammett scholars over the years and earned its spot on
the to-do lists of tourists who come to order the Sam Spade Special, a dinner of “chops, baked potato, and sliced tomatoes” that Spade quickly eats there in the novel. The falcon statuette in a glass case on John’s second floor is the best known of all the replicas in the city. When it was stolen in 2007, a twenty-five-thousand-dollar bounty failed to bring it back, but a replacement bird was created by art students.
^*

Across Ellis Street from John’s, at the Hotel Union Square, where he never stayed or wrote but did put up his pregnant fiancée before their wedding in 1921, the
Thin Man
movies play quietly on a continuous loop in the lobby. Fans of the writer can sleep in the Dashiell Hammett Suite, which features a
SPADE & ARCHER
sign in the window, fedora and mackintosh on a coatrack, a suitcase filled with Hammett paperbacks, and framed pictures of both Hammett’s wife, Jose, and his companion Lillian Hellman. (Many Hammett enthusiasts who have stayed in the suite have put the discordant Hellman portrait facedown during their stay: after all, she has nothing to do with San Francisco.) The most charming feature of the suite is the lovely chiming of the cable cars passing under the windows, on their way to and from the grinding turntable at the bottom of Powell Street. And while the literature that comes with the room claims he wrote his great San Francisco works in the 1930s (when he had gone to New York and Hollywood), still, it is a fine place to have a drink and think about Hammett.

All that’s known for sure is he wrote
The Maltese Falcon
mostly in the studio he rented not that far away, at 891 Post
Street, which sits just within the Tenderloin district. He had moved there while still working as advertising manager for Albert Samuels, and it is where Sam Spade first came to life, a “hard and shifty fellow” if ever there was one. After two strong books, Hammett produced a nearly perfect one in this space of barely three hundred square feet. Unlike with his Op or the Old Man, Hammett claimed no direct inspiration for Spade from his own experience: “Spade had no original,” he remembered in 1934. “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.”
¹
But he and Spade shared more than that, starting with their common apartment.

He put so much of himself into Spade—gave him the rooms he was living in and the streets he knew well; added a handsome, angular face very much like his own, as well as a risky romance with a woman inspired by one he had met at the office, Peggy O’Toole; gave him a cop antagonist with the name of a boy from his old Baltimore neighborhood, Polhaus; he attached the name of a favorite cousin, Effie, to Spade’s “invaluable angel” of a secretary, and then christened Spade with his own first name, which he used less and less, Sam.
^**
The rest, of course, was a rough-edged “dream man” with yellow-gray eyes, the perfect foil for the invading throng of deadly treasure hunters chasing an antique black bird. Hammett’s new mystery presented a private detective uniquely suited to his wicked world, as
Hammett said, “able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent by-stander or client.”

Like the Continental Op, who prefers to stir things up and see what happens, Spade’s “way of learning” is to “heave a wild and unpredictable monkey-wrench into the machinery.” But unlike the Op, Spade is not a company man. Others have written about Spade having a personal code (“When a man’s partner is killed he’s supposed to do something about it”), but he is also the perfect adaptive animal for the San Francisco of the late 1920s, the end result of Allan Pinkerton’s dictum about the importance of detectives assimilating with criminals. “Don’t be too sure I’m as crooked as I’m supposed to be,” Spade reminds Brigid O’Shaughnessy.

Sam Spade launched a thousand tough-guy sleuths, yet he remains more lifelike because he is not really knowable beyond his ruthless focus and weakness for women. Spade is given to sudden rages that might be strategic, draws a punch from a cop as a way of sounding him out (“in losing his head and slugging me he overplayed his hand”); even when he sleeps with his beautiful client, you aren’t sure it isn’t just to steal her key to search her room:

At his side, Brigid O’Shaughnessy’s soft breathing had the regularity of utter sleep. Spade was quiet leaving bed and bedroom and shutting bedroom-door. He dressed in the bathroom. Then he examined the sleeping girl’s clothes, took a flat brass key from the pocket of her coat, and went out.
²

He examines every crevice of Brigid’s hotel suite, then returns to cheerfully make her breakfast. He crosses so many
lines and mostly crosses back, keeping cop and crook off balance, a quality that allows him to play each of the falcon hunters off the others. But as a wise lady once said to the Hammett authority Don Herron as he was leading one of his Hammett tours, you don’t know how the book might turn out if Spade held a real, bejeweled falcon in his hands.

Inside Hammett’s small Post Street studio, you can easily imagine Spade rolling his cigarettes and jauntily serving Bacardi to his unwelcome guests. According to the Friends of Libraries plaque placed on the wall of the apartment building in 2005, DASHIELL HAMMETT LIVED IN THIS BUILDING FROM 1926 UNTIL 1929, WHEN HE WROTE HIS FIRST THREE NOVELS. Several of those months were spent elsewhere, but as the inscription continues, this space is also significant as the home of Sam Spade: MODELED ON HAMMETT’S, ON THE NORTHWEST CORNER OF THE FOURTH FLOOR.

An original member of the Maltese Falcon Society, Don Herron has helped thousands along the Hammett trail since founding his Dashiell Hammett Tour in 1977. Hammett transformed himself while living in San Francisco, and Herron, born in Detroit, also became the man he is only after moving here, during the city’s scruffier prime, long before tech money raised the rents and Google buses prowled the streets.

Herron has been climbing the San Francisco hillsides since the Jimmy Carter era on behalf of the enthusiasts who show up on designated Sundays, cash in hand, to follow this tall bearded man in his comfortable trench coat: throngs of actors, English professors, Bogie fans, hard-boiled know-it-alls, and kindly buffs. He has led groups of amateur sleuths (from the Mystery Writers of America) as well as professional detectives, and he
had the honor of bringing the writer’s daughter Jo Hammett full circle back to her first childhood home on Eddy Street and to the Post Street studio with the cramped elevator where her father wrote
The Maltese Falcon
.

After a short, close elevator ride, the apartment door opens into a curved passageway with a recessed wooden phone box of the kind once used for buzzing in guests. On the other side of the wall from the phone is a small but bright kitchen, while in the main room, a Murphy bed is folded away behind a door (“In his bedroom that was a living room now the wall bed was up …”). Against the wall a period desk sits beneath a framed map of San Francisco, with a solid black Royal typewriter on a leather blotter, and behind the typewriter stands another falcon.

Turning right from the desk there is a long window view down Post Street, for whenever the writer needed to look away from the “swell lot of thieves” of his imagination. A Gramophone sits on its stand in the corner, opposite a glass-fronted bookcase. Hanging over the scene is an acorn-shaped alabaster light fixture, a little more sculptural than the plain “white bowl, hung on three gilded chains” that lights Spade’s room in the novel. Missing also is the sound of the old Alcatraz foghorn’s “dull moaning” through Spade’s open windows.

Starting with Sergeant Polhaus, almost every major character comes to Sam’s apartment to harass him at some point in the novel, wanting him for murder or love or treasure. One can imagine the bulbous villain Casper Gutman seated heavily on the room’s couch discussing the history of his black bird, or Brigid O’Shaughnessy undressing in Sam’s bathroom to prove she’s not a thief.

After Hammett left it in 1929,
^†
tenant after tenant occupied his small studio at 891 Post, presumably unaware of its possible literary significance. Then, more than six decades later, Bill Arney moved in among the Hammett ghosts and began his architectural detective work.

Arney first saw the outside of Post Street while taking Don Herron’s tour in July 1982. Eleven years later, he recognized the building as he passed it in a cab, with a For Rent sign outside: apartment 401 was available. Arney had heard this was Hammett’s apartment number from Herron, who got it from the novelist Joe Gores, who cited the
Crocker-Langley San Francisco City Directory
. But Hammett had never said his old apartment definitely belonged to Sam Spade. The man Don Herron calls the “pivotal tenant” ultimately made the case that Hammett’s and Spade’s apartments were one and the same.

Arney’s discovery of the apartment would take him deep inside the Hammett cult as he lived with Sam Spade for fourteen years. “I did not know for sure that it was
really
Spade’s apartment until I sat in there and read the novel,” Arney recalls. “Now,
that
was spooky. For the first months, it was
incredibly
spooky, to the point where it was hard to get to sleep at night.”
³

Arney noticed that his apartment had a bend and a small closet in the front passageway, just like Sam’s, and that there was a door between the passageway and the main room, which few other units in the building had. When the cops visit Sam’s place the night of Archer’s murder, Spade hears the elevator cage
door rattling open. In those days, the apartment door was glass, therefore less soundproof, like the door between the passageway and the living room/bedroom, which Arney rescued from the basement. The bathroom’s layout also accommodated the famous strip search later in the novel, allowing Brigid to take off her clothes without being between the bathtub and the toilet (where Sam lays the pistols) or between the bathtub and the door. This keeps her discreetly out of sight of Casper Gutman and others in the adjoining room.