Welcome to a hard-boiled and not without noir blog with news and reviews, occasional outbursts of maniacal Autograph Hound activity, plus archival records from the forty-five year run of The Dashiell Hammett Tour. 
The Dashiell Hammett Tour
1977-2022
Arkham House Ephemera
The Classic Years 1937–1973
Death Lit
Essays and Reviews Selected from Fifty Years of Writing 1974–2024
Willeford
The Book
Monthly Archives: July 2021
Rediscovered: Lost Quinn (and Hall)
The noted book and pulp collector Kevin Cook doesn’t want you to think that Brian Leno is the only guy who has so much stuff in his collection he doesn’t know what he has — hell, no! Here’s Kevin with … Continue reading
Posted in Lit
Tagged Argosy All-Story Weekly, Austin Hall, Brian Leno, Frank A. Munsey, Homer Eon Flint, Jack Palance, Kevin Cook, Roads, Seabury Quinn
Sinister Cinema: Juggling The Glass Key and Red Harvest
Today Evan Lewis in his digging through digital archives pulls up some interesting news articles from 1941, covering the birth of a film version of Hammett’s Red Harvest. Hollywood had decided not to do a new version of The Glass … Continue reading
Posted in Dash, Film
Tagged Alan Ladd, Brian Donlevy, Evan Lewis, newspaper action, Paulette Goddard, Red Harvest, The Glass Key, Veronica Lake
Rediscovered: Slide Redux into the O.P. Column
Keeping casual track of the Pilgrim’s Progress of my Kid Protégé John D. Haefele, I was surprised a couple of days ago to notice that his 2010 monograph August Derleth Redux had slipped out-of-print. I popped the news to him, … Continue reading
Rediscovered: Lost Adventure
Brian Leno has been ditching unwanted odds and ends on eBay, Stephen King and stuff like that, saleable at the moment (but what savant would bet money on those books keeping their value, long-term?) — which led to him sending … Continue reading
Hammett: Collecting Creeps by Night
Autograph Hound Super-Sunday again, in this instance spurred on by Terry Zobeck mentioning to me that he finally landed a copy of the Hammett-edited Creeps by Night in dustjacket — after years of having it as a Grail Item on … Continue reading
Posted in Dash
Tagged Autographs, Black Mask, Book Collecting, Brian Leno, Cap Shaw, Creeps by Night, J. Paul Suter, Terry Zobeck
Hammett: #MeToo 2
Awhile back I linked to a set of contemporary newsprint articles on Hammett and the assault on Elise De Viane. At that moment Cosby had been thrown in the hoosegow — and now he’s out. The weird meanderings of history-in-the-making. … Continue reading
Rediscovered: 50th Anniversaries
And as an inevitable footnote to the celebration of Donald Sidney-Fryer’s 1971 book Songs and Sonnets Atlantean reaching its fiftieth anniversary, obviously the death of his publisher August Derleth only weeks after release would have occurred fifty years ago, as … Continue reading
Posted in Lit, News
Tagged Arkham House, August Derleth, Deuce Richardson, Donald Sidney-Fryer, Lovecraft, Songs & Sonnets Atlantean
