Will Murray has been delving into the vasty archives of newspapers available on the net for the dedicated researcher. You’ll remember him here for his discovery that, in fact, Hammett did not write the story “The Diamond Wager”. A major discovery, right up there with Warren Harris sleuthing down the real life Midget Bandit once mentioned by Hammett, who served as the model for Wilmer Cook in The Maltese Falcon.
In addition to mucho such research, Will must be as well or better known as a neo-pulpster, ghosting dozens of the paperback originals in The Destroyer series back when and more recently writing Doc Savage adventures under the traditional house name Kenneth Robeson.
Will dropped me a note saying, “I came across a mention in a 1929 newspaper that Dash Hammett and Raoul Whitfield were collaborating on a stage play version of The Maltese Falcon. Have you ever heard anything about this? Obviously, nothing came of it. Would you know if the stage play was ever finished? Does it survive? Probably not. An interesting footnote to the history of the novel….”
I never heard of the idea. Whitfield’s main connection to Hammett was as a fellow writer for Black Mask — Hammett reviewed and promoted his hard-boiled novel Green Ice. And had an affair with his wife, Pru Whitfield.
The headlines for the article in the Victoria Daily Times read:
Novelist Here
From Hollywood
Finishing Books
— —
Raoul Whitfied Now Com-
pleting “Green Ice”
and “Wings of Gold”
— —
Collaborating With Dashiell
Hammett in Adapting “Mal-
tese Falcon” to Stage
The text in the article adds no additional info in re: the play. Hammett of course talked about doing such a play, and the way he constructed the novel makes the idea seem logical.
On the business side of things, Will notes, “Benjamin F. Glazer signed a contract to adapt Maltese Falcon as a stage play in Aug 1930, but the contract was voided that December.
“In 1945, Laurence Stallings did the same. That contract was voided Feb 1946.
“Strange. Did they both find the adaptation too daunting?”
Diving deeper into Hammett, Will says, “Another interesting item I discovered was that John Barrymore was slated to play Sam Spade in the 1931 film. But some kind of scheduling conflict knocked him out of the picture.
“Barrymore was announced in the role in October 1930 but by December papers were reporting that he was doing Trilby instead. Trilby was ultimately released as Svengali.”
John Barrymore as Sam Spade! What would that have done to the history of cinema? Could he have out-Sammied Bogie? Probably not with that 1931 screenplay, but at least it would have paired him with the great Dwight Frye.
And to make it a trilogy, Will adds, “Another odd thing I discovered is that a random California newspaper serialized The Maltese Falcon in the middle of 1930. That seems strange when the book had just come out.”
Yeah, published by Knopf on Valentine’s Day 1930. And later that year in The Chico Record.
But as my pal the late great John D. Squires determined, the newspapers were going wild with reprints. He once spotted a reprint of Hammett’s The Thin Man from 1934 in The Australian Women’s Weekly for February 15, 1936.
