Evan Lewis leads off his post today with the image above, a bronze figurine of Bogart as Spade that sold at an auction of Lauren Bacall’s stuff two years ago for $16,250 — compared to the loot hauled in from sales of the Black Bird figurines from the Bogie flick, pretty cheap.
Anyway, if interested surf over for Evan’s 37 Different Looks at The Maltese Falcon (1941), which continues his new burst of Hammett mania — and if you’re just now looking, go back a few days for more visual and even audio treats, and keep going until Evan moves on to the next thing after he runs pages from the Golden Age comic book of the Falcon.
He popped me a note explaining how he got himself lined up to jump into the deep end of this particular pool:
Here’s the skinny.
My Falcon burst was spurred by the fact that — after ten years of searching boxes in my storage unit for the Maltese comic book — I found it in my top desk drawer, buried in a stack of 3-D comics. It was right there the whole time, about two feet from my nose. I’ve been wanting to post it on my blog ever since I started the thing. I was going to start the comic on May 27 in honor of the Birthday, but decided to kick off on the 26th, when I’ll get a lot of traffic from the Forgotten Books crowd.
Hey, I know that feeling — just the other week I stumbled across my copy of Irving Rosenthal’s novel Sheeper, which I was going on about in the recent radio interview with Burrito Justice.
Evan mentions that he wasn’t yet aware of the “new” Spade story: “And no, I didn’t know The Hunter had a Spade fragment. I have a copy here from the library, but haven’t got around to inspecting it.” Me, I’m not sure that the Spade item actually is a fragment, as described — it feels like it could be a full story to me, but with lots of the plumping-up left out.
Among other things Evan thought up to do, he reports, “I’ve also been wanting to post The Kandi Tooth for years, and only recently found my old cassette tape. Thought I was going to have to post it myself to YouTube, but I see someone did that a couple of months ago and saved me the trouble.” If you don’t know, Kandi Tooth is a sequel to the Falcon performed on radio — kind of goofy, but fun. Punch it into YouTube and find out for yourself.
