Terry Zobeck keeps his eye peeled like a Pinkerton’s man and let me know the Hammett Tour book gets some nice blurbage from Max Allan Collins on CrimeReads. Thank you, thank you — to both.
Looks as if Hard Case Crime will be popping the Collins sequel to The Maltese Falcon in January 1926. And The Return of the Maltese Falcon will have this piece now excerpted for CrimeReads as an afterword.
Fun to read, and the sources Collins says he mostly relied on are ones I would have given top plugs. Surf over and check it out. Even if you have no interest in reading a Falcon pastiche, it’s one Hammett fan speaking from the heart to others.
The mini-review of my tour book is satisfyingly well-crafted. If I were going to do another edition of the tour book, it’d definitely make the cut for a lead blurb.
My favorite line reads, “Over the years, I have read every Hammett book-length biography I could find, and that’s more than a few; but the guidebook’s exceptional ‘brief’ bio is the only one I referred to before I began (and during the writing of) this novel.”
I selected as a main blurb for earlier tour book editions a couple of lines from The Mystery Fancier. One reads, “It contains photos, maps, bibliography, and the best capsule biography of Hammett I have ever read.”
I’m happy the little bio continues to get some recognition.
Without digging a copy out from deep in the Hammett Tour Files, I believe that issue of The Mystery Fancier — officially, I guess, The MYSTERY FANcier — came out in the 1980s. And my memory is that the reviewer was Marvin Lachtman. Major genre scholar — and he wrote well.
