And it sounds like Hammett won, if you don’t factor getting arrested into your win/lose calculations.
Brian Wallace pops another Hammett item my way from his constant scouring of the web, but he is provoked to mention, “This really sounds like an ‘urban legend’ to me.”
Who knows? But it takes place in Miami, and mentions Hammett’s extended stay in the Keys — one of the things I keep an idle eye out for is any solid evidence to pinpoint the year (1935?) that Hammett rode out a big hurricane in Key West.
One thing to quibble about is the line about The Maltese Falcon “coming out in paperback” — not in 1934, it wasn’t. Perhaps the reporter confused the Modern Library reprint that year (a neat little hardback) with a paperback, but they didn’t have paperbacks in the modern sense on the market quite yet.
Quick, kind of fun — with a picture of the department store where Hammett was tossing rocks through the windows.
