Tour: Guest Stars

Posted on May 4, 2011 by Don

And on that tour by appointment for April 19 I was talking about, Charlie Morfin and Carrie-Anne of the Black Dahlia walks in Hollywood were up to check out the Frisco scene, get some tips about leading tours for film noir sites and so on — I don’t know if they want to muscle into my territory or not, or keep it strictly on the mean streets of Tinseltown — but they’ve got ambition. Historic jeep tours of LA. Visits to the graves of the stars (I’ve done a lot of those on my own dime, faves being Dwight Frye, Bela Lugosi one plot over from Bing Crosby, John Ford, Jack Benny — hell, I’ve checked out many, and still need to track down Lon Chaney, Sr. — Bogie rests in a closed-off section of a boneyard, alas).

Next time I drop south for a couple of days, with any luck I plan to join these guys for the martini course in Musso & Frank’s, one of my all-time favorite places. Maybe spot a few celebrities on the side.

If you run down and want to see some sites, check out the various tours that are offfered — and if like a lot of people interested in Hammett and the hard-boiled genre, you dig the period clothing and Art Deco vibe, Carrie-Anne has a line of noir fashion going on the side. You could get bumped off in style.

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Frisco Beat: Dashiel Hammet Stret

Posted on May 3, 2011 by Don

On Tuesday April 19 I did a tour by appointment for the folk who run the Black Dahlia walks in Hollywood — and more on that in the next post. The usual fun ensued, always happens when you have people deep into film noir putting gumshoes down on the mean streets. Yeah, it’s a cheap thrill, but cheap thrills are among the best, right?

Big news as we ambled along occurred as we reached the corner of Bush and Dashiell Hammett Street (formerly Monroe). The street sign got a huge bend in it a couple of years ago — I presume a delivery truck or something of that sort clipped it. Even in the shot used in the new tour book, you can see the bend. Well, there is a bend no more.

Between the last time I paid attention and April 19, The City has replaced the sign — maybe another truck clipped it and broke the damn thing, maybe someone just ripped it off for their terribly private collection of cool street signs. I don’t know.

I do know that whoever supervised the new sign can’t spell. They left the final “l” off Dashiell. They left the last “t” off Hammett.

Come on. It’s no skin off my nose, it doesn’t matter to Hammett, who is long gone and whose fame cannot be touched. But it makes San Francisco look kind of illiterate, which isn’t good. I wrote The Literary World of San Francisco, and I know better.

Powers-that-be, fix the sign.

Dashiell. Hammett. Street.

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Tour: Every Sunday in May

Posted on April 27, 2011 by Don

I can’t make it any simpler: you’ll find a Dashiell Hammett Tour each and every Sunday in May. Four hours. Ten bucks. The usual. No reservations needed, just show up with your gumshoes polished, ready to walk.

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Hammett: “Magician” Trackdown

Posted on April 26, 2011 by Don

Lately M. P. Shiel has been in the air around here — I’ve been easing my way through the first two of three volumes of the biography of Shiel from the pen of Harold Billings (on the side reading upcoming potential bestseller novels about werewolves in Manhattan and surfer dude Private Eyes, on assignment). And good old John D. Squires has just tumbled to the origins of the quote where Hammett called Shiel “A magician.”

As I mentioned in the recent post about Shiel, the thought had been that some of us presumed that John Gawsworth, a big booster of Shiel in his last years, would have solicited the quote from Hammett, most likely after seeing the rave review of Shiel’s novel Lord of the Sea dropped into the Continental Op story “The Gutting of Couffignal.”

JDS tells me that a guy named Terry Zobeck on the FictionMags chat group just discovered the origin of the quote in a review Hammett wrote for the July 3, 1930 New York Evening Post — reprinted on page 103 of Discovering the Maltese Falcon and Sam Spade from none other than Vince Emery! Jeez, I’m also going to have to sit down someday and read each and every page from Vince’s Ace Performer series, looks like. . . . 

So, pull your copy of the Vince tome off the shelf (I presume everybody has a copy), and check it out. One mystery solved, thanks to Terry Zobeck.

The question that remains unanswered, at least for the moment, is whether Shiel himself knew about the quote — did he have tear sheets of the review in his files, from which Gawsworth pulled the blurb for the 1948 collection The Best Short Stories of M. P. Shiel? Or was Hammett’s review unknown to Shiel until the wily, nose-to-the-ground Gawsworth somehow tracked it down?

Somebody get on this one.

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Tour: Banner Ad

Posted on April 19, 2011 by Don

I’ve got to give Vince Emery credit for his job publishing the newest edition of the Hammett Tour book — and he tells me that he has taken out a banner ad for the trade paperback printing over on the Thrilling Detective website. Promotion, relentless promotion. . . .

You can surf over to Thrilling Detective and kill off many days poking around in the features and links, almost a one-stop shop for Private Eye stuff. I’m particularly fond of it after some anonymous voter circa 2002 selected my “Mr. Hunt” story from Measures of Poison as best of the year, with the comment: “The best Continental Op story Hammett never wrote.”

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Rediscovered: Fantômas, the Serials

Posted on April 15, 2011 by Don

My pal John D. Squires, current honcho of the cult for M. P. Shiel, saw the blurb for Fantômas the other day and popped me the ad above, which tries to hook movie theatres in 1916 into running a film serial tied-in with newspaper serializations of stories or novels. Last time I saw JDS at PulpFest he told me about research he’s been doing into this commercial enterprise during the silent era, centered on Shiel’s occasional collaborator Louis Tracy, where Tracy had one novel after another appearing in newsprint, in conjunction with local showings of some film based on the novel. Enough different towns and textual variations and cool illustrations to give JDS material for a whole book just on Tracy.

To the best of my memory, I had never heard of this idea before — that’s why I like guys like JDS, always digging around and coming up with something I’ve never heard of. Yeah, yeah, I know about the later Photoplay editions and still ongoing novelizations of various films, but this angle was news to me. John says the critical and academic community doesn’t seem to be aware of this early cross-pollination between books and newspapers and films, either.

I’ll give a shout out when the book on Tracy appears, and meanwhile cut another notch on the extensive appearances of Fantômas.

Posted in Film, Lit | Tagged , , , , |

Frisco Beat: Almost, Elmore

Posted on April 12, 2011 by Don

These mean streets have seen some of the best. Dashiell Hammett. Charles Willeford. And we almost had Elmore Leonard, too, according to a new interview.

Of his life in the Detroit area, Elmore said, “There’s no reason to move. I thought about going to San Francisco in the ’70s, but then I realized that I’d have to learn all the streets, how to get around and all that. It wasn’t worth it.”

Posted in Frisco, Lit | Tagged |

Rediscovered: The Kindle in 1959

Posted on April 11, 2011 by Don

For no special reason I got the urge to reread Fritz Leiber’s Change War series, off and on, over the last few weeks, still have at least one or two more to go (since they never all quite saw a collection in one book, and I just found a couple more in The Worlds of Fritz Leiber).

If you remember my post about the guy on a Hammett tour downloading the Fritz novel Our Lady of Darkness on his Kindle even as I blurbed it, as we stood in front of 811 Geary Street, you may like a line that jumped out at me from the new round of readings. I said that I was sure (and I am sure) that Fritz would have loved the idea that someone could first learn of a book one moment and download it instantly the next.

The short story “The Mind Spider,” first published in Fantastic in 1959, begins: “Hour and minute hand of the odd little gray clock stood almost at midnight, Horn Time, and now the second hand, driven by the same tiny, invariable radioactive pulses, was hurrying to overtake them. Martin Horn took note. He switched off his book. . . .”

I guess the Change Winds have blown through, and what was science fiction fifty-two years ago is now everyday reality.

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Frisco Beat: The Pickwick

Posted on April 6, 2011 by Don

I hope everyone is surfing frequently over to ReelSF off my Fellow Ops links — the mysterious CitySleuth is knocking out new descriptions of sites from movies, especially noir movies, all the time, featuring great then and now shots.

Of special interest to me was the gumshoe work to dope out the location of the bus terminal from the 1947 Bogart and Bacall film Dark Passage, based on the novel by the great David Goodis. From a casual clew, it looks as if that scene was filmed in the old Pickwick Stage Terminal.

The Pickwick Stage Terminal was where Sam Spade stored the black bird in the novel The Maltese Falcon. But those same scenes from the 1941 John Huston movie were shot on sets in Hollywood, so Bogart as Sam Spade doesn’t set foot in the actual locale — still, it is pretty cool to see him on site as Vincent Parry. Check it out.

Posted in Film, Frisco | Tagged , , , , |

Frisco Beat: A Century of Fantômas

Posted on April 2, 2011 by Don

Okay, I don’t know how this one got put on the calendar, other than via the interest and tireless efforts of Peter Maravelis, teamed up with a horde of local Fantômas fans and no less than the French Embassy — but we’ve got our own four-day blowout celebration of the mysterious crime fighter reaching one hundred years on the mean streets and mean rooftops and mean subterranean haunts. Show up in City Lights this Wednesday for the kickoff and you may ask for directions to the affair on Friday in one of the secret locales Peter constantly scouts out, to add that extra oomph to the proceedings.

Fantômas is early in the long line of avengers-by-night — The Shadow, Batman, Doctor Sax, and many more — black-clad eluders of amazing death-traps, half-dreamt, hovering over fantastic cityscapes of the imagination. The Shadow is my favorite iteration of this concept — PulpFest this year will be celebrating his debut eighty years ago as Walter Gibson, writing under the name Maxwell Grant, created a character whose exploits would run for years in the wood pulps. And while the pulp guys seem to think that The Shadow is the first such hero, Fantômas does have a twenty-year edge on the cliff-hanging action.

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