“There are Hammett quotes to apply,” Nathan suggests, “no matter how the next races go. I remember somebody bets on a horse named Peggy O’Toole, a sly in-joke. Maybe in The Glass Key.”
Yeah, Peggy was a dame who hit New York City with Hammett on his first big trip as a newly minted novelist. And I’m pretty sure the namedrop was in Glass Key, too.
Nice-looking pony. Hammett loved the track.
Jeez, just think: maybe we’ll get a showdown someday between Maltese Falcon and Dain Curse. Red Harvest and Thin Man.
Get your bets in.
“At minimum,” Nathan says, “we have to place a bet on this horse.”
You’ll remember Nathan Ward and his Hammett bio The Lost Detective. That one really gets going when Hammett rolls into San Francisco and sits down at his typewriter.
Over on CrimeReads Nathan has just kicked a story off from San Francisco again, a tale of mutiny at sea from 1902 with murder and shooting — highly detailed, very interesting. You’ll want to find out how the main mutineer later turned up as a sheriff in Arizona, I bet.
I haven’t been thinking a lot lately of Frisco as a hotbed of shanghai action and a major port and all that history, but of course it was.
Two words: Jack London. Three words: The Sea Wolf.
And the rebel crew back in 1902 picked up the handle the “cowboy mutineers.” I suspect Nathan may have come across this saga as he was working on his upcoming book about Charlie Siringo, due out in September. He’s been digging into range detective Siringo’s career the last few years. He keeps busy.
They’ve been put in touch, and have spent an initial two hours on the phone. Many more to follow, no doubt.
Joe Goodrich, the guy who knows the guy who can inform the guy, also mentioned something else of interest: he’s one of the people who’ve done fiction featuring Hammett as the protagonist, like Joe Gores did in his novel Hammett.
Joe told me, “A story of mine featured Hammett and Fred Dannay solving a murder that took place at the Jefferson School of Social Science in early 50s New York City.”
Title was “The Ten-Cent Murder” and it saw print in the August 2016 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.
Dannay came in to speak to Hammett’s classes, and that’s the era when he was paperbacking a lot of Hammett’s fiction (but not the now discredited “The Diamond Wager” — man, I bet not one Hammett fan is sorry to see that dog kicked out of the kennel).
Got up today, holiday festivities looming in a few hours, and found some exciting news in the inbox.
Remember the guy in France working on a documentary on the first shoot Wim Wenders did for the neo-noir movie Hammett? Guy’s name is Damien Bertrand, if you know him — I only mention this angle because every recent email I’ve sent his way comes back instantly as Mailer-Demon Undeliverable.
How are you supposed to help a guy you can’t reach, anyway?
The news comes from Joe Goodrich, obviously an inhabitant of the Mean Streets — he tells me “I reread your Hammett guidebook every time I reread his novels.” No more solid a credential.
Joe says, “I was intrigued to learn of the French documentary in-the-works on Hammett.
“Michael Hacker, an old friend of mine from my stint in Los Angeles, was Wenders’ assistant on the film and was there — to quote Mr. Bernstein in Citizen Kane ‘from before the beginning’ to ‘after the end.’ (Michael also worked on One from the Heart and Apocalypse Now.)
“I think he’s someone the filmmakers might like to speak with. Michael’s up for it. How best to put the two together I don’t know, but I thought it worth mentioning.”
So, pass on the word.
Help hookup Talking Head with Documentarian.
I think we’d all like to see more info on the Wenders San Francisco shoot come out.
Paging through Greeks in Hollywood: In the Silent Movie Era, I was stopped in my tracks when I saw the clipping of Jack Pierce, legendary makeup artist, working on Boris Karloff.
If you dig the original Universal Monsters, Pierce pretty much gave all of them their iconic looks, imagery which persists to this day. I’ve known Pierce’s name since I was a teen, but I guess I never read deeper into his biography over all these years.
I had no idea he was Greek.
Real name Ioannis Pikoulas.
The sub-title In the Silent Movie Era for the book isn’t strictly accurate, even though most of the coverage goes back to the earliest days of Hollywood. But Pierce brings you into the talkies, and there’s a photo of a young Marlon Brando hanging out on a beach with some fellow (Greek) actors.
Roughly half of the hundred page plus text comes from Nikos Theodosiou, and the other half from our pal Fondas Ladis. You’ll remember that Fondas is researching the San Francisco strikebreaker Blackjack Jerome, prominent on the local scene when Hammett first arrived in the city as a Pinkerton’s op in 1921. But he took a sidetrack to knock this project out.
Great book — if you’re a silent movie buff (or a student of Greek cultural history) I cannot plug it enough. Tons of period photos and ads. You’ve got a large section on Alexander Pantages and his theatres. Thanasis Lyberis and other Greek film pioneers you probably have never heard of fill up other chapters.
Here’s a paragraph that I like:
We find Lyberis in 1916 in Mexico, in the midst of the Mexican Revolution, looking for his brother, who was by then Pancho Villa’s brother-in-law, and while in Russia the Winter Palace was falling to the Reds in 1917, Lyberis was an extra in silent movies in Hollywood.
There’s a page covering how Pantages bet Jack London $195 against the three dollars he had in his pockets that the young author wouldn’t be able to land a Beardslee trout on a fishing expedition to Lake Crescent in the Olympic Mountains.
Using the Greek angle, you get a look into primal Hollywood you won’t know about. Not the same old same old.
And the actual physical book is gorgeous, a tall trade paperback with a three-quarters wrap-around dustjacket.
I can only hope Fondas’ book on Blackjack Jerome is this good. But I’m guessing it will be.
Autograph Hound Super-Sunday again, and signature maven Brian Leno reports in with one of his (many) recent acquisitions (Call Them Legion).
“On ABE I saw a copy of a book titled Mirage, signed by William H. Kofoed,” Brian says, “who started the whole Brief Stories thing where Dashiell Hammett did some of his early writing.
“But Kofoed also has a Robert E. Howard link, since he likewise started Fight Stories and even, unofficially acting as Howard’s agent, placed ‘Fists of the Desert’ in Dime Sports.
“And — get this — William and his brother Jack partied with Al Capone shortly after the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.
“Obviously I had to add Kofoed to my list of editor signatures.”
Here’s Brian:
Kofoed started The Little Story Magazine, which became Brief Stories, where he remained editor and must have handled the “Peter Collinson” manuscripts. Of course anyone no longer wearing short pants knows Collinson was Hammett.
Because he started Fight Stories, Kofoed worked with Robert E. Howard. We all know Howard submitted there. In addition, Kofoed — a busy fellow — also started Jack Dempsey’s Fight Magazine and Howard appeared in that pulp as well.
When that magazine folded Kofoed still had 3 short stories and a novelette from Howard left in the Dempsey unpublished inventory. Doing Howard a favor, Kofoed placed the novelette “Fists of the Desert” with Dime Sports Magazine — the title was changed to “Iron-Jaw.”
Howard’s main literary agent, Otis Adelbert Kline, got his panties stuck in his crack and told the Texan, apparently, that he wasn’t too keen on Kofoed helping him out. The writer would apologize for using another agent, but he still let Kline know that he had the right to employ two agents at once if he so desired.
After the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, Al Capone was arrested in Philadelphia for carrying a concealed firearm. Can you imagine? Anyway, he was released, although he would have to return later in the year to serve a short prison sentence.
Not being a Scarface expert, some of the details of this stuff are a bit murky for me, but following his release he went to Florida and threw a big party. Two of the guests were William Kofoed and his twin brother Jack.
Call me a celebrity chaser but I think it would have been pretty cool to have a glass of champagne with Alphonse shortly after the massacre. As long as Al wasn’t close to a baseball bat.
And by the way, William Kofoed would go on to co-author a book titled Meet the Mob.
I definitely should record the passing of actor Frederic Forrest on June 23 at the age of 86.
For purposes of the Mean Streets, he claims the honor for portraying Dashiell Hammett in the 1982 film Hammett directed by Wim Wenders. I’m not a big fan of that flick — think I’ve only seen it once upon release. But Forrest did his best with the material, I’ll admit. (I might rewatch it someday to see David Patrick Kelly in the role of the Wilmer Cookish punk — it was great to see Kelly surface in John Wick as the undertaker.)
Plus Forrest played Hammett again a decade later in 1992’s Citizen Cohn, about the Communist witch hunts. One a made-up Hammett from a crime novel, the other Hammett from real life.
If you’re into trivia, the Forrest-as-Hammett-twice is something to keep in your pocket. Not as spectacular as one-time standup comic Richard Belzer in his role as John Munch, playing that character across something like eleven TV shows, but worth knowing about in case it comes up.
The fictional and real angles give Forrest an edge.
People, if Will’s right — and he seems to be rock-solid on this one — as of June 30 we now have one less crime story by Dashiell Hammett.
Yeah, scratch “The Diamond Wager” published under the byline “Samuel Dashiell” off the list.
Read it all. One repercussion mentioned is that the pulp magazine the story appeared in has been selling for up towards a thousand bucks lately. Our resident Hammett bibliographer and arch-collector Terry Zobeck tells me, “I think he is probably right. Which makes my copy of the pulp, for which I paid $425 for back in 2004, a lot less valuable today.”
Do you feel the pillars of Hammett bibliography shaking?
You probably know about my little hobby, pretty casual, of recording how the name Dashiell pops up in the culture. From Gotham City to Night Court.
I was watching a podcast with Michael Biehn and thought I heard him reference his son — named Dashiell.
Sure enough. Dashiell King Biehn, born March 21 2015.
I’m still irked that the follow-up to Aliens starring Biehn got derailed in development. No less than twice.
Sure, if they’d shot it when originally floated maybe it wouldn’t have been the best action film ever made, trying to follow Aliens — but it would have had to be good. At least a Die Hard 2 (and the trailer for Die Hard 2 remains the best trailer I’ve ever seen).
At least they haven’t screwed up the John Wick franchise yet. . . .
Welcome to a hard-boiled and not without noir blog with news and reviews, occasional outbursts of maniacal Autograph Hound activity, plus archival records from the forty-five year run of The Dashiell Hammett Tour.
