
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. -

The Dashiell Hammett Tour
1977-2022



-

Arkham House Ephemera
The Classic Years 1937–1973-

Death Lit
Essays and Reviews Selected from Fifty Years of Writing 1974–2024-

Willeford
The Book-
-
Tag Archives: Black Mask
Hammett: “Arson Plus”
Aha! Terry Zobeck is back, with the latest installment of Zobeck: Series Two. That’s where he looks into the edits made by Frederic Dannay, a.k.a. “Ellery Queen,” to Hammett stories that in recent years have been restored from the Dannay-blue-penciled … Continue reading
Rediscovered: When Hammett Met Chandler
Vince Emery just popped me a link to an LA Times article covering the one time Hammett and Chandler met at the dinner for Black Mask writers — nicely documented by the famous photo — 78 years ago today. Hop … Continue reading
Posted in Dash, Film, Lit, News
Tagged "The SImple Art of Murder", Black Mask, Bogie, Jo Hammett, LA Times, Raymond Chandler, Ricardo Cortez, Vince Emery
Rediscovered: The eMask, Live Today!
The brave new world of ebooks! — what does it offer you today? If you’re a fan of pulp era crime fiction, especially the gritty and hard-boiled sort that shot and slugged its way through the pages of Black Mask — home base for Dashiell … Continue reading
Posted in Dash, Frisco, Lit, News, REH
Tagged Black Mask, Eugene Cunningham, Evan Lewis, PulpFest, Raymond Chandler, Robert E. Howard Library, The Shadow, Theodore A. Tinsley, Triggernometry, Walter Gibson
Hammett: And the Oscar Goes To
As I was moping around the web during Oscar season this year a bit of information attracted my attention. I’d no doubt seen the same stats when I looked over Oscar info the previous season, but no bells rang at that time. This … Continue reading
Posted in Dash, Film
Tagged Ace Atkins, Ben Affleck, Black Mask, Falcon from Knopf, George Arliss, Hammett Tour Book, Jack Benny, Marky Mark, Maurice Chevalier, Oscar, Pulps, Ronald Colman, Shylock, Spenser, Valentine, William Godschalk
Hammett: “Corkscrew” Part III
When Frederic Dannay, a.k.a. Ellery Queen, collected the Continental Op yarn “Corkscrew” in the 1948 Lawrence Spivak digest Nightmare Town, he resurrected it from the crumbling wood pulp pages of Black Mask much like Dr. Frankenstein rescued the monster from the grave … Continue reading
Posted in Dash, Lit
Tagged "Corkscrew", Black Mask, Frederic Dannay, Lillian Hellman, Pulps, pure texts, Terry Zobeck, The Big Knockover, Zobeck Series One
Hammett: “Mike or Alec or Rufus”
We just had a post from occasional Guest Blogger Brian Leno — how about one from the much more frequently appearing Terry Zobeck? As you might expect, Terry spent some of his spare time during PulpFest prowling the stacks of … Continue reading
Rediscovered: Stabbed in the Forehead! (and Other Pulp Thrills)
How about a postmortem on PulpFest before something else ripping Up and Down These Mean Streets distracts me? It’s always something — latest is juggling a date and time to do a walk for a Private Eye convention in October. (Tours … Continue reading
Posted in Dash, Film, Lit, News, REH
Tagged Alexandre Dumas, Anthony Tollin, Arkham House, Black Mask, Bob Clampett, Book Collecting, Brian Leno, Chester Himes, Conan, Count of Monte Cristo, Dillinger, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Erle Stanley Gardner, Esquire, Fantomas, Fat Charley Makley, German Village, Green Lawn Cemetery, James Thurber, Jim Tully, John Carter, Mike Chomko, Nick Certo, O. Henry, Ohio Caverns, Ohio State Pen, PulpFest, Pulps, Rick Lai, Rusty Burke, Serpent Mound, Smart Set, St Marys Ohio, Stark House Press, Terry Zobeck, The Shadow, The Spider, Walker Martin, Walter B. Gibson
Hammett: “The Advertisement IS Literature”
Even as he packs his valise for PulpFest 2012, our frequent Guest Blogger Terry Zobeck finds a moment to comment on the local action: “Nice post on Vidal. He’s one of my favorite writers. He got a little odd there … Continue reading
Posted in Dash, Frisco, Lit, News
Tagged "Ber-Bulu", "Mike Alec or Rufus", "The Advertisement IS Literature", Anatole France, Aristotle, Benedetto Croce, Black Mask, Goethe, Gore Vidal, H. L. Mencken, Jim Tully, Joel Elias Spingarn, John Galsworthy, Joseph Conrad, Mark Dawidziak, Ohio State University, Phil Cody, PulpFest, Raymond Chandler, Ring Lardner, Terry Zobeck, The Editor, Thomas Carlyle, Western Advertising
Hammett: “Who Killed Bob Teal?”
Step-by-step, story-by-story, Terry Zobeck is chipping away at the editing done to Hammett’s short stories by Frederic Dannay over fifty years ago, and this round returns with another tale of the Continental Op. Most Op tales take place in San … Continue reading





