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: Dwight Frye
Hammett: Top Ten
ABEbooks just released a list of their top money-makers for 2021 and Hammett comes in at no. 10 — not with a first edition, but with a much later reprint of The Maltese Falcon inscribed to Bebe Daniels. Bebe played … Continue reading
Posted in Dash, Film, Frisco, Lit, News
Tagged ABEbooks, Bebe Daniels, Book Collecting, Dwight Frye, The Midget Bandit, Wilmer Cook
Hammett: “A Fast-Moving Gripping Mystery Yarn”
The pulp expert John Locke was just telling me he got his hands on a trove of Photoplay issues from the 1930s, and figured everyone would like to see how the trade mag blurbed the very first movie version of … Continue reading
Posted in Dash, Film
Tagged Bebe Daniels, Dwight Frye, John Locke, Photoplay, Ricardo Cortez, Richard Layman
Sinister Cinema: Karloff
Autograph Hound Super-Sunday — what signature could Brian Leno possibly offer on the altar of Movie Titans Past for the John Hancock Ritual? Especially after his tour de force rollout yesterday. I think he’s got it covered. Here’s Brian: Nobody will … Continue reading
Rediscovered: The Morgman on The Augman, and Others
As any long time reader, surfer or dipper into The Mean Streets may have noticed, I’m not great on anniversaries — yeah, I hop on the annual birth and death days for Hammett, and usually remember Robert E. Howard’s birthday. … Continue reading
Posted in Lit, News
Tagged Arkham House, August Derleth, Dwight Frye, John D. Haefele, Morgan Holmes, S.T. Joshi
Sinister Cinema: Back to the Tenderloin Museum
I’ll be hitting the Tenderloin Museum once again on July 13 — hey, just three days before their second anniversary on July 16 — to talk Dashiell Hammett for awhile. Hammett, pretty much the most famous writer to have made … Continue reading
Posted in Dash, Film, Frisco, News
Tagged Dwight Frye, Myrna Loy, Skippy, Tenderloin, Tenderloin Museum, The Midget Bandit, Thin Man, William Powell
Hammett: And Chandler, and Nigel, Bill and Don
Slightly over twenty people did the “just show up and walk the walk” routine for the tour yesterday. I always think of twenty as being the average number of tourists gumshoeing the mean streets on the walk over the years, though … Continue reading
Posted in Dash, Film, Lit, Tour
Tagged 891 Post, BBC, Bill Arney, Delicatessen, Dominque Pinon, Dwight Frye, Fatty Arbuckle, Jo Hammett, Mark Murphy, Murphy bed, Nigel Williams, Raymond Chandler
Hammett: In the Aftermath of Midget Bandit Week
Last Sunday, just as we wrapped up a full week of posts for Midget Bandit Week — seven days, every day — Michael Fitzgerald over at the Stockton Record added a post of his own. What the hell, let’s make like The Beatles … Continue reading
