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: Steve Eng
Rediscovered: More Leno Library
Brian Leno has come into a group of display cabinets and now is working to fill them up. I imagine he’ll juggle some of the stuff around again, eventually. Maybe have one devoted to his Jack the Ripper collection. Or … Continue reading
Rediscovered: Shiel and Floyd and an Absurd Adventure of Dennis McMillan
Just noticed a quick email from 2022 where Brian Leno told me: Came across a letter where Lawrence of Arabia — in his T. E. Shaw alias — tells a bookseller he will take a copy of Shiel’s The Purple … Continue reading
Posted in DMac, Lit, News
Tagged Brian Leno, Death Lit Essays and Reviews 1974-2024, Eddie Little, Floyd Salas, John D. Squires, Lawrence of Arabia, M. P. Shiel, Steve Eng
Mort: Steve Trout
Morgan “The Morgman” Holmes recently sent word that apparently Steve Trout died sometime last month — “69 years old. Appears to have been Alzheimer’s disease. He must have had one of those aggressive versions that can hit younger, a la … Continue reading
Rediscovered: Biography Month Redux
Today is the official publication date for Nathan Ward’s newest bio, Son of the Old West — The Odyssey of Charlie Siringo: Cowboy, Detective, Writer of the Wild Frontier. Something to kick off another Biography Month here on These Mean … Continue reading
Posted in Dash, Lit, News
Tagged Captain James Cook, Charlie Siringo, Danny Trejo, Eugene Manlove Rhodes, Franz Kafka, Jim Tully, Jimmy Buffett, Mark Dawidziak, Nathan Ward, Paul J. Bauer, Son of the Old West, Steve Eng
Two-Gun Bob: June 11, 1926 — 1936 — 2022
Today marks the anniversary of the suicide by gunshot at age thirty of Texas author Robert E. Howard, sitting in his Chevy outside the family home in Cross Plains. Our resident Autograph Hound Brian Leno lays out another John Hancock … Continue reading
Posted in Film, Frisco, Lit, News, REH
Tagged Autographs, Book Collecting, Boris Karloff, Brian Leno, Collier's, Hugh Wiley, literary suicides, San Francisco Mysteries, Steve Eng
Frisco Beat: Anniversary 101 for Stan McNail
As it turned out, the first installment of my short-lived review column for Lit, a literary supplement for The San Francisco Bay Guardian, hit print in May 1995 — timing that allowed me to wrap up the piece with a … Continue reading
Posted in Frisco, Lit, News
Tagged Arkham House, Bay Guardian, Book Collecting, Dirk Mosig, Galley Sail Review, Greyhound, Jack Spicer, Lawrence Hart, Paul Dobish, Something Breathing, Stan McNail, Steve Eng, The Activists
Rediscovered: An Ossuary of Paper and Board for a Rajah of Words
You snooze and you lose. Of course, it doesn’t help anything if the item you are about to buy is done in a print run of only about 85 copies, published in Bucharest. . . . By the moment I … Continue reading
Posted in Lit
Tagged A. Reynolds Morse, Alfred A. Knopf, Carl Van Vechten, Harold Billings, John D. Squires, M. P. Shiel, Malcolm Ferguson, Steve Eng
