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: Tenderloin
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
Frisco Beat: Naming The Names at Milkbean
Mark Murphy, one of my operatives always on the ground, constantly reporting on the Tenderloin Beat, tells me that Milkbean — a sandwich and coffee joint which opened recently in the space in the Sam Spade Building once occupied by … Continue reading
Frisco Beat: On the Mean Streets with Fritz and Sam
Don’t think that during my deep hibernation of Xmas/The Onset of Winter I did nothing at all, even if doing nothing was the prevailing theme. I remembered that I never polished off the Sherlock Holmes stories decades ago, stopping after the … Continue reading
Posted in Dash, Frisco, Tour
Tagged Fritz Leiber, Fritz Leiber Tour, Halloween, Jim Nelson, M.R. James, Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Tenderloin, Xmas
Frisco Beat: Tenderloin Museum, Year One
Coming up fast on July 16, The Tenderloin Museum celebrates its first anniversary — details on the website or the Facebook page. From 10a.m. to 9p.m., free admission, with workshops, talks, jazz, a drag show — the whole historical and … Continue reading
Sinister Cinema: Voice of Noir
How about a few more pics from the gig in the Tenderloin Museum? I was supposed to talk for 30 or 40 minutes about Hammett living in the TL, the 1941 film of The Maltese Falcon and so forth — … Continue reading
Sinister Cinema: The Black Bird Flaps Back to the Old Hood
Tuesday October 27 The Maltese Falcon returns to the hood where it was imagined, plotted and pounded into life on the typewriter keys by none other than longtime Tenderloin resident Dashiell Hammett — the 1941 film version with Bogie, of … Continue reading
Posted in Dash, Film, Frisco, News
Tagged Bogie, Cadillac Hotel, Jack Dempsey, Tenderloin, Tenderloin Museum
Frisco Beat: A Big New Wrinkle in Mapback Thinking
Got another note from Nathan Ward — which as an aside, reminds me that maybe when his new bio of Hammett hits the stands later this year, I could do another Biography Month celebration here on Up and Down These … Continue reading
Tour: Sunday October 13 and Sunday November 10
Someone else flying in from Australia gave me more than a month’s advance notice, asking for a walk on Sunday October 13 — one where anyone with twenty bucks and four hours to burn can join in on. The usual. … Continue reading
Frisco Beat: And eBooks Shall Gumshoe the Mean Streets. . .
John Nardizzi tells me he once worked the Frisco Beat as a private eye for no less than three years, and he returns to the burg with a novel, paying tribute to the city of Sam Spade and a hundred … Continue reading
Posted in Frisco, Lit, News
Tagged Commodore Hotel, Hank's 500 Club, John F. Nardizzi, Kindle, Red Room, San Francisco Mysteries, Tenderloin
