Out of the blue, a double-whammy from Portland.
Over on the Davy Crockett Almanack site Evan Lewis does a nice appreciation of Hammett’s The Big Knockover — the Op adventure that ought to make anyone with a pulse a Hammett fan for life — and mentions that he has picked up the new edition of the tour book against an upcoming visit to San Francisco. Yep, that’s what it’s for, hit town and go wild tracking down the sites.
And the Portland Book Review just ran a review of the tour book, as well — mentioning that the book is “dense.” Yeah, it’s designed for serious Hammett fans, not people who are stricken with awe by a couple of tweets. You want superficial, just look at the photos and the list of stops. . . . And by the way, it is the 30th anniversary edition, not the 13th — I left thirteen years on the mean streets in the dust a long, long time ago.
Plus I hear that this blog itself just got some kind of mention in the November issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, in the column about Internet action by Bill Crider — I haven’t seen it, but apparently the posts on restoring Hammett’s pure texts by Terry Zobeck get particular attention, as well they should — Hammett deserves having his best texts in print, and if we help create a groundswell of opinion in that direction, cool. Any current publishers using less than the best texts are just going to look like some kind of apes, in a year or two.
