Fictional Reality: The Dashiell Hammett Tour
Doug Hoekstra



The next time you're wandering the aisles of a used-book store, if you go to the mystery section and look up Dashiell Hammett, chances are you'll find at least one pocketbook version of The Thin Man. The front cover bears a picture of the author, looking gaunt yet sophisticated, thin moustache and callow cheeks. He's wearing a pinstriped suit and his wide-brim fedora is pulled down on one side to shade his eyes. His thin left hand is jauntily thrust into his left jacket pocket, while his thin right hand rests on a long narrow walking cane. Hammett is having some fun, one presumes, blurring the lines between fiction and reality with this picture, portraying himself as THE thin man of the novel's title, as well as the long line of detective protagonists that populate his work. "It is not I it is another," said Rimbaud, and yes, this sort of playful self-identification has been going on for ages within the realms of art and commerce, and art versus commerce, spanning Byron to Dylan, many before, many to come. In San Francisco last Spring, I set out on my own Hammett journey, blurring fiction and reality as I not-so reluctantly set out in pursuit of a slice of Black Mask History. It was a blue gray day, as my wife Molly and I took off from Nashville, destination San Francisco, for an anniversary trip that promised big fun on the coast and in the City. We flew Southwest Airlines, and as our plane soared across the continent, onward towards Oakland, I stuffed myself with honeyroasted peanuts and pored through a new collection of Hammett stories, tales long out of print, recently compiled, and wonderfully new to me. As I read, I marveled at his range and abilities, for they went far beyond the traditional image of the fedora-laden detective story, the cliché he seemed to embrace and mock in pages and publicity. I stared out the window at a bed of white clouds, and below, green earth, stretching for miles, faint outlines of a river, and once in awhile, a cluster of houses. We were flying over the vast Western United States, as I read the title story, "Nightmare Town," and discovered Steve Threefall stumbling into Izzard, the connection between the wide-open lawlessness of the Western frontier and Hammett's day became clear. I looked down the aisle at my travel-mates, crammed three seats aside, sweat stains under the arm, disheveled pillows under the head, and thought about all the people everywhere, here in the air or down below, always moving, active even when inactive. So many people apart, adrift, like the characters in these stories. No wonder there's always been such an identification with the Byronic hero, the Hammett hero, the Springsteen-esque hero, the loner protagonist trying to make sense of the world, both of it and yet, apart from it. We arrived in Oakland mid-evening and after spotting our luggage on the conveyor belts, fumbling through the BART system, misreading the map, getting off at some extremely funky neighborhood, righting the wrong, getting back on the train relieved, with redirection, not redemption, we made it into San Francisco, where we landed on a rollicking cab ride, our driver an ex-patriate Michiganer with tousled hair who turned and looked over his shoulder at us to tell a story or two about this or that Earthquake, making hair-raising curves straight out of a Steve McQueen movie, depositing us finally, white-knuckled, in Cow Hollow, at the doorsteps of our quaint Victorian bed and breakfast.


The next day, after showers and coffee, we set out, walking eastward on Lombard, the self-advertised crookedest street in the world.. The air was cool and clear, sunny, yet light jacket weather. A perfect spring blue San Francisco day. Not too long after this, I'd wind up writing a song about a character in the Mission District whose girlfriend goes out on the "bay on a blue gray day". His name is Lawrence and he doesn't understand the murals of Quetzacoatl that adorn the playground near his home. She is a muralist and a painter. He works a straight job, with no other aspirations other than her and her happiness, their happiness. But, a blue gray day as the kind of day it was - different, however, from the one we left behind in Nashville, because it was cooler and somehow permanent. Nashville was much more transient, the weather and the people - the City felt like a place you could belong to. We worked our way down and up Lombard Street, huffing and puffing, sometimes parallel, other times perpendicular, but determined to keep our dogs moving, no matter how much they barked. We made it into North Beach a little before 10 and walked past the church where Joe DiMaggio married Marilyn Monroe, and saw the old Chinese men in the park doing Zen "chi-building" exercises. Then, we decided to stop in at City Lights on Columbus Avenue, the hallowed home of the Beats. I loved the Beats as a teenager, in the Romantic way many of us do, and I wonder if it's wisdom or cynicism we embrace as adults. At this point in my life, I think the Beats were a better idea than a reality, Capote's words branding Kerouac as a "great typist" remain imprinted on my memory and, despite my Romanticism, I recognize the words as true. On the other hand, Capote be damned, the Beats do work on some sort of broader plane. I remember listening to an old radio broadcast of Carl Sandburg, whereby he proclaimed himself and his generation as being Beats, in their day. And, it's true. The notion, at its essence, is timeless, and while we think of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, But, what about Hammett, Chandler, McDonald? What about Guthrie, Dylan, Springsteen? What about Wordsworth, Shelley, and Byron? If you skip the bongos and go straight to the heart, you'll see beats in every corner of every city in every part of the world, holding fort, carrying the torch that began way back with Shelley and the Romantics, and beyond, past Marlowe, past Shakespeare (although where he was a beat is up to debate, Hollywood depictions aside). And, back even further than that. I bet there were Beats in the beginning, the Cro-Magnon heir who refused to hunt, writing hieroglyphics and staring into the sky all day, to the chagrin of his fellow man. Maybe he was ostracized. Maybe he was revered. Or more likely, both. Maybe it is his etchings on a cave in the heart of Africa that make us understand the roots of mankind, and of course, this raises the question of what we value - commercialism (hunting) or art (cave-sketching). And, perhaps there are two kinds of people, after all, and we align ourselves in these basic primordial categories. So, in this vast, expansive sense of history, I began to see City Lights as a stronghold, a place where the Beats held guard for their brief moment in time. I looked across the street to the storefront which I imagined was very much like it was in the 50s, save for the long line of people waiting for it to open. There must be something intangible here, I thought, and it must be more than mere hype or advertising, the reason we line up and flock to breathe the rarefied air, so perceived, because, isn't the same air, certainly. Time rolls on and things change and Kerouac said "we're all going to die someday", and he was right, and with Burroughs and Ginsburg now gone, the Beats that populated City Lights are in scarce supply. Of course Ferlinghetti still lives and if you're "lucky" you might see him bopping around North Beach, the ultimate experience of the pilgrim, the pilgrimage, and the object of pilgrimation (is that a word?) coming together. Since Ferlinghetti is still somewhat "now", as in "breathing," his was the first book I bought at City Lights, a small volume of poetry called Pictures of the Gone World, which included a poem that became an instant favorite, a piece that finds the poet "at the Hopper house...on the beach at Truro...I look back up at it...on its high bluff...And I am Edward Hopper...famous American painter...sprawled on the hillside...on the beach grasses...looking back up at Hopper's World...where he lived all those...windblown years...hardly as lonely as...the people at his paintings...in their all-night diners...Sunday morning storefronts...bare-bulb bedrooms...lighthouses in sun...summer evening porches...houses by he railroad...Victorian facades...of emptiness...and yet would I paint them differently now...at the tail end of our twisted century...as if overpopulation now...had really overcome...our enormous solitudes...in which a symbol of success is still...an isolated house...on a hill." (Ferlinghetti, 37.) And Hopper was appropriate for this journey I was taking, or about to take, blurring fiction and reality, for Hopper, like Hammett, has straddled the worlds of critical acclaim and pop culture success, and made his way into our canons of the present, for good or bad, reminding me of the line from Hammett's drinking buddy Faulkner about the past never being past. Although, in pop culture form, this can amount to something like Hopper parodies showing James Dean and Marilyn Monroe at the diner to Gap commercials with faux beatniks to Garrison Keillor's Guy Noir and TV movies about Hammett and Hellman, starring Sam Shepherd, of all people, as Dash. So, that's what I'm getting to and forgive me if I've taken so long, but like so many journeys, the destination becomes circuitous and secondary to the overall experience. At City Lights, I also found a book by Don Herron called The Dashiell Hammett Tour, a thin pocket guide that takes the reader on a blow-by-blow walking tour of all the important Hammett sites in the City, complete with self-guided maps. Interesting historical asides on Hammett, San Francisco, and the relationship between the two are peppered throughout the book. As the back cover explains that "in this expanded and revised edition, Don Herron's Dashiell Hammett Tour guides you over the fog-shrouded hills stalked by Sam Spade, the Continental Op, and other legendary characters created by San Francisco's most renowned mystery writer. See every place Hammett is known to have lived in the City and the majority of locales from his master mystery The Maltese Falcon. Prowl the back alleys where the Op fought hard-boiled criminals with a blazing .38. Shadow Sam Spade in his quest for the fabulous figurine of a mysterious black bird. See the dead-end alley where Spade's partner, Miles Archer was done in by Brigid O'Shaugnessy." (Herron, jacket) He makes a good argument for Hammett's treatment of the City ranking with Joyce's Dublin and Dickens London for it evocation of 20s San Francisco - "when night-fog cloaked the hills and a host of sinister customers were afoot" (Herron, 2) Herron conducts these tours himself, but Molly and I prefer to do things on our own pace, in this case and in general, so the book would suffice.

 

 

After we were done at City Lights, we took in an incredible tour of the murals of the Mission District and Balmy Alley, inspiring me like no art, musical or visual or printed, that I'd seen in ages. I wrote something in my journal about this being where the Beats of today populate the City, the spiritual descendants of Diego Rivera, and the hip-hop kings of murals, the spray-can artists. Some of them work in the middle of the night, quickly, surreptitiously, evading police detection. The rest of the week went similarly for us as we quickly, surreptitiously, evaded the sorrowful notion that our fun times would come crashing to a halt eventually, as we explored at the Exploratorium (and I ate bugs), watched the sunset in Carmel, rode to Big Sur in a rented convertible, and watched Vertigo at the Castro. Finally, we had but one day left in the City and I realized I still hadn't made my Hammett pilgrimage. I mentioned it to Molly, who knew I wanted to go, but whom I knew really didn't want to accompany me. But, we're pretty good about cutting each other slack on said travels. The Exploratorium was her idea, for instance. Although eating bugs was mine. She was a good sport. "I've got to at least hit the key sights," I explained. "I've got to see where Sam Spade ate, where Miles Archer was shot, where Bridgid lived." "But, these aren't real people," she reminded me, referring to the Hammett characters I'd mentioned, immortalized in The Maltese Falcon. "I know they're not real people..." was all I could say. It wasn't much of a comeback, I know. Her point was well taken, but in one sense, the paradox only added to my fascination. In the realm of pop culture, in his efforts to be taken seriously as a "real" writer, would Hammett have ever dreamed people would be commemorating not only himself, but also Sam Spade? Sam was not, as Molly so correctly and undeniably pointed out, a real person. The Continental Op, the fat, middle-aged, and anonymous protagonist of 36 short stories 2 novels, was indeed, a little harder to memorialize or commemorate, and perhaps Hammett would take refuge in that. Like an anonymous Op, we shoehorned our way into a crowded bus, which crawled through traffic, down through Chinatown and into the Financial District, where most of the Hammett sites are located. The streets of Chinatown were teeming with humanity, old Chinese patriarchs with grocery sacks bumping into young Chinese hipsters with fanny packs and roller blades. I thought of the Op weaving his way through the landscape, one that appeared decidedly less mysterious than the intrigue of short stories like "Dead Yellow Women", where the fat man races through Chinatown, does his job, and winds up exhausted, exclaiming, "I don't mind admitting that I've stopped eating in Chinese restaurants, and that if I never have to visit Chinatown again it'll be soon enough." (Hammett, 195 The Big Knockover). Of course, that was 1925 and I have it on a good instinct that the Op wouldn't be heading back to North Beach for some seaweed at a macrobiotic diner. (By the way, Chinatown is also the setting of Wim Wender's rather obscure American movie, Hammett, which casts the writer as a fictional sleuth in a real world, a Chinatown of sepia noir tones. The film is based on the Joe Gores' novel of the same name and I don't even want to think about how much fiction blurring reality is involved in the translation, a fictional novel based on real writer in fictional settings being filmed by a German filmmaker working in Hollywood under the umbrella of Francis Ford Coppola's production company.) Molly and I decided to cover key Hammett highlights, rather than the whole slew of clues and characters, so we got off at a spot close to the Monroe Street apartments, one of the places where Hammett, who suffered from tuberculosis, rented a room for a time to separate himself from his wife and daughters. A section of Monroe is now called Dashiell Hammett Way. Lawrence Ferlinghetti floated the idea of having some of the streets in the City rename after writer's connected in some fashion, as so Hammett, along with Jack Kerouac, Frank Norris, Ambrose Bierce, and others were celebrated and honored.

 










 

 


We looked at the apartment buildings. Yep, he lived there. Strange, isn't it? I mean, a house sometimes takes on the personality of its owner, but what about an apartment building? Years of inhabitants, stamping one soul on the other- if we went to the room, would any of the Hammett character remain? Or would it be decorated in feng sui? Maybe that was the Op's problem with Chinatown - maybe he had bad chi. From Monroe, it was on to the Stockton Tunnel. In Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade receives a middle-of-the night urgent phone call and has a taxi drop him "where Bush Street roofed Stockton before slipping downhill to Chinatown...Spade crossed the sidewalk between iron-railed hatchways that opened above bare ugly stairs went up to the parapet, and, resting his hands on the damp coping, looked down into Stockton Street." (Herron, 91) So, there I stood, Hammett book in hand, baseball hat pulled down low over my brow, one hand shoved into my black thin-legged jeans, and I recrossed Spade's steps. And the fiction blurring reality - or non-reality, if you like - began to set in, as I found myself "following" a book about a self-created tour based on fictional accounts of non-real events, written by a man long-since dead. My thoughts wandered to the Morton Salt Girl, the pop culture answer to the lotus petal. You know, if you look at the package, you see the girl has a package of salt in her hand and on the package is another girl, holding another package. And on that package, there is another girl. And so on….to infinity. But, I digress, as Percey Shelley himself once put, it so eloquently. I did it. I shared Spade's fiction blurring reality view. I paused to soak it all in. Molly was growing restless, and though she smiled, I heard a small "boring" muttered underneath her breath. It was a little joke between us - when I got too eggheaded in one of my pursuits, reading some Melville for fun or some such activity, she would say "you read boring books." It was all in good fun, though. She was plot-driven; I liked setting. I guess we both dig characters and that's how we came together. But this particular day, we were just beginning. And we were always just beginning. Beginning and yet, continuing, and you couldn't ask for anything better from two people, together. We always seemed to be new and yet, established. And, I never forget how beautiful that is, and no amount of fiction would ever blur that reality. Well, we walked westward from the tunnel, a short way, until we got to the ultimate fiction blurring reality site of the tour, a sign at the end of the alley that reads, "On approximately this spot, Miles Archer, partner of Sam Spade, was done in by Brigid O'Shaughnessy." It is here we pass even one more step into the great commemorated and commodified, and increasingly confusing, beyond, a plaque that commemorates fictional accounts from The Maltese Falcon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I stood and stared down the empty alleyway, closing my eyes and imagining Sam Spade, imagining Hammett walking by this spot on his way to John's Grill or his job writing ad copy, but my memory was not one of the printed page and my conceptions of Spade and Archer and the Fat Man, but rather, the dark alleyway in John Huston's film noir version, black upon black, as Archer is gunned down, and rolls down a long slanted terrain to some sort of gully, which of course, is not how it looks in present day real-life, especially in broad daylight. The film follows the book faithfully, but that's relative, of course, as much of Spade's interior thoughts are quickly expressed through mood lighting, and the mannerisms of Humphrey Bogart. Also, in the film, Spade moves through a world of signs, on doors, hotels, theaters, door numbers, and print, as the detective makes it his job to order the signs into a clear narrative, a pattern to be solved (Abramson, 116). In this way, the sign in the alley made some sense to me, and I saw us as walking through a series of modern day film versions of Hammett's work, past pop culture signs, in search of some real meaning about the author of these works and what they mean today. I think. Maybe. Hmmm. Next, we backtracked, and passed the Sir Francis Hotel, where in the Maltese Falcon, Miles Archer shadows Brigid O"Shaughnessy and Floyd Thursby from the lobby to his death in Burritt alley. The most famous case Hammett claimed to have worked on as a Pinkerton operative in San Francisco originated in the St. Francis, where the famous silent comedian Fatty Arbuckle had a big bash Monday, September 5, 1921, in a suite overlooking the corner of Powell and Geary Streets. After the party Arbuckle was accused of raping a young actress who died a few days later, and Arbuckle went on trial for the murder in a sensational case, which became the O.J. trial of its day. Hammett said he worked on the case gathering evidence for Arbuckle's lawyers (Herron, 106), and Hammett, along with Arbuckle's good friend Buster Keaton, felt the comedian was innocent and that the whole deal was a set-up. Regardless of truth and the legal system, Arbuckle's career was ruined and death would come soon. Thinking of Arbuckle made me hungry, so we trekked onward, to John's Grill, the joint where Hammett used to drink and eat, and where the fictional, as I needed to remind myself, Sam Spade stopped for a snack in The Maltese Falcon, if men like Spade could be said to snack. Inside, the tables were all set up neatly with white tablecloths and what looked to be, fine cutlery. I'd always imagined it as a greasy spoon.. We went in the waiter sat us down and gave us menus and we saw that we could order "a Bloody Bridgid," which comes in a souvenir glass with a falcon emblazoned on it. Or a "Sam Spades Chops" rack of lamb baked potato and sliced tomatoes. Vegetarian non-smokers who rarely drink, I was again reminded that cultural habits have passed with time. We slipped out before the waiter could come back for our order, something like one of the suspicious characters in a Hammett novel, shady and nonconforming vegetarians.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After John's, the final stop on our tour was another big apartment house, 620 Eddy, which is "important" because, of the eight years Hammett lived in San Francisco, five (1921-26) were spent there. It's the place where he wrote some of his finest short stories, and his first novel, the intensely Marxist shoot 'em up Red Harvest. Hammett always distrusted free enterprise run amuck, another irony of the tour we were taking, the book we were buying, the Brigid glass we could have had. And, other forms of free enterprise abound, as 620 Eddy is precariously close to the Tenderloin, one of the more dangerous parts of the City. The lawlessness of the gangsters in that novel has been replaced by the lawlessness of the drug dealers today. Sure enough, as we admired the façade of this anonymous-looking apartment complex, crack dealers and mumbling addicts, the homeless and the disenfranchised surrounded us. "The stuff that dreams are made of," as Sam Spade sardonically philosophizes at the end of The Maltese Falcon. Dreams can do so much; they can liberate or they can kill. Sprits can be raised or extinguished, and it's all up to time to decide. I think that's what Hammett was getting at. I don't know if I learned anything from my tour, other than what I already knew - the paradox that while nothing remains the same, some things do. But, I did get something of a feel for what the City must have been like in Hammett's day, a rough town that was perfect for the hard-boiled hero, the quasi-modern Byronic protagonist epitomized in his novels, running past dim lights into darkened alleys, reflecting our souls, and our desires. What a City the City must've been then. What a City it is today. And, those were my thoughts, as we hailed a cab and headed back to North Beach for some terrific Italian food, which was not fictional reality, but quite filling and satisfying. Now, only if Joe DiMaggio had walked in.



Works Cited
Abramson, Leslie H. "Two Birds of a Feather: Hammett and Huston's The Maltese Falcon." Literature Film Quarterly. Vol. 16, Issue #2, 1988, pp. 112-118.
Ferlinghetti, Lawrence. Pictures of the Gone World. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1995, #37
Hammett, Dashiell. "Dead Yellow Women" The Big Knockover. New York: Random House, 1956. pp. 150-95.
Hammett, Dashiell. "Nightmare Town." Nightmare Town. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. pp. 3-41
Hammett, Dashiell. The Maltese Falcon. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1987.
Herron, Don. The Dashiell Hammett Tour. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1991.
Nolan, William F. Hammett: A Life at the Edge. New York: Congdon & Weed, 1983.


"The contemporary writer's job is to take pieces of life and arrange them on paper. And the more direct their passage from street to paper the more lifelike they should turn out. He needs to make what is set down seem truly contemporary, to give the impression of things happening here and now, to force upon the reader a feeling of immediacy...He must know how things happen - not how they are remembered in later years- and he must write them down that way." - Dashiell Hammett (Nolan, 53)

F.S.R.
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Doug Hoekstra is currently about to release his fourth disc 'Across the Margins'

His previous recordings are

When the tubes begin to glow 1994( Back Porch Music)
Rickety Stairs 1996 ( Back Porch Music)
Make me Believe 1999
(One Man Clapping)

this article and photos copyright
Doug Hoekstra 2000