Collecting San Francisco Mysteries . Hammett started that one off, of course, but I discovered quite a few other writers I liked in addition to the creator of the Continental Op — Samuel W. Taylor, David Dodge, and Virginia Rath personal favorites among them.
Merle Haggard, the great country singer, songwriter, and guitar player whose most enduring tales chronicled the often hardscrabble lives of American survivors, died.
Every now and then I would do an article based on the experience of tracking down these books. The first version appeared under the title “San Francisco Mysteries” in a special Frisco issue of the magazine Mystery dated September 1. I even included a checklist of all the local mystery novels I knew of at the time. For the summer 1. The Argonaut: The Journal of the San Francisco Historical Society, I retooled that earlier article a bit and added a sidebar called “Histories and Mysteries,” pointing out how you can track down some pretty interesting local info if you just read enough crime novels. I did a new version for Firsts: The Book Collectors Magazine, the April 2.
Prior to the 1937 Rape of Nanking, Rabe had led a relatively peaceful though well-traveled life. The son of a sea captain, he was born in Hamburg, Germany, on.
325-262-1467 Elke Maedke E 31st St, San Angelo, Texas. 325-262-3932 Fred Pinkham Duckworth Rd, San Angelo, Texas. 325-262-4447 Constance Wachtler Guthrie St, San. 6, 1937 Oildale Kern County California, USA: Death: Apr. 6, 2016 Palo Cedro Shasta County California, USA: Country and Western Singer, Songwriter. March 13, 1949: Inmates rest in triple bunks at San Quentin. This accompanied an article in the Chronicle about prison overcrowding. For around a quarter of a century I had a nice little hobby going, collecting crime fiction set within the San Francisco city limits. Hammett started that one off, of. Dean of Death Row The man who became the face of San Quentin.
But then what happens but that Bancroft librarian Randal Brandt, another big fan of David Dodge, decides to put up a website devoted to San Francisco area mysteries, keeping it updated as new titles continue to appear. Do you know a local crime novel not on the list? Just pop it in to Randal and make the quest to gather a complete collection that much more difficult. If you’re thinking about which hobby you should get into next, you could do worse than to try.
By Don Herron. The tremendous lure of San Francisco began with the discovery of gold in the Sierra foothills. That immediate onrush of the Forty- Niners created almost overnight a unique American city, rapidly climbing up the hills over the bay. The spectacle and drama of the earthquake and fire of 1. Only San Francisco, when you consider the matter, seems like the proper place to have served as such a locus for the Beats and the hippies.
The recent waves of ambitious dot- commers, which poured in for the digital gold rush, are merely like an echo down history of the fortune- seekers that first put the place on the map of great cities of the world. For book collectors, San Francisco offers almost limitless opportunities. Volumes about the city itself as one aspect of Western Americana, from the Mission era to this very moment. The early writings of reporter Samuel Clemens, a. Mark Twain, before he left town to become one of the giants of world literature. Accounts of the depredations of that desperado from Frisco known by the cool handle of Black Bart.
The many titles by San Francisco native Jack London. The publication of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems by City Lights — a landmark censorship case.
So much — hundreds of writers and poets you might collect, and every neighborhood has its stories. I sampled many of the local collecting angles before deciding that gathering shelf upon shelf of mysteries set in San Francisco would be my game. That novels about crime and detection should attract my attention, however, is no kind of mystery. In 1. 97. 7 I began doing the Dashiell Hammett Tour through the streets of the city, a tribute to the greatest private eye writer ever to live in San Francisco. Hammett had traveled the country as an operative for Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency before moving to the city in the summer of 1. While here he began writing stories based on his experiences for the pulp pages of The Black Mask magazine. Before taking off for New York and then Hollywood in the fall of 1.
The Thin Man was written in its entirety after he left San Francisco. Better yet, because he liked to write about what he knew, Hammett set many of his stories in the city where he was living. His San Francisco stands as one of the great literary treatments of a city, and has been compared with Joyce’s Dublin and Dickens’ London for its evocation of time and place, the days in the 1. Most of his series of three novels and over two dozen short stories and novelettes about a short fat nameless operative for the Continental Detective Agency takes place in San Francisco and environs.
For people who know the streets, these Continental Op tales are a vein of ultra- tough solid gold — among the best hard- boiled fiction of all time, set on pavement you can walk any time you feel like it. The short Op novel The Big Knockover, in particular, is a tour de force run over the hills of the town, hitting neighborhoods even people who have lived here for years have yet to visit. And then there’s this one book, The Maltese Falcon. Just as London has hundreds of detectives, but the first name that comes to mind is Sherlock Holmes, so too does San Francisco have her detective: Sam Spade. No other novel has excited so much interest here, or sent so many people scurrying over the hills as they shadow Spade’s movements in his search for the fabulous figurine of a mysterious black bird.
The Maltese Falcon gave a mythic icon to San Francisco, with the image of the private eye in snapbrim hat and trenchcoat stalking through the fog as integral a part of local lore as the 1. The first edition of this novel, published by Knopf in 1.
I confess I would have had a hard time cracking that safe only a year before, when nice copies in jackets were fetching cheques in the $1. Even when I started doing the walks, fine copies hovered close to a thousand or three, and I just never have burned enough rubber off my gumshoes to catch up with the market, I guess.
All of Hammett’s first set of novels from Knopf, including Red Harvest (1. The Dain Curse (1. The Glass Key (1.
The Thin Man (1. 93. I long have admired from afar, and getting farther all the time. I know you can always get lucky, of course.
In the days when that arch- bookman Dennis Mc. Millan lived in San Francisco, as he was just starting his publishing empire, we used to book about — amazing to see how Dennis always would spot the title resting on the cheap tables that was really worth $4. We visited one collector in San Jose, who had narrowed his library down to books signed by their authors. Most were a puzzle to me, merely pop self- help books with a John Hancock. The signed Mein Kampf, however, I realized was a coup.
But most impressive of all was the inscribed first of Hammett’s Red Harvest. No dustjacket, some wear, but by no means bad. And this fellow had found this copy for a dollar at a garage sale. I confess that I have never felt that lucky in my entire life, but I can see Mc. Millan nabbing that kind of deal some day. All I can hope to do is spend long hours speculating about who this Bettye may have been. On the story collections from the forties and fifties, I actually prefer the reprinted Dell Mapback versions to the first edition digest format issued by Spivak, where age has been especially unkind to the paper.
The combination of the cover art with the crime scene maps on the flip side give those Dell paperbacks considerable charm, and more than once I have thought that I really need a complete set of all the Mapbacks. I know collectors with complete sets, but so far have resisted the siren call. The most interesting Hammett first in my hands is not a distinguished edition, just the 1.
Knopf omnibus of The Novels of Dashiell Hammett (and that not even the first time the novels were assembled under one set of covers). The provenance makes this one a favorite. This copy belonged to James Sandoe, mystery critic and author of the seminal early work The Hard- Boiled Dick: A Personal Check- List (1. In a small neat hand in pencil Sandoe signed his name on the front flyleaf, and several note- size pages with his later thoughts and questions about what Hammett was up to remain as inserts in the book. If my collection of Hammett never became a cause for egomania, though, leading the tour for awhile occasioned delusions of grandeur. I veered close to the description Hammett once gave for Sam Spade, when he wrote: Spade had no original. He is a dream man in the sense that he is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been and what quite a few of them in their cockier moments thought they approached”a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent by- stander or client.
After leading 3. 0 or 4. Hammett tours I picked up that attitude, too.
Not that I have much in common with Sam Spade — I don’t smoke, and prefer Jack Daniels to Bacardi. Still, I was getting cocky. People on the tour would ask a question, and I’d pop with some kind of answer every time. But on one walk the dream detective got yanked back into the real world, when someone asked, “Have there been many mysteries set in San Francisco, other than those by Hammett?”My answer was quick: “No. Not many.” I mentioned the novels by the current local mystery writers Joe Gores, Bill Pronzini and Collin Wilcox. I cited Poul Anderson’s three novels featuring the Norwegian- Japanese detective Trygve Yamamura — Perish by the Sword (1.
Murder in Black Letter (1. Murder Bound (1. 96.
Bay Bridge in the East Bay, but feature a chapter where Yamamura comes over to the city. And I probably dropped the name of Lenore Glen Offord, crime novelist and the then current mystery critic for the local paper, before concluding, “And that’s about it.”An older woman on the tour spoke up. Who the hell is David Dodge? Part of it takes place on Telegraph Hill.
He’s my cousin.”Soon I tracked this book down —. Death and Taxes (1. CPA James Whitney as its amateur sleuth. Dodge, who had been working as an accountant in the financial district, had Whit return in Shear the Black Sheep (1. Bullets for the Bridegroom (1. Reno to get married. Returning from wartime service, however, Dodge’s mood had darkened, demonstrated in the final and most famous title in this series, It Ain’t Hay (1.
Reefer Madness. Whit’s back in the berg, but where the previous books had been light and fun, this one is a downer. Describing the killer weed, Dodge writes, “Look at some of these musicians that use it.