I heard the coverage, and wondered, Hey, was it in 891?

Nope. But close. The shootout was down the block in 861 Post.

I figured it was worth a moment on the blog, to let people know the mean streets are still mean.

Every now and then something exciting happens adjacent to the Sam Spade apartment. My fave, years ago, when Bill Arney was in residence, was the building directly across Hyde Street exploding (after an underground gas leak filled it to the brim), the shock waves blowing out every window for blocks around, debris from the structure landing in courtyards of buildings a block away in every direction.

Bill was in the Sutter Station bar, saw the flames on the TV, heard “Post and Hyde”. . . .

He jumped in a cab, asked for 891 Post.

“Don’t bother,” said the cabbie. “That building just blew up.”

Nooooooooooooooooooo!

Bill went there anyway, saw 891 was still standing, roped off by police tape. He tried to get through — Bill, as always garbed in black, in a black hat. The cops grabbed him.

“Look!” said a bystander. “They’ve caught the bomber!”

That was a good one. I suppose my next favorite was when the Buddhist shrine in an apartment on the other side of the fourth floor caught fire.

Recent mentions of hitting Hollywood again, plus references to my 1984 book The Dark Barbarian, on Texas writer Robert E. Howard, brought Jim Tully back to mind — a road kid and beggar and circus roustabout who became one of the bestselling writers of the 20s and 30s. His last years spent on the Hollywood scene involved doing lucrative articles on the stars for national magazines — kind of an authentic tough guy turned Ryan Seacrest, but the money was very good.

In preparation for writing the essay “Hard-Boiled Heroic Fantasist” (under the name George Knight) for TDB I read a bunch of Tully’s books. In a December 1932 letter Howard offered the opinion that of living American authors of the day only the writing of Tully and H.P. Lovecraft would endure. Lovecraft has become a standard, and Tully has dug in as a cult favorite. Yeah, he gets a push toward major rediscovery every now and then, but his best novels aren’t going away even if he never cracks the mainstream again. You get pulled into the sphere of Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties, you’re going to encounter this Shanty Irish mug.

One of the books Charles Willeford wanted to do was a major book-length study on Tully. He didn’t get to it, but you can read some pieces he wrote toward it in Writing and Other Blood Sports. I figure if a writer like Tully keeps showing up again and again as an interest of other writers you like, then check him out.

The Could Have Been.

My main objection, that star Sarah Jones looks to be about twenty years old — not old enough to be convincing as a police homicide detective — could have been handled with the exact same actress playing a rookie cop. Her character was going to be in the mix regardless, since she’s related to time-hopping bad guy Tommy Madsen — she could have been a teenager in high school, anything, and they’d have had to write her in. Make up an excuse to give her a gun and let her go Dirty Nancy Drew. I’d have been more willing to go along with that than to try and believe she’d made Homicide.

Sure, that’s nitpicky, but petty little details often make or break it. A guy on the tour this past Sunday thought the show was awful, but also mentioned that he had a relative, a local cop, who couldn’t watch Alcatraz because they called homicide cops inspectors instead of detectives, or detectives instead of inspectors, whichever is correct.

The San Francisco audience is a tough sale.

In the section on Robert E. Howard’s Library in The Dark Barbarian from 1984, Steve Eng pointed out that “A look at the volumes of poetry may discover lines that are echoed in Howard’s verse.” True enough. And you also can see the shadow of other writers, not just poets, here and there.

Before I visited the Zane Grey Pueblo on Catalina Island last year I downloaded on Kindle the two novels by Grey known to have been in Howard’s personal library at the time of his death — The Border Legion from 1916 and To the Last Man from 1922. I felt like I might die of old age before I ever finished The Border Legion, and to date haven’t tried the other one — but I did read the foreword, written in Grey’s studio in the pueblo in April 1921. One passage in particular reminded me of Howard:

Even today it is not possible to travel into the remote corners of the West without seeing the lives of people still affected by a fighting past. How can the truth be told about the pioneering of the West if the struggle, the fight, the blood be left out? It cannot be done. How can a novel be stirring and thrilling, as were those times, unless it be full of sensation? My long labors have been devoted to making stories resemble the times they depict. I have loved the West for its vastness, its contrast, its beauty and color and life, for its wildness and violence, and for the fact that I have seen how it developed great men and women who died unknown and unsung.

I dug around in Howard and found the specific passage in which those lines echoed in a letter from REH to August Derleth, circa March 1933, in which Howard talked about the book Frontier’s Generation by his friend Tevis Clyde Smith:

I hope you’ll like Clyde’s book. One objection I have heard voiced to works of this kind — dealing with Texas — is the amount of gore spilled across the pages. It can not be otherwise. In order to write a realistic and true history of any part of the Southwest, one must narrate such things, even at the risk of monotony. There is no part of the United States whose history is more obscure, so little known, as that of Texas. We have always been more or less isolated from the rest of the nation, and life has been such a terrific struggle for existence that the arts and literature had no opportunity to develop. It is only in the last few years that native Texans are beginning to write the chronicle of the Southwest. Much of it is already lost and forgotten. Much will never be written. I myself know of incidents that would make vivid and dramatic reading; but I have not written of them, and I do not intend to.

But to return to blood-letting. Authentic history or realistic fiction of Texas must be gory. Writing fiction with the purpose of selling it, I would trim it down, past the facts, lest I be looked on as a mere sensationalist. Write a fiction book with half a dozen killings in it, and the critics would brand it melodramatic and impossible. Yet such an absolutely authentic work as Charles Siringo’s autobiography contains repeated references to murders and homicides. And in John Wesley Hardin’s autobiography, or rather in that part of it covering his life from his birth, in 1853, to the time he went to prison in 1878, descriptions are made of, or references to, the killings of 66 men. More than half of these were killed by Hardin himself. Nor was this super-homicide limited to the lower strata of life, as in other localities. If that were the case, history would not need to be so detailed about it; but the wealthy ranchman was as likely to be shot out of his saddle as the most humble vaquero. The politician wore his guns under his coat-tails just as regularly as did the cattle-rustler.

A couple of years ago I got a Kindle as a gift from Vince Emery, so I could check out how The Dashiell Hammett Tour book looked in that format — now, suddenly, highly ironic.

On my own, I probably wouldn’t have popped for any sort of ereader as yet. Let’s face it, I could get by without one perfectly well. And at first I wondered what to do with it. Really. The thing sat around a lot on a pile of books.

But since I had it, I tried figuring out some use for the Kindle, and realized I could store various titles from the Robert E. Howard Library on it. Anyone familiar with my 1984 book The Dark Barbarian knows about the appendix Steve Eng did, compiling a list of the known books Howard had in his personal library in Cross Plains, Texas. That really kicked off a movement to track down and read those books, check to see what else the creator of Conan may have mentioned reading in his letters — a cornerstone moment in Howardian scholarship.

Sure. I could use the Kindle to archive various REH library items for eventual reading. I still shelved the entire Mars series in book form, but other novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs that Howard owned I had ditched long ago. I once had some Fu-Manchu books, in paperback, by Sax Rohmer, but had given them away after not being able to wade through the first one. And I can’t recall ever having a Zane Grey novel hanging around.

Click. Click. Click.

Knowing I had a trip to Catalina and a stop in the Zane Grey Pueblo coming up, I figured I could haul along the Kindle and do some support reading while soaking up the scene. The Border Legion from 1916 sounded good — a legion on a border, very evocative — one of two titles definitely in Howard’s collection, though no doubt he read many others by Grey.

I started it before boarding the boat to Catalina. I got in a few pages before conking out in Grey’s former writing studio. I kept plugging away after heading home. Finally, I got 43% into that novel before not being able to go on for another page. I have no idea how I managed that much. . . .

Absolutely brutal. I felt like I’d been reading forever, and nothing much was happening. Yes, Grey was one of the bestselling novelists of his time — so many reprint editions, you will still find copy after copy in any bookstore that has a Western section. So dated. Not quite as creaky as James Fenimore Cooper, but a long, long road ahead before you get to a contemporary Elmore Leonard level.

I’m not that big a Western reader, anyway. Yeah, I’ve read a bunch, but generally speaking I’d rather watch a Western movie. All things being equal, I’d rather see some guy riding around on a horse in an arroyo than read about some guy riding around on a horse in an arroyo. I’d rather read a non-fiction account about Doc Holliday or Billy the Kid than read a novel loosely based on their best gunfights. I’d rather visit the graveyards where those two were buried, and I have, than read any kind of Western novel.

I now know I’d rather visit Zane Grey’s house than read Zane Grey.

Still, on the Kindle scene, it seemed kind of depressing. A tiny warehouse for mostly unreadable books.

To give the machine a fair shake, I punched up the recent James Reasoner crime novel Dust Devils and popped right through it. I think that’s what these ereaders are for, getting access to stuff that once would have been on the paperback spinner racks. Current cheap reading. Electronic pulp.

But if you can take it, yes, you can also read a lot of Zane Grey.

My recent trip down to Musso & Frank and the link yesterday to my guidebook The Literary World of San Francisco remind me that I’ve been meaning to blurb the Zane Grey Pueblo Hotel on Catalina Island for awhile now. I’ve been aware for years that the prolific Western writer lived on the island — if you read my book Willeford you’ll see that Charles Willeford had a schtick going in his writing about how Grey would donate the swordfish he’d reel in on his boat to the LA County Jail, to the point that the prisoners grew sick of swordfish.

I guess I first did a daytrip out to Catalina around ten years back — worth it for the boat ride, hanging out in the town of Avalon, and a visit to the theatre Wrigley of gum fame had erected. (A second trip reminded me that the artist who did the theatre murals was also connected with the 1941 film of The Maltese Falcon — art director or something like that.) And it’s hard to believe today that ships full of people would travel out to the island from LA to dance to now legendary Big Bands in the theatre ballroom.

But my favorite angle was seeing the Zane Grey home still standing, and operating as a hotel. I’ll visit any literary site open as a museum — from the Robert E. Howard House in Cross Plains, Texas to the attic in London where Dr. Sam: Johnson compiled his dictionary, the Brontë home, the birthplace of Sinclair Lewis, Hemingway’s house in Key West, Poe’s digs in Philly — I’ve got that jones. I’ll also stand outside literary sites that aren’t open for business and absorb the atmosphere.

So, I knew a return trip to Catalina had to include at least a night in the pueblo. As it turned out, I got the Desert Gold Room (all the guest rooms are named for various Grey books), which proved to be Grey’s writing studio (you can tell from the large wooden slab used as a mantlepiece in historic photos). Kind of a quick crash course in Zane Grey, you can look down on the sports fishing club of his day (and today, same building), the Tuna Club, where he got into an argument about records — they docked him for using stronger lines to haul in bigger catches.

Great views. Really great views.

Of course, I’m prejudiced in favor of places like this — but check out this review, which seems to me fair enough, and accurate. The guy liked it, his wife wanted a place with TV and cable.

Without really battering the old brain, offhand I can’t think of another major literary site that’s open as a hotel. And when I stopped there February last year, the place was being offered for sale — in the $13 million range, if you’ve got the change — either to continue as a business or change back to a private residence as in Grey’s era.

When I hit Musso & Frank after that visit, both Donald Sidney-Fryer and I ordered swordfish, in honor of Zane Grey (and Willeford).

The indefatigable Terry Zobeck is back to complete his coverage of Hammett’s side career as a book reviewer. He began with a post on February 1st and dedicated another on February 16th to the mystery review column The Crime Wave. This round he takes on the third and final issue of The Forum containing a review of Mary Austin — who features in my The Literary World of San Francisco as one of the literary founders of Carmel-by-the-Sea — as well as a big wrap-up Hammett did on advertising books during his San Francisco years. Terry sends along a b&w shot he took of Western Advertising, saying “the original color cover is wonderful. I wish the Library of Congress had color copiers.”

Here’s Terry:

Back in February I lamented the fact that the website Unz.org was missing one of the three issues of The Forum with a Hammett review — the one from August 1925. During my recent trip to the Library of Congress I obtained a copy of that issue. Hammett’s review, titled “Genius Made Easy,” was of Mary Austin’s Everyman’s Genius. Austin was a novelist, playwright, poet, and critic, with particular interests in Native Americans and the desert southwest, and a fellow contributor to The Forum.

Unlike most of the books that Hammett reviewed, Everyman’s Genius is not a novel. Rather, it is an exploration of the nature of genius. Austin’s premise is that genius is derived from inherited racial experience stored in the “deep-self.” Hammett acknowledges that Austin has some interesting things to say, but concludes: “Although much of her evidence is trivial and logic is not in her, Mrs. Austin achieves a certain convincingness by sheer weight of humorless sincerity.”

I thought that was the final Hammett book review I needed to track down, but I was wrong. I’ve long been intrigued by the articles Hammett wrote for Western Advertising, a San Francisco-based monthly devoted to the art of advertising, but could never find them. I finally had a chance recently to read them — thanks once again to the collections of the Library of Congress —and learned that one of his contributions to the magazine was actually a book review.

After starting off 1926 with a story in each of the first three issues of Black Mask for the year, Hammett stopped publishing in the pulp due to a dispute over money. It would be a year before he returned to fiction and Black Mask with “The Big Knockover.”

Meanwhile, to make ends meet, Hammett took a job in March 1926 as advertising manager with the Albert S. Samuels Company, a San Francisco jewelry store, but due to a dramatic decline in his health, he was soon forced to cut back on his hours. He continued, however, to work for Samuels part-time until late 1927, by which time he began the serialization of Red Harvest in Black Mask.

While working in advertising, Hammett appears to have thrown himself wholeheartedly into his work. Over the course of 18 months he produced five pieces for Western Advertising, an indication of his self-confidence in his abilities in his new profession. Four of these were articles on various aspects of how to create interesting and successful advertising — more on those in a future blog. The fifth piece — “The Literature of Advertising in 1927” — was an omnibus review for the February 1928 issue of the best advertising books published the preceding year. Even with such stuffy material, Hammett couldn’t resist bringing his sense of humor to the job. Of Stuart Chase’s and F. J. Schlink’s Your Money’s Worth — “the most talked about book of the year” — he wrote that:

. . . they attacked the sales mechanism of modern business above and below the belt, from front and back, and from around corners. If they didn’t actually redden the earth with their victim’s blood, they assuredly drew from him and from the spectators groans, cheers, jeers and assorted bellowings enough to satisfy even a pair of authors.

Some of the books Hammett reviewed and his comments on them provide insight into his interests and intellectual curiosity, and they take on added historical interest given our perspective of 84 years later. Commercial radio broadcasts had begun only 8 years earlier, yet advertising was already playing an important role in this new medium and Hammett recognized it.  He noted in his review of Using Radio in Sales Promotion that it was:

. . . a thorough, competent and understandable presentation of the known facts concerning the advertising use of radio. The first authoritative work in its field, this was a volume not to be neglected by any advertiser or advertising man, no matter how well-informed or how little interested in this newest of media.

Hammett was obviously interested in economics — he undoubtedly was to become even more interested, along with the rest of the world, by the end of the following year. Of The Economics of Installment Selling he wrote:

Professor Seligman found abuses in installment selling, and dangers, but he found no reason for supposing that consumer credit was not fundamentally sound; and he concluded that when its evils were removed—as old evils had to be removed from banking—it would be as beneficial to the consumer as bank credit is to the producer. This book had an enormous silencing effect on the enemies of installment selling, and a soothing effect on those who had begun to be afraid that credit had become too easily obtained.

In a nice bit of inadvertent foreshadowing Hammett noted of Business Cycles: The Problem and the Setting that it was:

. . . a painstaking and scholarly inquiry into the nature and processes of recurrent commercial fluctuations; an attempt to combine the observations of economic theorists, economic statisticians and economic annalists, and to discover what business cycles actually are. Although not a book for those who require a neat and simple answer to every problem, it brought order—if complex order—into a field where most had hitherto been confusion, and prepared the way for further studies, leading eventually, perhaps to an understanding of the causes of business cycles and of how they may be controlled.

It seems to be a topic as timely today as it was then.

For the sake of completeness here’s a list of the 41 books Hammett covered in this review — I doubt there are many Hammett aficionados who will want to “collect them all”:

Your Money’s Worth by Stuart Chase and F. J. Schlink

Economics of Advertising by Roland S. Vaile

Old Sox on Trumpeting by E. T. Gundlach

Advertisement Writing by Gilbert Russell

What about Advertising by Kenneth M. Goode and Harford Powel, Jr.

Using Radio in Sales Promotion by Edgar H. Felix

Advertising Copy: Principles and Practice by Lloyd D. Herrold

Advertising Simplified by N. B. Boardman

Color in Advertising and Merchandising Display by Charles C. Knights

Sixth Annual of Advertising Art foreword by W. H. Beatty

Modern Poster Annual (fourth annual edition)

Printing for Commerce by the American Institute of Graphic Arts

A Printer’s Manual of Style by Frederic H. Hamilton

The Art and Practice of Typography (enlarged edition) by Edmund G. Gress

Manual of Typographical Standards (enlarged edition) by the New York Times

Type Faces by D. C. McMurtrie

Achievement in Photo-Engraving and Letter-Press Printing edited by Louis Flader

How Banks Increase Their Business by G. Prather Knapp

Finance and Advertising by the Bureau of Advertising of the American Newspaper Publishers Association

Principles of Effective Letter Writing by Lawrence C. Lockley

Principles of Selling by Mail by James H. Picken

Constructive Selling Talks by B. J. Williams

How to Influence Men by Edgar J. Swift

How to Sell Newspaper Advertising by H. A. Casey

The Measurement of Advertising Effects by George Burton Hotchkiss and Richard B. Franken

An Investigation of Attention to Advertisements by H. K. Nixon

Advertising Research by Percival White

Principles of Marketing by Harold H. Maynard, Walter C. Weidler and Theodore N. Beckman

The Economics of Installment Selling by Dr. Edwin R. A. Seligman

Business Cycles: The Problem and the Setting by Wesley C. Mitchell

Advertising Fluctuations: Seasonal and Cyclical by William Leonard Crum

Advertiser’s Annual and Convention Year Book (from the UK)

Papers of the American Association of Advertising Agencies (report on the meeting of the A.A.A.A., including President Coolidge’s speech).

My Life in Advertising by Claude C. Hopkins

Trail Blazers of Advertising by C. L. Pancoast

Hawkers and Walkers in Early America by Richardson Wright

The Advertising Agency by Floyd Y. Keeler and Albert E. Haase

An Outline of Careers by Edward L. Bernay

How to Become an Advertising Man by Norman Lewis

Writing and Editing for Women by Ethel M. Colson Brazleton

I missed it, because that day I was in LA hanging out with Jo Hammett. Always a pleasure. Again, her book Dashiell Hammett: A Daughter Remembers is one of the essential items for anyone who considers him or herself to be a bigtime Hammett fan. Worth it just for the photo of Hammett in a crew of head-busters in a railroad yard.

But Mike Humbert keeps up with all that stuff and had copied me in on it by the time I got back to the burg. I guess the new era for the apartment is kind of a Nick Charles/Thin Man/slicked-up incarnation. Me, I guess I prefer the nearly twenty years Bill Arney put in as Keeper of the Shrine, a rough and tumble/Continental Op/vigorous pulp-style period. A Golden Age — and one of the things you can say for me is that I recognise a Golden Age when I’m in it.

(I ran a photo of me and Bill and Mike in a post last year, standing in front of the folded-up Murphy bed in the apartment — click here.)

May 2012. A Dashiell Hammett Tour each and every Sunday this month. $10. Four hours, beginning at noon.

No reservations taken. Just show up.

And if you just can’t make it in May, on Sunday June 17 you’ll find a walk requested by a guy flying in from Australia, open to anyone who shows up. Noon. $10. Four hours. The usual.

Just got back from a run down to Musso & Frank to find that Terry Zobeck logged in with another installment of his series investigating the editorial changes made by Frederic Dannay to Hammett’s short stories — and what better way to kick off another month here on Up and Down These Mean Streets?

Take it, Terry:

“Afraid of a Gun” saw first publication in the March 1, 1924 issue of Black Mask. Hammett had been placing stories with a variety of magazines for just under 18 months. “Afraid of a Gun” marked a baker’s dozen of stories appearing in Black Mask up to this point. A slight story, one of Hammett’s wry short tales told for a comic twist at the end, it wasn’t collected by Fred Dannay until Woman in the Dark in 1951 — it also appears in the currently available edition Nightmare Town from 1999.

The story is not without merit. It has an interesting set-up concerning bootleggers and their conflict with Federal agents; however, nothing much comes of it. Perhaps more interesting is the setting. Hammett returns to the wilds of Montana, this time in the Cabinet Mountains, along the Kootenai River. Owen Sack, a frightened little man, once again is forced to run from his fear of a gun. In recalling similar events over the course of his life, he remembers a time back in a Marsh Market dive in Baltimore when a sailor almost killed him over a dice game. Hammett would have been quite familiar with Marsh Market (another potential stop along the Hammett tour, East Coast edition!).

Dannay made no edits to the story when he reprinted it.

As I’ve looked into documenting Hammett’s pure texts, I can discern no sense or reasoning behind Dannay’s editing of the stories. A minor story like “Afraid of a Gun” goes unscathed, while Op stories like “This King Business”, “Death and Company”, “It”, and — as we’ll see next time — “Night Shots,” are cut willy-nilly.

“Afraid of a Gun” is one of three Hammett stories that I photographed recently at the Library of Congress. Again, I am deeply indebted to Mr. Clark Evans of the LOC’s Rare Book Room for arranging my access to these fragile pulps and for helping me to photograph them.