A year ago, this very month, our Guest Blogger veteran Terry Zobeck explored the references to real life kidnappings in various incarnations of the Hammett story “Death and Company” — which included the 1934 Alice Speed Stoll caper.
Just got a note from Steven Key Meyers, who tells me, “As it happens, my 2011 book All That Money (and, yes, I filched the title from Hammett) was inspired by the Stoll kidnapping.”
You can read a couple of chapters on his website, plus I see that the kidnapper did part of his stretch on no less than Alcatraz. Big case in that era — Meyers mentions that the “New York Times alone carried more than a hundred stories about it.”
