The Tour: 45 Years (1977-2022)

                 

“Since 1977, Don Herron has slipped on his trenchcoat and snap-brim hat to lead groups on a four-hour, three-mile investigation of Hammett sites…”

— NEW YORK TIMES —

“Theatrical and thoroughly immersed in Hammett arcana.”

— LOS ANGELES TIMES —

“Hammett and the San Francisco of the 1920s come to life again.”

— SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE —

“The group moved like a drunken cat through the streets and back alleys of the Tenderloin. It passed Southeast Asian diners, tawdry hotels, bars without windows, and places where a twenty will buy you more than the weekend’s groceries.”

— THE WALL STREET JOURNAL —

If only the gumshoes could have held out for an even fifty years. Such a soul-satisfying number.

But for forty-five years you could walk with Don Herron over the fog-shrouded hills stalked by Sam Spade, the Continental Op, and other hardboiled characters created by San Francisco’s most renowned mystery and noir writer. During the Dashiell Hammett Tour you saw the buildings where Hammett wrote his most famous stories — and the majority of locales from his classic novel, The Maltese Falcon.

As the tour promo once said:

Shadow Sam Spade in his quest for the fabulous figurine of a mysterious black bird. Prowl the back alleys where the Continental Op, Hammett’s longest-running detective, faced down the opposition over the barrel of his blazing .38. Follow Hammett himself as he works for the Pinkerton Detective Agency on the infamous Fatty Arbuckle case. See the spot where Spade’s partner, Miles Archer, with a smile on his mug and his pistol buttoned away under his overcoat, met swift death in the night-fog.