Ace Atkins just popped me a note that a few photos of Hammett currently are on the block on eBay, including a shot I’ve never seen before. If interested, hop over pronto for a look or to join in the bidding wars, if so inclined.
I’ve never done much on eBay, and once thought that you could use it as a research tool, to see what items had sold over the years, for how much when — a grand march of auctions going back to the early days of the web. Infinite! Then I found out they drop the back auctions after a couple of months, so you can’t find out anything. Great.
One of the shots features Hammett with W.S. Van Dyke, director of the first Thin Man flick, while another is the shot of Hammett with George Raft (during the making of the first version of The Glass Key) which I’ve seen in one of the biographies. The third offering is the coolest, apparently unposed, Hammett talking to a guy who isn’t known to me (though he kind of looks like J. Edgar Hoover — naw, couldn’t be. . .), or to Ace. Check them out before they hit the dumped info bin.
Oh, and running through Ace’s blog just now I noticed that he did a retraction on his guess that Hammett may have been smoking a Cohiba in that film clip I featured for Hammett’s birthday.
