Take a walk in Sam Spade's gumshoes
San Francisco — It was cool outside. The rain had stopped, but the dampness seeped into our bones with the chill of death. We walked from our hotel down through the Tenderloin, a no man's land of desperate panhandlers, to John's Grill, where we took a window table on the second floor and ordered the chops, baked potato and sliced tomato.
This was the meal Sam Spade ordered in the hard-boiled classic "The Maltese Falcon." We didn't ask the waiter to hurry it, as Spade did. We had no other place to be. We ate, then sat back and waited to see if a "youngish man with a plaid cap set askew above pale eyes" would come tell us the car was ready for a run to Burlingame to rescue Brigid O'Shaughnessy.
No man in a cap showed. Still, the moment was fun.
In the 75 years since Dashiell Hammett maneuvered private detective Sam Spade through the streets of San Francisco, this city has changed. But not so much that "Falcon" fans can't still find the ghost of Spade's partner, Miles Archer, hovering "where Bush Street roofed Stockton before slipping downhill to Chinatown" -- the alley where O'Shaughnessy plugged him.
Part of the fun of "The Maltese Falcon" is Hammett's emphasis on place as much as character, moving Spade among hotels, restaurants and apartment buildings selected from the writer's haunts in the 1920s.
Don Herron, a cabby, part-time writer and Hammett fanatic, has been leading walking tours through the heart of San Francisco since the 1970s, pointing out the past, both real and fictional. On a Friday in mid-March, my 14-year-old son, Michael, and I caught a short afternoon tour. (The long version covers three miles in four hours.) Fog would have added to the fun -- Spade awakened one night to the lonely echo of the Alcatraz foghorn -- but we got rain.
We started at the Flood Building, where Hammett worked intermittently from 1915 to 1921 as a detective for the Pinkerton Agency. Herron whisked us past a small display in the lobby and out the Ellis Street door to John's Grill, marked by a plaque and a falcon silhouette on its awning. It's the only restaurant where Spade ate that still exists.
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What's in a name?
"The Maltese Falcon" begins with O'Shaughnessy -- using a fake name -- hiring Spade and Archer to find her sister by trailing Floyd Thursby, who she said was helping the girl. It's a ruse; O'Shaughnessy, Thursby and three others are all looking for the Maltese falcon, a priceless statue whose gem-encrusted surface is hidden beneath black enamel. Thursby and Archer get murdered, and Spade's pursuit of the killers -- and the falcon -- propels the plot.
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