As we walked, Herron pointed out key spots and a detail new to us. For reasons that remain unclear, Hammett used real restaurants in his books but gave hotels pseudonyms. In an intriguing hairsplit, he identified the Palace Hotel because Spade ate there, but no characters checked in.
O'Shaughnessy stayed first at the St. Mark hotel, which close readers of the novel think is the Westin St. Francis overlooking Union Square, and then moved to Apartment 1001 of the Coronet on California Street. Herron pointed out what some Falcon fans think is its model, the 19-story Cathedral Apartments, a 1930 sandstone-colored building rising above the corner of Jones and California streets. Because the Cathedral opened after the book was published, and Hammett described a route that suggests the real Coronet was farther west, we weren't convinced.
Underworld character Kasper Gutman and his gunman Wilmer Cook stayed at the Alexandria, whose model remains murky but is best-guessed as the Sir Francis Drake, where bellmen in beefeater garb still wrestle bags from car trunks and hail cabs. Wary conspirator Joel Cairo stayed at the Belvedere, generally read as the Bellevue (which is now the Monaco); it's just up from the Geary Theater, where Spade met Cairo on the sidewalk under Cook's watchful eyes.
Our soggy trek continued westward along Geary, passing the intersection with Leavenworth (where Thursby was gunned down) before arriving at 891 Post St., where Hammett lived from 1926 to 1929 and wrote "The Maltese Falcon" and two other novels, "Red Harvest" and "The Dain Curse."
Herron and other aficionados think Hammett lived in a corner unit on the fourth floor, though some hold it was the third. On the Saturday we were there, a plaque was added to the outside of the building marking it as a literary landmark. A friend of Herron's has rented the fourth-floor studio, so it often is included on the walking tour, as it was this day. In the late 1920s, Hammett was married with two children but had contracted tuberculosis, so he took this small apartment with a Murphy bed to avoid infecting his family. Fans believe he made it Spade's apartment too.
This is where Spade had his run-ins with the police, his romantic encounter with O'Shaughnessy and his showdown with Gutman, Cook and Cairo. And it's where, placing justice ahead of emotion, he handed O'Shaughnessy to the cops.
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Off on their own
