Dashiell Hammett

Your choices in San Francisco hotels are overwhelming. The prices can be too. So during our staff visit to the City by the Bay, we looked for reasonably priced hotels that had charm, location or both. We came back with 14 ideas on places to bed down. It's not a complete list, but it is eclectic, like the city itself. Mystic Hotel. This property, which opened in April, stands on a tunnel-adjacent block of Stockton Street that you'll never see on a picture postcard, yet it has style, as do the Burritt Tavern bar and restaurant downstairs.

Is the surest way to literary success the pairing of two cultural masters? There's a pile of books on my desk that say, yes, it is. They total two novels, one history and one set of correspondence. The subjects are two literary figures who were a couple, two literary figures whose relationship is imaginary, a musical master and his wife, and two literary lions writing to one another. These books are brought together by titles that are, in most instances, a set of paired names.

A previously unpublished short story by the late crime writer Dashiell Hammett will appear in the Strand Magazine this week, its managing editor, Andrew Gulli, said Tuesday. But 14 other stories that he discovered while researching the author at the University of Texas will remain unseen, he said, because Hammett's estate decided not to publish them. "So I Shot Him" revolves around the character named Rainey who challenges a man to overcome his irrational fear of water, with surprising consequences.

A previously unpublished short story by the late crime writer Dashiell Hammett will appear in the Strand Magazine this week, its managing editor, Andrew Gulli, said Tuesday. But 14 other stories that he discovered while researching the author at the University of Texas will remain unseen, he said, because Hammett's estate decided not to publish them. "So I Shot Him" revolves around the character named Rainey who challenges a man to overcome his irrational fear of water, with surprising consequences.

Sixty years after its initial publication, "The Maltese Falcon" remains one of the most skillfully written detective novels in the history of the genre. As few modern readers will be able to erase the images from the classic 1941 film, it's interesting to contrast the Dashiell Hammett and John Huston versions of the characters.

"That strange Marylander" is what Henry Louis Mencken ("the sage of Baltimore") called Samuel Dashiell Hammett, who was born in the Old Line State in 1894, 45 years after Edgar Allan Poe died there. Like Poe, Hammett grew up in an America still fashioning its social and cultural identity from raw materials. And like Poe, inventor of the detective story, Hammett would write tales that held not only the shocks and thrills of entertainment but also the lights and shadows of art.

The weather looked promising as the plane descended into Oakland International Airport: low overcast, gusty, needle-cold, flat gray. Just the sort of gloom that would chase Sam Spade out into the alleys and shadows of the city, looking for trouble. I wasn't looking for trouble. I was looking for Spade. And his creator, writer Dashiell Hammett.

"Hammett was the ace performer," wrote Raymond Chandler in his frequently quoted 1944 essay, "The Simple Art of Murder." "He did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before." Chandler's appraisal of Dashiell Hammett's influence on American crime fiction is unassailable.

For a collection of the correspondence of my father, Dashiell Hammett, author of "The Maltese Falcon," we would appreciate photocopies of any letters, postcards or telegrams. JOSEPHINE HAMMETT MARSHALL and DON HERRON, P.O. BOX 982, GLEN ELLEN, CA 95442-0982 For a book I am writing on the Women's Army Corps during World War II, I'd appreciate letters, tapes or phone calls from women who served. I'd also like to hear from you if you have recollections of a relative who served.

These days, Ireland sometimes seems to export writers the way it once did priests. Not least among them is a fine group of first-water crime novelists, including the redoubtable John Banville writing under the pseudonym Benjamin Black. Declan Hughes also comes to the genre from a more elevated literary angle — in his case, a successful career as a playwright and screenwriter that included a stint as artistic director of the well-regarded Rough Magic Theatre Company, which he co-founded, and a writerly association with the Abbey Theatre.

Writing a contemporary follow-up to a classic novel is either an act of bravery or chutzpah -- or perhaps both. One must contend with vociferous readers who consider the classic so sacrosanct they deem any new work heretical. In the last few months alone, the news of impending sequels to A.A.

Call in the coppers, get Sam Spade on the case: The Maltese Falcon's gone again. In a missing-bird caper reminiscent of the one that perplexed Dashiell Hammett's fictional sleuth, the owner of a landmark restaurant here is offering 25 Gs ($25,000) for a replica of the famed Maltese Falcon swiped from a locked display case over the weekend.

JUST in case books written by women haven't been shoehorned into enough marketing categories, there's a new one, coined in the Washington Post. So-called pink mysteries are books by women that feature a female protagonist (miserable love life optional) who solves crimes while decked out in designer heels and expensive manicures. No hard-boiled detectives in trench coats please!

"That strange Marylander" is what Henry Louis Mencken ("the sage of Baltimore") called Samuel Dashiell Hammett, who was born in the Old Line State in 1894, 45 years after Edgar Allan Poe died there. Like Poe, Hammett grew up in an America still fashioning its social and cultural identity from raw materials. And like Poe, inventor of the detective story, Hammett would write tales that held not only the shocks and thrills of entertainment but also the lights and shadows of art.

People have been talking in one way or another about the black bird -- ex-detective Dashiell Hammett's third and classic novel, "The Maltese Falcon" -- ever since its original serial publication in Black Mask magazine in 1929. As a 1930 Knopf hardcover, the book was an immediate bestseller, going through seven printings that year. The "Falcon," a masterpiece of American hard-boiled writing, revolutionized the detective novel, and its merit as literature was seen from the first by critics.

A few years ago, working on a piece about the school of hard-boiled detective fiction, I reread Dashiell Hammett's "The Thin Man" for the first time in 15 years and was shocked. The wise-cracking private eyes Nick and Nora Charles of my memory had been replaced by a pair of cynical, hard-drinking shrews who seemed at least as unsavory as the characters they were trying to put in jail.

Call in the coppers, get Sam Spade on the case: The Maltese Falcon's gone again. In a missing-bird caper reminiscent of the one that perplexed Dashiell Hammett's fictional sleuth, the owner of a landmark restaurant here is offering 25 Gs ($25,000) for a replica of the famed Maltese Falcon swiped from a locked display case over the weekend.

Often called the father of "hard-boiled" crime fiction, Dashiell Hammett wrote such classics as "The Maltese Falcon" and "The Thin Man" during the 1920s and '30s, creating iconic characters Sam Spade and Nick and Nora Charles. A longtime companion of playwright Lillian Hellman, Hammett was jailed briefly during the McCarthy era for refusing to answer questions regarding left-wing group the Civil Rights Congress.

"Hammett was the ace performer," wrote Raymond Chandler in his frequently quoted 1944 essay, "The Simple Art of Murder." "He did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before." Chandler's appraisal of Dashiell Hammett's influence on American crime fiction is unassailable.