Rare bird – An Irishwoman’s Diary on ‘The Maltese Falcon’ and Dashiell Hammett

You can still buy a Bloody Brigid cocktail in John’s Grill, Dashiell Hammett’s favourite bar in San Francisco’s edgy Tenderloin.

Named for the femme fatale of his Maltese Falcon, it's red and inappropriately sweet.

“Iconic” and “hardboiled” and “noir” are clichés minted for Hammett’s noir, which wrestles murder out of Sherlock’s parlour and kicks it down the city’s mean streets, carelessly tossing it with lying Brigid O’Shaughnessy and a priceless statuette of a black bird.

When TV tycoon Ted Turner colourised – colourised! – John Huston's black-and-white masterpiece The Maltese Falcon in 1986, Huston began a hearing on Capitol Hill with a joke: "Two producers are lost in the desert and dying of thirst. About to give up the ghost, they crawl into view of a miraculous spring of pure effervescent water, and go joyously to drink it when one says, 'No – wait. Don't drink . . .wait until I piss in it'."

Huston (late of Galway) capped: “And in my opinion both producers are members of the Turner organisation.”

Sam Spade

Huston was making a point, bitterly, that Turner was contaminating his classic. When something ain’t broke, don’t “fix” it by messing with Sam Spade.

But Huston's joke (from cine-historian Joe McBride's Book of Movie Lists) struck a nerve. By the mid-1990s, Turner gave up colourising; The Maltese Falcon is back to black.

And Turner Classical Movies have been rescreening it in glorious black-and-white for its 75th birthday in 650 cinemas throughout America, including the Tenderloin Museum.

Call it Huston’s revenge.

Every fan has a favourite line or bit: “The stuff that dreams are made of” (echoing Shakespeare) or Joel Cairo and the Fat Man. In the last scene Spade grinds his teeth, and says through them to Brigid: “I don’t care who loves who, I won’t play the sap for you.” The shot of Mary Astor’s face in the elevator going down to her ride to San Quentin is purest noir.

Spade’s creator forged his characters from his experiences as a Pinky – a private eye in Pinkerton’s Detective Agency. When Hammett found the “cool grey city of love”, he’d been demobbed from the first World War with bad lungs and was looking up Josie Dolan, the nurse he’d fallen for in hospital. He rented a room on the 300 block of Ellis, next to the gospel church Glide Memorial where Rev Cecil Williams tends a sea of needy.

“Frisco” was the wrong place to live with haemorrhaging lungs but he liked its easygoing conviviality and speakeasies (Café Dan’s on his corner had a sidewalk slide into cellars that covered over neatly when cops showed).

And the ’Loin’s crazy paving of strung-out crack whores and dealers was pristine back then. Apartments had shot up after the 1906 quake to house immigrants building the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition – a public relations show to mark the city’s recovery, complete with timely invention of the fold-down Murphy Bed.

Hammett gumshoed an infamous investigation of the day – Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle’s rape trial, which scorched headlines for months. Sent to investigate bogus charges against the silent comedian, Hammett – who once wrote “Your private detective wants to be a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself, able to get the best of anybody” – concluded he’d been framed by “corrupt newspaper elements”.

But soon Hammett was too sick to gumshoe. After collapsing in a pool of blood one day, he took his sick leave in the Main Library, perusing HL Mencken's Black Mask monthly magazine and telling Mary Jane, his toddler daughter, "I could do this." Putting his Royal typewriter on the kitchen table he gestated Spade, the Continental Op, and Nick and Nora Charles, and grew rich.

Fedora

Don Herron, a cabbie and Hammett guide, leads a band of

Falcon

fans through the ’Loin on weekly summer tours. In trusty trench, with his fedora worn low, he trails the author’s cough from Eddy and Post to the library. Once, he had a macho fan that insisted the tour all sit on a pickpocket while they awaited the police. “Sometimes I dream that I’m leading homeless and prostitutes around in my sleep.”

He owns two “black birds”. “But Accessories to Murder manufactured those babies – any fan can get one.”

Me, I’ve lived in the ‘Loin, and currently work there – teaching immigrants, I hasten to add – and don’t find it dangerous unless you’re a drug dealer, in which case you have it coming, don’t you?

Rented room

It’s an immigrant and misfits’ haven, often poignant. When I first came here, I had a Murphy Bed in a rented room next to Glide, and was tripping over Hammett’s ghost. Each one of my neighbours had been hurt by losing jobs, family, friends, no education – or were on the wrong side in some war – Yemenis, Iraqis, Latinos, Vietnamese. Some day I want to write their stories.

My advice is to watch the Falcon, stroll the 'Loin and drink Bloody Brigids, though tequila is better.

Take Herron's tour – or my pal Peter Field's Prostitution in the Tenderloin walk, which starts at 9am (when hookers sleep). Then go to multiracial Glide Church at 11am and listen to the gospel choir's rendition of Bridge Over Troubled Waters. Don't blame me if soon you're shouting hallelujah at the altar, a small browner hand in each of your giant pink ones.