A Detective’s Detective

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From Medium:

By the early 1970s, sadly little proof remained of Dashiell Hammett’s one-time employment as a Pinkerton operative beyond the word of his family. The background of his one-time service as an operative had set him apart from his hard-boiled peers, and given his stories their plausible aura of authenticity. (Pinkerton’s, for their part, would not confirm or deny his employment.) In New York literary society, and in Hollywood, Hammett had entertained with many stories about his old Pinkerton days, but after his death it became cynically fashionable with some to doubt he had even been a detective.

When David Fechheimer arrived in San Francisco in the early Sixties, it was still “Hammett’s city,” he remembered. “Men wore hats, everybody drank.” But by 1965 the city was entering its countercultural bloom; Fechheimer was a “budding flower child” and poet on his way to a literature degree at San Francisco State when he encountered the books that got him off his academic track. It was not a one-night transformation from reading The Maltese Falcon, as would be repeated in later profiles.

“We all lived hand-to-mouth then,” he said, and all were looking for work; after admiring the collection of Hammett’s other jobs listed on the backs of his novels he’d admired, Fechheimer called up Pinkerton’s San Francisco branch and began his own detecting career where the writer had finished his. While working out of the very same Pinkerton branch in San Francisco in the late 1960s, David Fechheimer became increasingly interested in the history of the man whom no one at the businesslike Flood Building seemed to remember.

He learned all the skills of sleuthing, and, later under his longtime boss Hal Lipset, quite a few tricks unknown to Hammett, before eventually going into practice himself as a San Francisco private eye. Like Hammett, he began to learn the city around him right down to its bones.

As an investigator, he noticed things: While waiting for the M car on the traffic island opposite the House of Lucky Wedding Rings, he met Albert Samuels sweeping the sidewalk, who had once employed Hammett to write jewelry ads. He got his hair cut by an old barber named Bill Sibilia, who remembered trimming Hammett’s graying pompadour and that he was a good tipper.

Fechheimer also located a woman Hammett had written poems for in San Francisco; she talked to him in whispers outside her house, having never told her husband about her romance with Hammett or that he had said she inspired Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon. He next found and interviewed Mrs. Hammett, long presumed dead by scholars at the time, then, hoping to find any of his hero’s old colleagues, he used the same method that had drawn Hammett into the agency to begin with — placing a simple newspaper ad.

Two old men answered his query: Jack Knight had been a well-traveled Pinkerton in the early twenties who never worked directly with Hammett but knew his reputation as one of the “fellows with particular ability.” The other, Phil Haultain, said he had learned to shadow from ‘Sam’ Hammett himself, and was his partner in the last months of Hammett’s career as an operative. Fechheimer went to meet Haultain in the office of his conveyor belt company in Emeryville, California in early September 1975. Their conversation remains the only eyewitness testimony about Hammett as a detective.

Link to the rest at Medium

From Tales from Hollywood & Vine:

There likely isn’t a film buff on the planet who doesn’t know – and love – the 1941 classic detective drama The Maltese Falcon starring, among others, Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre. It is the living, breathing definition of a film classic. It is also one of the very first movies both written and directed by the same person – in this case, the then 35-year old [John] Huston who made a deal with studio owner Jack Warner that he would only charge his boss a measly ten bucks for the screenplay if only he were permitted to also direct as well. What a lot of film buffs do not know is that Jack Warner actually produced two other films based on Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 novel prior to the Huston classic:

• 1931’s The Maltese Falcon, starring Ricardo Cortez as detective Sam Spade and Bebe Daniels as Ruth Wonderly,
• The 1936 tongue-in-check send up entitled Satan Met a Lady, starring Warren William as Sam Spade (here called “Ted Shane”) and Bette Davis as Ruth, here called “Valerie Purvis.” Unlike the 1931 version, which was a box-office hit, Satan Met a Lady was so bad that Bette Davis spent a lifetime trying to get it expunged from her official filmography.

Link to the rest at Tales from Hollywood & Vine

For PG, there can only be one Sam Spade.