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Committed for Better Business

“Around this location, Miles Archer, partner of Sam Spade, was murdered by Brigid O’Shaughnessy.” So says a plaque on a building at the corner of Burritt Alley and Bush Street in downtown San Francisco. This is a nice residential block on a cul-de-sac, not exactly the place for a murder, but of course this murder only happened in the pages of Dashiell Hammett’s “Maltese Falcon.”

As I’ll discover as I tour Sam Spade’s neighborhood, San Franciscans are happy to pretend that Sam and that motley crew of falcon hunters, the mysterious Miss Wonderly, oily little Joel Cairo, and the creepily cool Gutman really traveled. by the city. blocks around Union Square in his search for the shiny black bird.

This claim requires some effort because Dashiell Hammett was not given to scenario building. The most detailed description in The Maltese Falcon consists of one sentence: Spade has received the call informing him of the murder of Miles; he calls a yellow cab company. The cab drops you “where Bush Street covered Stockton before gliding downhill toward Chinatown.”

Sam Spade’s San Francisco ignores everything that postcards and that song and travelers, including me, associate with the city. “Little Cable Cars Don’t Go Halfway Up to the Stars” or anywhere else in the world of Sam Spade. There’s hardly a sense of the hills that can turn even a walk around the block for breakfast into a calf-stretching hike. Stockton’s “roof” from Bush Street only suggests the way this city climbs up and down Nob Hill, Russian Hill, Telegraph Hill – the three heights that separate Sam Spade from a blue ocean, an orange bridge and a beautiful bay that he never seems to see.

As I walk through the world of Sam Spade, I realize how small it is. This is dark and busy San Francisco, the part that turns its back on all the blue sea and sky and all those pastel-painted, gabled Victorian houses that cling so optimistically to those cruel hills. As I ride the Hyde Street cable car from Nob to Russian Hill, where it tumbles down into the Pacific, San Francisco looks to me as if it just came out of the laundry all fresh, blue and white, hanging to dry in the summer sun. the morning.

But Hammett’s characters don’t have time to contemplate such beauty. After all, they’re looking for a far more elusive beauty: “the stuff dreams are made of,” as Bogart said in the movie (but Hammett didn’t in the book): solid gold enameled black, jewel encrusted. falcon that will consume all the ambition and energy of him and finally he will escape from all of them.

Hammett gives his characters very occasional amusement. Joel Cairo attends a show at the Geary Theatre. They currently exhibit Moliere’s Misanthrope; A Christmas carol is announced for the holidays. It’s hard to imagine Joel Cairo attending any of them. He wouldn’t have had far to walk from his Belvedere Hotel. In the true incarnation of him as Bellevue, he was just a block from Geary and Taylor. These days it has been reborn as the Monaco, a chic “fantasy” boutique hotel where upturned Vuitton trunks serve as the reception desk and hot air balloons on trompe l’oeil rooftops race through fluffy clouds.

There is an occasional mention of San Francisco’s “thin, sticky, penetrating” nighttime fog, but for the most part, Falcon’s characters move through a world of interiors: Sam’s office, his apartment, the Brigid’s apartment and various hotel suites.

Dashiell Hammett worked for a while as a detective in San Francisco. He moved around a lot but lived for a while at 891 Post Street and that’s where he put Sam Spade’s apartment. When he asks a restaurant waiter if it’s a safe area to visit at night, he shrugs and says, “It’s a bit like a gay ghetto after dark…”.

Hammett gave Spade an office in a splendid 1926 building at 111 Sutter Street. The lobby and marble walls and beamed painted ceiling look more like the entrance to a Medici palace. The doorman, the maintenance man, anyone in the hallway knows that this is where “Sam Spade had his office, on the fifth floor.”

In another of Hammett’s brief stage directions, he has Spade say, “Have him pick me up at John’s, Ellis Street.” And there, the detective asks the waiter to rush his order of “chops, baked potato and sliced ​​tomatoes.” In 1997, John’s Grill was declared a National Literary Landmark. For $29, a visitor can still order those chops. If they do, they should try eating them in the upstairs dining room, where Hammett’s books are kept and a replica of the Maltese Falcon in a display case in the entryway.

But something is missing. Sam Spade might know the look of the place, but probably not the smell. There is no smoke. And the smokers lurking outside his office building in Sutter, sneaking a smoke during a brief lunch break in America, are a reminder that Sam and his mink-clad ladies were left behind by another century.

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