“At approximately this location, Miles Archer, an associate of Sam Spade, was assassinated 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 in a cul-de-sac, not exactly the location 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 wander through Sam Spade’s neighborhood, San Franciscans are happy to pretend that Sam, and that motley crew of hawk hunters, the mysterious Miss Wonderly, oily little Joel Cairo, and the creepily cool Gutman really do. They traveled through 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 Miles’s murder; he calls a yellow cab company. The taxi drops him off “where Bush Street covered Stockton before sliding downhill into Chinatown.”
Sam Spade’s San Francisco ignores everything that postcards and that song and travelers, including myself, associate with the city. “Little cable cars don’t go up halfway to the stars” or anywhere else in the world by Sam Spade. There’s barely a feel for the hills that can turn even a stroll down the block for breakfast into a calf-stretching hike. Stockton’s “roof” from Bush Street only suggests the way this city rises and falls on 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, at the point where it collapses into the Pacific, San Francisco looks to me as if I’ve just come out of the laundry all fresh blue and white, hung out to dry in the summer sun. the morning.
But Hammett’s characters don’t have time to contemplate such beauty. After all, they’re in search of a much 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, encrusted with jewels. falcon that will consume all your ambition and energy and finally escape from all of them.
Hammett gives his characters very casual fun. Joel Cairo attends a show at the Geary Theater. 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 to walk far from his Hotel Belvedere. In its true incarnation as Bellevue, it was only a block away from Geary and Taylor. These days it’s been reborn as the Monaco, a chic “fantasy” boutique hotel where upturned Vuitton trunks serve as reception and hot-air balloons on trompe-l’œil ceilings race through fluffy clouds.
There is an occasional mention of the “thin, sticky, biting” San Francisco night 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 several hotel suites.
Dashiell Hammett worked as a detective in San Francisco for a while. 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 I ask 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 lavish 1926 building at 111 Sutter Street. The lobby and marble walls and beamed painted ceiling are more like the entrance to a Medici palace. The doorman, the maintenance man, anyone in the hallway knows this is where “Sam Spade had his office, on the fifth floor.”
In another of Hammett’s brief stage directions, he has Spade say, “Tell him to 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 and a replica of the Maltese Falcon are kept in a glass case in the entryway.
But something is missing. Sam Spade might recognize 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 short lunch break in America, are a reminder that Sam and his mink-clad ladies left another century behind.
