It's hard not to trip over Samuel Dashiell Hammett's ghost in this town, to feel his lean, mean presence 80 years after he arrived in San Francisco's Tenderloin. When the slumming angel of Sam Spade fame was demobbed from the Great War with bad lungs, he'd landed an assignment for Pinkerton's as private investigator.
He was also looking up an Irish nurse he'd fallen for in hospital, Josie Dolan. He found a cheap room on the 300 block of Ellis, next door to Cecil Williams' Glide Memorial Church, and started his daily diet of pork chops, tomatoes and baked potato at number 63 in John's Grill.
Back then he got change from a dollar. John's Grill still serves "Sam Spade's Chops" - now $25.95 - and "Bloody Brigids", a lethal $10 vodka, pineapple, lime and grenadine Micky Finn concocted by the California Historical Society and named for Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon, and served to aficionados by owner John Constin in the dim-lit upstairs room, where the Maltese Falcon invigilates a gallery of old photos of the hard-boozing womaniser.
Not that Hammett drank "Bloody Brigids." His original Brigid was modelled upon Peggy O'Toole, a secretary Hammett met at Samuels' Jewelers, and romanced at Li Po's in Chinatown; but like most of the Tenderloin, he preferred slugging Wild Turkey straight from a bottle.
The "Loin" and its human crazy-paving of druggies and pimps and hookers and transvestites was cleaner then, its brand-new apartments shooting up after the 1906 quake, ready to house the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition arrivals. Hammett was employed in the day's most famous investigations, including the Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle rape trial that raged across William Randolph Hearst's front pages. Sent to check the Saint Francis Hotel crime scene, Hammett - who once said "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 the comedian had been framed by "corrupt newspaper elements". The Saint Francis is the original St Mark's of The Maltese Falcon, and a block away is the plaque commemorating where Brigid puts "a bullet clean through his pump".
Foggy San Francisco was the wrong place for haemorrhaging lungs, but Hammett liked it anyway. By July he'd married his Josie in St Mary's, found a $45 per month apartment at 620 Eddy, and was writing bad poetry that nobody liked. In October 1921, their daughter Mary Jane was born. But Hammett was too sick to gumshoe, and after he'd begun writing ads for Samuels' instead, he collapsed in a pool of blood one day, and wound up sitting in the Old Main Library, perusing H.L. Mencken's Black Mask crime magazine and telling baby Mary Jane, "I can write better". He put his trusty Royal on the diningroom table and created the Continental Op and Sam Spade, becoming the man who wrestled "detective fiction away from Sherlock Holmes and dropped it into the gutter", in the words of ex-cabby Don Herron, who guided Hammett aficionados through the Tenderloin on Saturday walking tours for 25 years.
In his trusty trench, fedora yanked low, Herron traces the budding author's cough down to John's Grill. The blocks where Hammett lived are hardly changed, including the 811 Post apartment where Spade put his teeth together and said to Brigid, "I won't play the sap for you". But John's Grill is first stop.
Once, Herron had a macho fan who insisted on making the tour sit on a pickpocket while waiting for the police. "Sometimes I dream that I'm leading a group of homeless and prostitutes on the Hammett tour around in my sleep." By the time Hammett left the Tenderloin for Hollywood and Lillian Hellman, he'd done his life's work and he never wrote again.
Don Herron's Saturday tours begin at noon outside the Main Library, May-October. His website is www.donherron.com