Free The Lost Detective by Nathan Ward

his 1981 landmark life Shadow Man , Layman has continued to produce books that deepen people’s readings of the novels and stories, and with Hammett’s granddaughter Julie M. Rivett, he has edited Hammett’s letters and brought out collections of his screenplays and unpublishedstories that challenge the limited view of Hammett left us by Lillian Hellman.
    Julie Rivett was also patient with my occasional odd questions, starting with my first, highly specific query: which of Hammett’s hands bore the famous imbedded knifepoint? (The exact location was never specified in the biographies.) Julie relayed the question to her mother, Hammett’s younger daughter, Jo, author of Hammett: A Daughter Remembers . When Jo answered that she was pretty certain the knifepoint had been on his left hand, the confirmation brought the scar out of the realm of legend for me, as if she had pulled a smoke ring from the air.
    A number of Hammett experts I met through the generosity of Don Herron, who is best known as the Fedora’d host of the long-running Dashiell Hammett Tour, but whose lively blog, Up and Down These Mean Streets , functions as a kind of hot-stove league for Hammett fans, featuring occasional guest lecturers such as the literary researcher Terry Zobeck. In 2012, Terry typed Hammett’s name into a Brooklyn historical search engine called Fultonhistory.com, which surprised him by hiccupping up a long-forgotten interview Hammett did with the Brooklyn Daily Eagle Magazine in October 1929, just after he had moved to New York. This interview was unknown to recent biographers, and I have made generous use of it here.
    Don Herron took me around San Francisco, even got me into the 891 Post Street studio where The Maltese Falcon was written, and shared his network of similarly helpful Hammett fans, including Bill Arney, who described his experience living with the spirit of Hammett’s novel in the Maltese Falcon apartment; and Mitch Soekland, who gave me the tour onbehalf of its gracious current renter, the writer Robert Mailer Anderson. Vince Emery, who has devoted an entire publishing company to the study and enjoyment of Hammett (Vince Emery Productions/Ace Performer Collection) gave me some helpful advice on researching tuberculosis in Hammett’s time and information on his op career in general.
    I am extremely grateful to the San Francisco detective and Hammett scholar David Fechheimer for his continuing insights into his elusive hero, and for his original interviews, which have proved so essential to anyone’s idea of Hammett. The Hammett medical file, now missing from every possible branch of the Veterans’ Administration, was fortunately copied by Fechheimer in the summer of 1976, after he was loaned it by a contact who brought it to dinner one night. Fechheimer read the whole filched document into his tape recorder, and then, after abandoning plans for his own Hammett book, sent the tape and transcript off to Richard Layman, who graciously shared it with me. So much that appears in each Hammett biography of the last four decades comes from the sleuthing of Fechheimer published in the Hammett-themed November 4, 1975 issue of Francis Ford Coppola’s City of San Francisco magazine. I hope that if he ever retires from detecting, Fechheimer will finally write his own book.
    My friend Allen Barra, a writer whose deep pockets of expertise run from gunslingers and gangsters to Alabama football and Albert Camus, is also a longtime Hammett man, and supplied his short, helpful history of the various film incarnations of Red Harvest —from Roadhouse Nights to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly ; Miller’s Crossing (which splits the difference between Red Harvest and The Glass Key ); and Deadwood .
    This project had many pleasures, chiefly the reading of the books themselves and touring Hammett’s San Francisco, but also my time spent at the Pinkerton archive of the Library of Congress in Washington, where for days at a time I was