ON LEAVING THE GREAT MAN'S DIGS

Over a decade ago, anticipating a stay of no more than a year, I moved from a roomy if unremarkable North Beach flat on the lower (and straighter) end of San Francisco’s famed Lombard Street into a cramped downtown studio apartment located at 20 Dashiell Hammett Place. Despite having to cope with the radically reduced size of my new surroundings -- not to mention the somewhat less than stellar interior décor and overall condition of the old and weathered brick building -- I was pleased with my new home for several reasons beyond the primary one of distancing myself from a particularly difficult room-mate.

Dashiell Hammett, formerly known as Monroe Street (changed in the 1980s thanks to the efforts of poet and City Lights Book Store owner Lawrence Ferlanghetti who launched a successful campaign to re-name certain thoroughfares after prominent literary figures who’d once lived there; Mark Twain, Jack London and Jack Kerouac being among those so honored), is a one-way street, bordered on the north and south by Pine and Bush and on the east and west by Powell and Stockton. Narrow and marginally tree-lined, it offers a wonderfully centralized location that easily lends itself to Union Square, the Bay, Chinatown and North Beach. Robert Louis Stevenson once spent brief time just around the corner as did Wyatt Earp not long after Arizona and the OK Corral misunderstanding. More important though, as a longtime admirer of the so-called hardboiled school of the mystery novel -- a school created and nurtured by Hammett plus a few other now largely forgotten pulp scribblers -- I was delighted to take up residence in the very heart of Hammett country. Not only would I be living in the actual building where the then struggling young writer resided in 1926 following an adventurous stint as an operative with the famed Pinkerton Detective Agency (from which he drew meaty inspiration for his five crime novels and assorted short stories), but just around the corner and across Bush Street is Burrit Alley, the exact spot -- duly marked by a commemorative wall plaque -- where Hammett’s deadly femme fatale Brigid O’Shaughnessy drilled Miles Archer, Sam Spade’s randy partner, in the opening of Hammett’s best known book -- and by extension the classic film adaptation -- The Maltese Falcon. If this weren’t sufficient connection with the author, there is also the long-standing Dashiell Hammett Walking Tour, a regular pedestrian odyssey that on weekends winds itself through the city back streets seeking the writer’s many haunts -- my doorstep included -- where both locals and tourists from around the world listen to tales of the author’s San Francisco days.

During my first year at 20 Dashiell Hammett I lived in number 9, just at the top of the heavily trodden carpeted landing on the second floor. My space, one of the smallest in the twenty-two unit building, was criminally miniscule with not much more than a closet space for a kitchen and an even more abbreviated area for a bathroom (no shower, just a deep tub and shallow sink with such acutely rounded fixtures as to render them incapable of supporting even the smallest bar of soap or disposable razor). In the main room, some fifty square feet of it, I somehow managed, following a painful purging of possessions, to wedge, pack and pile together my assorted books, tapes and CDs, VCR and television. For air and marginal light there was one large, permanently stained window replete with a thin, nearly transparent muslin membrane that partially masked seedy pull-down blinds. Suffocating heat was provided courtesy of an antiquated gunmetal gray floor heater that in the best tradition of the asthmatic species so spit and clanked throughout the evening that I eventually dismantled the thing, preferring the cold to the nocturnal racket.

The building’s manager at the time was Tim, a tall, slightly goateed specimen who seemed, given his anachronistic lingo and laid-back demeanor, to have been unduly influenced by beatnik trappings of the 1950s but who, I would later learn, had experienced his share of Viet Nam firefights. With little hesitation, Tim let me know that I should probably be charged a higher rate for Number 9 since, according to the research he’d done on the subject, I would actually be living in Hammett’s old studio. Needless to say, I was extremely excited by this remarkable disclosure. While those who chronicle the history of detective fiction seem to be unified in the belief that Hammett did no serious writing during his tour of duty at 20 Monroe Street (he did churn out material at other S.F. apartments he later leased, one on Post Street, as an example), the fact that I would be living in the same room where the embryonic seeds for the creation of what would ultimately become the uncompromising Spade, the chunky and nameless Continental Op and that unforgettably glib and sardonic couple Nick and Nora Charles (of Thin Man fame) were surely taking root in Hammett’s chronically gin-pickled brain provided me with a quirky psychological boost. For one who had lived much of his thirty-nine years in bookish pursuits and who too had spent a great deal of time -- most of it without critical or financial reward -- cranking out stories and plays, a curious sense of associative conceit set in with this move. At least, if nothing else, I was now living where a significant literary figure had once hung his hat and harbored his own stash of insecurities and dark artistic misgivings. I was no longer alone with my lack of confidence and writer’s block. I had company now. I had Hammett.

Despite its advanced age (built in 1912) and lack of attention on the part of the conspicuously absentee owner to its deteriorating state, 20 Dashiell Hammett quickly became a cozy nook for me, an ideal refuge for sustained cocooning and an inviting and protective nest to return to at the end of a long work day. I particularly enjoyed September and October evenings when the subtle changes of the California seasons began to be felt and the late afternoon light turned soft and muted. Equally pleasing was coming in from a damp bay fog, pausing in the modest lobby with its blotchy blood red and black wallpaper and envisioning the young near skeletal Hammett in stained fedora and pinstripe suit, perhaps with a .38 caliber tucked just beneath the breast pocket for easy access, making his way up the wobbly staircase in search of a bottle or a dame. With me trailing right behind, of course.

On many such nights, surrendering with enthusiasm to the old-fashioned, moody and slightly unsavory atmosphere of the place, I would climb out of my lumpy Murphy bed and stare out the window at the Marilyn Arms, a seedy rooming house located directly across the street and which seemed in many ways just the sort of place Hammett might have been familiar with during his active Pinkerton days. Hookers, drug addicts, the homeless, malcontents and just night crazies howling at the moon were permanent fixtures as they zigzagged up the gradual incline in search of a bed for a night or week at the Marilyn. Sipping cheap scotch in honor of Hammett, my trenchcoat strategically dripping from the front door within plain sight, knowing that my own untested snub-nosed revolver was just a few feet away tucked beneath the boxers in my underwear drawer, I delighted in the debauchery and human wreckage that often exploded in colorful and occasionally violent episodes right before my eyes -- the bloody and deadly knifefight one Sunday night in the Marilyn lobby, a jilted lover in a sniper’s perch who the police saved me from one evening as I walked home from a favorite local watering hole, a gang of some dozen teenage thugs who efficiently mugged a man just below my window on Christmas Eve -- dramatic and spontaneous events far removed from the boredom and routine of my day job as a newsletter editor at a small labor union. Other times, lying at night in the grainy darkness, I would think of Hammett so many years before in the same room working on a bottle or better yet, Spade or the Op joining the party (Nick and Nora Charles wouldn’t have set foot in the dump unless there was a double martini waiting for them and a bowl of milk for their mutt Asta), washing away their troubles, preparing to go out on a Chinatown tail or waiting for some slinky, bedroom-eyed vixen, who would ultimately betray them, to come in through the door. Oh, I had it bad, this film noir/hardboiled alternate universe. Once I had closed my apartment door behind me there was no rap music in the world, no dot.commers, cell phones or rollerbladers. There was just San Francisco eighty years ago with Hammett and me quietly keeping an eye on things through the thick bay mist.

Not surprisingly then, given this growing preoccupation with the great man and my tenuous connection to him, his name began to pop up with great frequency during conversations, the mention of his famous moniker intended as a sort of springboard or catalyst on my part to spice up otherwise dull chit chat, particularly with literary minded members of the opposite sex who I hoped might be interested in visiting this holy shrine. I soon learned, however, that the name Dashiell Hammett no longer resonated with as many modern readers as I would have hoped. There were so many misfires, strikeouts and non-reactions when I referenced his name that I recall thinking one night after throwing it in the face of a leggy brunette working on her third stinger at Tosca’s Café on Columbus, that I would probably have fared better had I said that I lived in Marcia Muller or Sue Grafton’s old apartments. Even cab drivers -- who you’d have thought would have known better (although to be honest, the old fashioned, wise-cracking, glib and well-read cab driver of pulp mythology and classic Warner Brother’s crime films is fairly an anachronistic character these days) -- pizza deliverymen and cable installers were totally immune to the fame of the name and when giving directions, after many instances of frustration and disappointment, I finally called it quits. "It’s a block from the Stockton Tunnel" was all they eventually got out of me.

"Yeah, but how do you spell that name, that dashal with a d?"

Still for all my failure at dangling the Hammett hook, I was still happy with my apartment and gave no thought to moving. Rents were increasing in the mid ‘90s, the locale for a career pedestrian such as myself couldn’t have been bettered, the walls were thick enough to keep out unwanted voices and music, and the vast majority of my fellow tenants -- with the exception of a future suicide victim on the second floor who played rap at full volume before downing a bottle of pills only two days into his occupancy -- polite and non-intrusive. In the entire decade that I spent at 20 Dashiell Hammett and regardless of what time I was out the door on the way to work in the morning, I never once bumped into a single fellow tenant. Yet, for all the anonymity, I never viewed 20 Dashiell Hammett as unfriendly, only blissfully quiet and subdued. It was simply a very intimate and secluded place for private people, a kind of sanctuary for those who liked nothing more than to fade into their rooms and be left alone.

Two years into my occupancy a slightly larger studio -- one that actually allowed one to stand in the middle of the room, arms outstretched, and not touch a single smoke-stained wall -- became available. Consequently Jack, the new manager with whom I soon became staunch drinking buddies, let me swap rooms for slightly higher rent.

Jack, who knew his way around classic mysteries himself (though having an almost pathological admiration for Inspector Morse which I only came to appreciate years later) was quick to comment on the change when I admitted slight disappointment at leaving Hammett’s rooms. "Actually, Tim got it all wrong. All available evidence points to him living in your new rooms." I didn’t know what the evidence was, didn’t ask, didn’t investigate. I just felt enormous relief as I moved my things, my books and records and barbells, my trenchcoat and .38 and George Foreman grill and decrepit IBM computer upstairs and spent the next eight years in these new digs which, despite continual insistence from local Hammett aficionados that no one truly knew which room had been his, I very happily and without question now accepted as the Great Man’s actual quarters. No matter what any of the experts or biographers said, I knew I felt Hammett’s presence in my room (and possibly even on occasion his chain-smoking, much put upon mistress/playwright Lillian Hellman) as I woke in the darkness to hear the groans of the furnace and the creaking of distant floorboards, as I mixed a stiff one or stepped from the tub onto the floor where he’d probably lain in a pool of tuberculin spit while battling an attack. Let the writers, tour guides, the specialists and the know-it-alls think what they would, I knew. During these years I even sold a few articles, a story here and there, but the big novel that I thought Hammett might inspire never came, not that it was any of his fault. I had no regrets, no resentment. He had done his best by me.

Some years later -- and most unexpectedly after a twenty year search --I found, at the advanced age of forty-four, the love of my life—a breathtakingly wonderful, understanding, sexy and undeniably Irish lass who would always prefer Joyce and Yeats to Hammett and Raymond Chandler, but I learned to love her anyway. She even put up with the confines of Hammett’s studio for much too long as we struggled with the Murphy bed, with cooking breakfast in the micro kitchen or trying to navigate around each other in the bathroom. Any sane woman would have bolted after one look at the place. We finally made plans to move and that we did, across town to a place with a real kitchen and bed and so far not a murder and only a single mugging in sight.

For a while, perhaps a month, I missed 20 Dashiell Hammett. I had lived in that cramped little studio longer than any other place in my life save the boyhood home in the East Bay where I first saw Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon on television in the 1950s. I missed the creaky staircase, the pool of white light on the second floor carpet, the tomb-like sanctity of the basement laundry area, waking in my apartment in the inky darkness and thinking about Hammett. But the sadness didn’t linger long because on reflection 20 Dashiell Hammett was really no longer the place I had known in the early years of my residence. The neighborhood had cleaned itself up somewhat and while there were still occasional moments worthy of a Cops episode, it had grown noticeably tamer. Even the Marilyn Arms had become a shadow of its gloriously seedy past with only the rarest of nocturnal rowdies disrupting the night. As far as the inhabitants of 20 Dashiell Hammett were concerned a few old timers had stayed on, my friend Jinny for instance who played drums in the basement, Karl, my next door neighbor, a former jazz saxophonist now struggling with MS, Paul who sang in the city’s opera chorus, Reeves down the hall who was trying to write a novel when bicycling didn’t get in the way, and of course Jack who I still drop by to share a drink (or four) and talk about the Kennedy assassination, the Zulu Wars, or the poetry of Wilfred Owens with. But for the record, where booksellers, painters, former CIA operatives, singers and professional con artists once hunkered down to savor the sanctuary of the place there now resides a predictable urban repository of dot.commer cell phone mainliners, internet advertising reps, computer pod people of every tedious sort, plus a few transparent Yuppie drug dealers. Hammett, I am quite certain, would have had them all for breakfast before nine and still had room for a second cup of coffee, spiked, of course. I sure miss the guy though. For a few years there, we were quite a team.

Copyright© 2004 Bruce Dettman

BRUCE DETTMAN is a San Francisco-based writer whose work has appeared in Military History, True West, Filmfax, Scarlet Street and Emmy. He is also the co-author of "Hoagy" a play on the life of composer Hoagy Carmichael.
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