Remedial's the Best
"You'll have to hock them," he said and held out his hand. "The Remedial's the best place -- Mission and Fifth."
Thus
Sam Spade enjoins Brigid O'Shaughnessy to pawn her jewelry to raise spend
ing money after he takes all her cash in
The Maltese Falcon.
In Joe Gore's prequel to the
Falcon,
Spade and Archer, Remedial is mentioned again:
At 8:30 Monday morning Sam Spade bounded up the stairs to his office above Remedial Loans on Mission Street whistling "Gut Bucket Blues" slightly off-key.
Later, Spade moved into a better building downtown, but Remedial--renamed the Provident Loan Association in 1951--is still there on Mission, and as the
San Francisco Chronicle explains, unfortunately still has a role to play in today's troubled economy.
Check out the full history of the pawnshop on their
website.
Sleeping the Big Sleep?
Given that PI protagonist Philip Marlowe explains that "the big sleep" is a synonym for death in Raymond Chandler's famous novel of the same name, you've got to wonder about the decision to give a British
hotel the same moniker.
The fact that John Malkovich is an investor in the chain, and "
is an ardent supporter of the death penalty," does nothing to add to my desire to check in for a night.
We Got Yer Popular Culture Here...
I've had over 300 hits for this picture of
Valerie Bertinelli on my Flickr account in the two days since
People magazine came out with a cover
photo of her in a bikini on the cover.
I took the picture last year at the
Los Angeles Times Festival of Books and didn't even know who she was when I snapped it. I had simply followed
the longest line of people waiting to get a signature from an author to see who was at the other end of it.
Ray Bradbury, on the other hand, only had about three people vying to get a signature...
The Dashiell Hammett Tour
My review of Don Herron's
The Dashiell Hammett Tour: Thirtieth Anniversary Guidebook is up on
The Rap Sheet. Check out the post
here.
And to whet your appetite for the review and the tour, here from a scan of the
1922 San Francisco City Directory is the listing for Dashiell Hammett and his wife Josephine in their first San Francisco residence at
620 Eddy Street.
And here is an ad for the
Pinkerton Detective Agency from the 1920 directory.
Pinkerton is, of course, the famous detective agency where Hammett worked when he first moved to the city.
The Big Wake-Up: Cover Six
Nothing like some severed baby doll heads to keep you up at night.
Here's the next competitor in the mock cover contest for my forthcoming novel,
The Big Wake-Up from
Bleak House Books.
Opinions in the post comments are welcome, as well as in the
Flickr photo set I've put together for all the designs.
Labels: Book Cover
Subdued Magic
I'd like to introduce you to the man who is writing the latest (and hopefully greatest)
Raymond Chandler biography:
Tom Williams. As you'll see, Tom is from the UK, which is entirely appropriate since Chandler's parents were of Irish/English stock, and although Chandler was born in Chicago, Illinois, he grew up and was educated in the UK.
Tom's book is due to be published in the UK by
Aurum Press in 2010 and the working title is
Subdued Magic: A Life of Raymond Chandler. Hopefully a US publisher will also be picking up the title.
He's has been blogging about the process of researching and writing the book
here, and he is currently ensconced at the
Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections at UCLA, which I wrote about in an
earlier post.
He happened across my blog as result of Google searches for
Black Mask magazine cover images and was kind enough to write and introduce himself.
You can check out one of Tom's reviews of crime fiction for the London
Observer here. Even from that small sample, you can already tell he knows his Chandler!
Return to the House of Shields
Way back when I was blogging about my novel
Candy from Strangers, I
wrote about the House of Shields bar where the first and last scenes of the book take place.
Now, in a case of life imitating fiction, the bar has posted some of the research I did on its history in the
about section of the bar website, along with a link to the
KQED podcast of
Bill Arney reading the opening chapter of
Candy. Curious what happens in the scene? Well, it's not giving too much away to say that Chris Duckworth, the sidekick of my private eye protagonist August Riordan, starts a bar fight with sailors who are in town for Fleet Week. You'll have to listen to find out exactly how he sets them off.
Enter the Mongoose
I'm participating in an anthology that will be published in 2009, brought to you by
Mongoose Press, who describe themselves as:
a new American publisher of chess books. Our aim is to produce great books that might not be seen elsewhere, drawing on the masters and authors of Eastern Europe.
Huh? How do I fit into that picture?
Well, it turns out that the anthology is a chess
fiction anthology and features such heavyweights as
Ronan Bennett,
Stephen Carter and
Katherine Neville, all authors who have produced well-regarded novels featuring chess themes.
My entree? My first novel,
The Immortal Game, is about the theft of chess software (as well as bondage & discipline, dominatrices and a few other oddments).
The story I contributed is a Sherlock Holmes pastiche which marks the first time Holmes competes at the chess board. (There are other things Holmes does for the first time in the story, but I won't delve into those now.)
For more information on the anthology and the full line up of authors, check out
this posting by anthology editor Howard Goldowsky.
Chandler Manuscript Page
Along with the
Bodleian Library at Oxford, the
Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections at UCLA has the largest collection of
Raymond Chandler papers.
Now UCLA is hosting an
exhibit featuring a sample of artifacts from their collection. Included in the exhibit are manuscript pages from Chandler's
Playback, the last novel he completed before he died.
Although I haven't had the opportunity to visit the exhibit, I'm particularly pleased to see the scan UCLA posted of page 6 of the manuscript.
As I described in my article, "
Writing The Long Goodbye," Chandler typed his manuscripts on half sheets, oriented 5.5 inches in width and 8.5 inches in length like a small portrait page. The rationale for this was to limit the amount of retyping required if Chandler elected to rewrite something on a page.
Due to restrictions placed on the Oxford collection by the Chandler estate, I wasn't able to duplicate any of the draft manuscript pages from
The Long Goodbye for my article, but the UCLA page provides a great example--although it appears Chandler switched from his usual yellow paper to blue for his last novel.
16 Random Things About Me
After being tagged by several fellow writers and failing to respond, here--finally--is my entry for the "16 Random Things" meme that's been making the rounds on Facebook and crime fiction blogs. (Yes, I know, it's old news at this point.)
First, the obligatory recitation of the rules:
Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 16 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 16 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.
Then, the "things:"
1. I was accepted for admission to West Point after being
nominated by
Senator Barry Goldwater, but elected not to attend. I nearly failed the physical exam because I'd never had blood drawn before and almost fainted: not exactly the "right stuff" for a career in the military.
2. My mother's grandfather fought in the Civil War--for the South.
3. I'm part
Choctaw Indian and would be eligible for membership in the tribe if I applied. My sister is a card-carrying member.
4. Like
Madonna, I eat a bowl of blueberries every morning. I don't have mine specially flown in from Canada, though.
5. As a gag for an old girl friend, I once created a character dubbed, "Thaddaeus, King of the Sea Sponges." I made him out of an old sponge and the non-potato pieces of a
Mr. Potato Head. I am convinced that the creators of
Sponge Bob Square Pants stole my idea.
6. As another gag for the same old girl friend, I dressed as Thaddeus and handed out flyers about her to people who were leaving a subway (
BART) station.
7. As an undergrad at Stanford, I took a graduate seminar on the Soviet Union co-taught by
Alexander Dallin and Condoleezza Rice. I believe Rice was doing post-doctorate work at the time and I had no idea who she was.
8. My mother's uncle was
shot and killed by the Sheriff of Silver City, New Mexico. I have his (my great uncle's) gold watch on my mantle.
9. The closest I ever came to being killed was when I was changing the (large) back tire of a tractor on my grandfather's ranch. The axle of the tractor slipped off the jack while I was working underneath it. Fortunately, I had also chained the axle to the branch of a tree and it didn't drop
all the way to the ground--just a few inches from my nose.
10. Another near death experience occurred in grade school when my friend and I decided to test out some homemade diving equipment in his family pool. Said equipment consisted of tire chains wrapped around my feet to insure descent to the bottom and a plastic bucket held over my head to supply (a limited quantity of) air. The dropping to the bottom part worked fine, but I lost my grip on the bucket almost immediately after jumping into the pool.
11. For my first and only date with her, I took the head cheerleader and home coming queen of my class to my senior prom in high school. When I called to ask her out, she said, "Mark who?"after I identfied myself. At the end of the evening, I was too flustered to even try to kiss her goodnight.
12. Later in life, a friend fixed me up with a former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader and I did just as well.
13. I do an excellent imitation of Tom Shane,
your friend in the diamond business, particularly when uttering the phrase, "ladies' tennis bracelets."
14. I bought my wife's wedding ring from Tom ... although I'm worried about the lifetime guarantee since
he just declared Chapter 11.
15. My first car was a 1964 1/2 Ford Mustang that my dad bought from a used car dealer for $800. It was supposed to have three forward gears, but sometimes they all went backwards.
16. I have been known to make and wear very elaborate Halloween costumes, including a Mr. Spock getup and a Saturday Night Live Killer Bee. The only time someone who worked for me stole something was when a housekeeper appropriated one of my Ghostbusters suits (complete with
Proton Pack).
Although I'm supposed to tag 16 more people to continue the chain, as a special favor to the few friends that read this blog, I won't.
Hammett and Spillane in LIFE
Google recently
digitized the LIFE Magazine photo archive and cataloged the results in the their Image Search facility.
For hard boiled mystery fans, there are more than a few gems to discover. Follow this
link, and see photos of an aged, but defiant,
Dashiell Hammett in front of Sen.
Joseph McCarthy's Senate Investigating Committee on Communism.
Or try your luck with this
one, and find pictures of a surprisingly young-looking
Mickey Spillane being equally defiant in the face of unfavorable reviews.
Photo credits: Hank Walker, 1953, and Peter Stackpole, 1952.
