Detective novel san francisco

I sampled many of the local collecting angles before deciding that gathering shelf upon shelf of mysteries set in San Francisco would be my game. That novels about crime and detection should attract my attention, however, is no kind of mystery. In I began doing the Dashiell Hammett Tour through the streets of the city, a tribute to the greatest private eye writer ever to live in San Francisco. While here he began writing stories based on his experiences for the pulp pages of The Black Mask magazine.

Before taking off for New York and then Hollywood in the fall of , he had written most of the novels that have made him a lasting figure in literature — only The Thin Man was written in its entirety after he left San Francisco. Better yet, because he liked to write about what he knew, Hammett set many of his stories in the city where he was living. Most of his series of three novels and over two dozen short stories and novelettes about a short fat nameless operative for the Continental Detective Agency takes place in San Francisco and environs.

For people who know the streets, these Continental Op tales are a vein of ultra-tough solid gold — among the best hard-boiled fiction of all time, set on pavement you can walk any time you feel like it.

The short Op novel The Big Knockover , in particular, is a tour de force run over the hills of the town, hitting neighborhoods even people who have lived here for years have yet to visit. Just as London has hundreds of detectives, but the first name that comes to mind is Sherlock Holmes, so too does San Francisco have her detective: Sam Spade. The Maltese Falcon gave a mythic icon to San Francisco, with the image of the private eye in snapbrim hat and trenchcoat stalking through the fog as integral a part of local lore as the earthquake and fire is of the history.

Even when I started doing the walks, fine copies hovered close to a thousand or three, and I just never have burned enough rubber off my gumshoes to catch up with the market, I guess. I know you can always get lucky, of course. We visited one collector in San Jose, who had narrowed his library down to books signed by their authors. Most were a puzzle to me, merely pop self-help books with a John Hancock. The signed Mein Kampf , however, I realized was a coup. No dustjacket, some wear, but by no means bad.

And this fellow had found this copy for a dollar at a garage sale. I confess that I have never felt that lucky in my entire life, but I can see McMillan nabbing that kind of deal some day. All I can hope to do is spend long hours speculating about who this Bettye may have been. Once you get past the high ticket Knopfs, my Hammett shelf is okay.

On the story collections from the forties and fifties, I actually prefer the reprinted Dell Mapback versions to the first edition digest format issued by Spivak, where age has been especially unkind to the paper. The combination of the cover art with the crime scene maps on the flip side give those Dell paperbacks considerable charm, and more than once I have thought that I really need a complete set of all the Mapbacks. I know collectors with complete sets, but so far have resisted the siren call.

The most interesting Hammett first in my hands is not a distinguished edition, just the Knopf omnibus of The Novels of Dashiell Hammett and that not even the first time the novels were assembled under one set of covers. The provenance makes this one a favorite. In a small neat hand in pencil Sandoe signed his name on the front flyleaf, and several note-size pages with his later thoughts and questions about what Hammett was up to remain as inserts in the book.

If my collection of Hammett never became a cause for egomania, though, leading the tour for awhile occasioned delusions of grandeur. I veered close to the description Hammett once gave for Sam Spade, when he wrote:. Spade had no original. After leading 30 or 40 Hammett tours I picked up that attitude, too.

Still, I was getting cocky. Not many. I thought, David Dodge, David Dodge. Who the hell is David Dodge? Part of it takes place on Telegraph Hill. Dodge, who had been working as an accountant in the financial district, had Whit return in Shear the Black Sheep , my personal favorite of the series, but in Bullets for the Bridegroom sends him off to Reno to get married.

For somebody else, the groove is rape or murder or arson. Where Bush Street roofed Stockton before slipping downhill to Chinatown, Spade paid his fare and left the taxicab. In the end he accepts the fact that she is a murderess.

The Falcon in the novel turns out to be a worthless imitation, perhaps the symbol of greed. The Spade and Archer offices could be in the Sutter building. Opened in , this great landmark restaurant still serves the Sam Spade special meal: chops with baked potato and sliced tomatoes. The even serve a drink call the Bloody Brigid. It is usually quiet and dark in this room. When I was trying to sell the first one, Grave Error , everyone in New York who saw it—agents, editors, and the like—told me that while I had a way with words, the mystery genre was dead so if I wanted to be published, I should toss the manuscript in the trash and write science fiction or fantasy.

I decided to set my detective novels in San Francisco because at the time I began writing, it was the only urban area I knew well. Drafted just after graduation, I returned to California after basic training to serve a year at Ft.

Ord, on the Monterey Peninsula. Despite my ambivalence about my military experience, I enjoyed the area so much that I returned in , to practice law in Monterey. After three years of practice on the peninsula, and three more in San Francisco, I was more than eager to abandon the law and try my hand at writing fiction.

Tanner lives on the south side of Telegraph Hill and works above an antique store on Hotaling Place. The next time out he will visit Seattle Flesh Wounds. Like me, my detective is a former lawyer.

He stopped practicing after the legal system drove one of his clients to suicide and Tanner was jailed for contempt for insulting the judge who let it happen. Unlike me, Tanner is not getting older—he has been pushing 50 for fifteen years. When I started writing, he was a veteran of the Korean War; now he is a veteran of Vietnam. He used to be older than I was and I had to guess at his state of mind. My most recent novel, False Conception , had its genesis in an article in California Lawyer magazine on the subject of surrogate motherhood.

At one point, the author observed that at the time of its birth, a child born of a surrogate mother can have six different parents. Six parents equals six suspects in my line of work, so I seized on the subject as a milieu for mystery in keeping with my interest in addressing realistic social issues in my work. It was particularly appropriate also because in recent years I have sought alternatives to murder as the moral and emotional engine for my novels, and a struggle over the fate of an unborn child seemed to suffice as a substitute.

In False Conception , Tanner is hired to investigate the lifestyle of a proposed surrogate mother to make sure she has no bad habits that might endanger the fetus. Tanner gives her a clean bill of health, the embryo is implanted, and Tanner believes the case is closed. A month later, he is asked to check her out once more, to make sure nothing has changed, and he reports the status remains quo.

A short time later, the surrogate disappears. The contracting parents are dismayed and the lawyer who hired Tanner to clear the surrogate is outraged; Tanner is directed to find the woman. He learns that the arrangement with the surrogate had several unusual aspects and she might have reason to terminate the pregnancy in order to thwart the hopes of the parents.

Others have conflicting interests in the child; feuds and frustrations from the past play a part as well. When the surrogate is finally found, more surprises surface. I owe him a great deal for what he has let me learn.

Volume 11, No. Unabashedly, Vollmann uses his journalistic tendencies and personal obsession with prostitution to inform this exposed, detailed account of the heaven and hell of the streets.

Recommended for: People drawn to the edge of experience, the seedy, the underbelly, the Tenderloin. Not for prudes. Aside from her prolific body of work, she does a ton for the community through her nonprofit Radar Productions. The narrator hops from job to job, bar to bar, bed to bed, all in a novel that flies by as fast as actual youth does.

As the narrator says, "No, I was not going to work. I was an artist, a lover, a lover of women, of the oppressed and downtrodden, a warrior really. I should have been somewhere leading an armed revolution in the name of love and no, I was not going to work. Recommended for: Baby dykes new in town. Lezzies still looking for love in the Mission.

The so-called Bible of the Beat Generation, On the Road is the tale of Kerouac and his friends hitting the road across America, high on poetry and drugs, looking to find themselves a place in the world.

Recommended for: Anyone who has ever wanted to get the fuck out of town. Particularly good for dudes between the ages of 17 and 25, who want to be seen reading on Muni.

Most of us know San Francisco as a soft foggy charmfest of a city. Either a must-read or must-avoid for anyone waiting for the next shaker. In this collection, you can find the San Francisco that is no longer, but still haunts the back allies. Set in a magical library that is always open, The Abortion is a cult classic, and revolves around a librarian who accepts only books that are "the unwanted, the lyrical and haunted volumes of American writing.

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