Literary California 6

Hammett / Additional Information

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As the movie adaption of Hammett's novel is widely known, I include the an FAQ-section on the whereabouts of the original bird statue . . .

Where's the black bird now?

According to a report in The San Francisco Chronicle (an electronic newspaper) Tuesday 4/4/95 page A16, the Black Bird has finally gone back to roost in San Franciso, site of the novel and film. The leaden statuette emerged from obscurity to be purchased at auction by New York jewellers The House of Harry Winston, for $398,500--considerably more than Casper Gutman thought 'the dingus' to be worth--in March, 1995.

According to Carl Nolte's report in the SF Chronicle the bird will appear on display during April 1995 at John's Grill, an SF eatery frequented by Hammett in his Pinkerton days. (The owners of the diner bid unsuccessfully at the auction.)

The display forms part of a fund-raising charity event. Apparently the 'centre-piece' of the event is a ten-foot high replica of the statuette.

[The SF Chronicle and The Gate share the URL http://www.sfgate.com/ but this link appears to be defunct (ED).]

FAQ reader Tim Gowen thinks that the dingus might be in London, or it may at least have made an appearance in London.

Tim recollects that Planet Hollywood (a posh London cafe near Leicester Square) had on display along with other sundry film memorabilia arranged for the amusement of its diners for its 1993 opening ... the rara avis.

Is The Bird still there (in which case, are there two dingusses/dingi)?
Or could this be the same bird which was purchased by the SF jeweller, The House of Harry Winston?

Stephen D. Youngkin, James Bigwood and Raymond Cabana Jr state:

In 1974, one of the seven plaster falcon figurines made up for the 1941 motion picture was stolen from a display case at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where it was in loan from Warner Bros. for a retrospective of Hal B. Wallis productions. It was the one seen behind the opening credits of the film, and its theft coincided with the making of a comic sequel to the Warners classic---Columbia's The Black Bird, starring George Segal as Sam Spade Jr, and containing one of the original falcons as well as two of the three remaining original players Lee Patrick and Elisha Cook Jr) reprising their roles as Effie and Wilmer.
Variety reported the theft under the heading ATTN SAM SPADE; MALTESE FALCON STOLEN, OR MISSING ANYWAY, FROM MUSEUM OF ART. A Columbia publicist admitted that the theft 'really smacked of a stunt' but denied any studio involvement. In any case, it smacked of yet another sequel---of sorts.

See The Films of Peter Lorre (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1982) page 143:

Where can I get hold of (a copy of) the bird?

I found the following while trawling the Newsgroups:

Newsgroup: rec.arts.movies.past-films
Subject: Maltese Falcon statue wanted

In article [snip] nobody@nowhere wrote:
>Greetings
>Anybody know where I could purchase such an item?
>I don't have any info on the manufacturer or when/
>how many were made.
>If anyone has any ideas on where I could find one
>(a shop specialising in movie collectables?)
>Please respond or email me [snip]

We got ours at the San Franciso Mystery Bookstore.
Leslie

The San Francisco Mystery Bookstore
746 Diamond Street
Noe Valley
San Franciso
California

Tel (415) 224-1132

Opens Wed-Sun 11:30am - 5:30pm

There is another American bookshop dealing in Maltese Falcon memorabilia:

The Mysterious Bookshop
129 West 57th Street
New York
New York 10019

Tel. (212) 765-0900

They offer plaster replicas of the black bird, mugs and other items.

(I got my own Black Bird from The Mysterious Bookshop---it took ages to get to the UK. I was hoping it would be wrapped in shredded newspaper. It wasn't. A VAT charge was slapped on though, and a Customs handling charge (presumably for opening the parcel and working out the VAT charge!) UK residents may wish to ask overseas retailers to tick the 'gift' section of the customs label when making international purchases to avoid unexpected surcharges (I'm not suggesting a VAT dodge here: send a cheque for outstanding VAT to The Chancellor of the Exchequer, 11 Downing Street, London SW to keep your conscience clear and to ensure you stay within the law.)

Bibliography

Dennis Dooley, Dashiell Hammett Recognitions (New York: Frederick Ungar: 1984).

Dashiell Hammett, Four Great Novels: The Dain Curse; The Glass Key; The Maltese Falcon; Red Harvest (London: Picador, 1982). [NB As a single volume edition, TMF is out of print in the UK at the time of writing. It is only available in the above collection.]

Stephen Jenkins, 'Dashiell Hammett and Film Noir', Monthly Film Bulletin 49, November 1982.

Richard Layman, Dashiell Hammett: A Descriptive Bibliography, Pittsburgh series in bibliography (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press; London: Feffer and Simons: 1979). [Layman's work is for the true Hammett bibliophile: it contains detailed bibliographic descriptions of the Hammett corpus and ephemera (ED)].

Richard Layman, Shadow man: the life of Dashiell Hammett (London: Junction Books, 1981).

Joan Mellen, Hellman and Hammett: The Legendary Passion of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett, (NY: Harper Collins, 1995). [Blows the lid off Hellman's attempt to contain and control the Hammett story, which so hampered previous biographers. Not published in the UK].

Christopher Mettress, ed., The Critical Response to Dashiell Hammett (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1994) [two contemporary reviews; Hammett's introduction to the 1934 edition; six short extracts from critical works and two critical essays on TMF (from the 1990s): there is something from each decade from the 1940s to the 1990s (ED)]

E. H. Mundell, A list of the original appearances of Dashiell Hammett's magazine work, The serif series: Bibliographies and checklists; no. 13 (Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1968).

William F. Nolan, Dashiell Hammett: a casebook (Santa Barbara, Calif., McNally & Loftin, 1969). [Nolan's book contains a list of Hammett's work in various media (ED)].

William F. Nolan, Dashiell Hammett: A Life at the Edge (London: Arthur Barker Ltd, 1983). [NB 'The stuff that dreams are made of' pp 86-96 (ED).]

William F. Nolan, The Black Mask Boys: Masters in the Hard-Boiled School of Detective Fiction (New York: William Morrow & Co Inc, 1985). [NB 'Behind the Mask: Dashiell Hammett' pp. 75-93 (ED).]

Paul Skenazy, The new Wild West: the urban mysteries of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler Boise State University western writers series; no. 54 (Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1982).

Robert E. Skinner, The hard-boiled explicator: a guide to the study of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald (London: Scarecrow; New Jersey: Metuchen, 1985). [History and criticism of detective and mystery stories. Contains bibliographies on each of the three authors (ED)].

Julian Symonds,Bloody Murder second edition (London: Pan, 1992). [Symonds' Chapter 10 'American Revolution' (pp. 153-164) deals with Chandler, Hammett, et al. See below, 17.4 (ED)].

Peter Wolfe, Beams falling: the art of Dashiell Hammett (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1980).

Related material

Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder (New York: Ballantine, 1972).
[This item is apparently unobtainable from the British Library in the UK, as I learned after submitting an Inter-Library Loan request via Suffolk College Library. However, Chandler's essay, 'The Simple Art of Murder' (of which there are apparently several 'versions': the essay was published two or three times, with slight revisions) is included in Raymond Chandler Speaking edited by Dorothy Gardiner and Katherine Sorley Walker (London: Allison & Busby, 1984), and is also reprinted in the collection Pearls are a Nuisance (London: Penguin, 1964) (ED)].

E J M Duggan, 'Fleshing Out The Thin Man, Finishing The Unfinished Woman: Joan Mellen's Hellman and Hammett', Crime Time No. 6 (December 1996) 4-5.

William K. Everson, The Detective in Film (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel, 1972).

Frank Krutnik, In a Lonely Street: film noir, genre, masculinity (London: Routledge, 1991).
[NB Krutnik's Ch. 7 'The Tough Investigative Thriller', 92-124 and passim].

Julian Symonds, Bloody Murder: from the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History second (revised) edition, with further revisions and postscript, (London: Pan, 1994). [Pedantic Bibliographical Note: Although this edition of Symonds' book bears the declaration 'third edition' in the Preface, the bibliographical detail above (ie 'revised, further revised and with a new postscript') is taken from the title page, whereupon it is stated that the second edition of the book has undergone further revision. As there is, to my knowledge, not yet an FAQ on bibliography, I would recommend Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) pp. 313ff.]

The Variety Movie Guide (London: Hamlyn, 1991).

Thanks to Jan B. Steffensen, who put together an HTML version of this FAQ, and who keeps zipped, text and HTML versions on his marvellous Mysterious Home Page. Thanks also to Bill Denton, who provided me with a copy of Satan Met A Lady. Bill cultivates the flourishing rara-avis list.

© Jörg Blecher, 2003