Ace Atkins: Devil’s garden

“What does it pay?” Jose asked. Always the skeptic.

“Not much,” Sam said. “But I can write longer if I want.”

“By all means make the detective handsome.”

“I’m gonna make him short and fat.”

“You’re kidding.”

“And he’ll be ruthless.”

“What will you call him?”

“Nobody,” Sam said. “Names are for suckers.”

Jose adjusted Mary Jane in her arms. She’d been bathed and dressed for bed. Sam already had the Scotch out. It had helped with the fog and cold summer nights that made him wake up with coughing fits.

“You think I can write literature?”

“For something called Black Mask?”

“Why the hell not,” he said. “If I have to read another goddamn story about English lords and little old ladies tracking down killers, I’m gonna shoot myself.”

“So what do you write?”

“The truth,” Sam said. “Write about sweaty, greedy sonsabitches who’d kill their own mothers for some loot.”

Jose nodded. She tucked Mary Jane in her crib and closed the door behind her in the safe room, clean of his coughs.

Sam poured a drink and loaded the typewriter with a fresh white page. “I unpacked,” Jose said. “The trunk. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Burn the thing.”

“So this works?”

“For now.”

“That’s all we’re promised.”

“Amen, sister.”

“Sam?”

“Yeah?” he said. He wore an undershirt and dress pants. No shoes.

“We’ll get through this,” she said. “You’ll get well.”

“This works,” Sam said. “For now.”

Jose went to bed. Sam lit a cigarette and poured a drink. The long steel arms of the typewriter hammered out that first story, the first story he thought he’d ever told straight and true. When he finished, he poured some Scotch he’d bought from the old woman downstairs.

He was sweating with the sickness.

Sam opened a window and crawled out onto the fire escape, looking down at Eddy Street, watching the pimps and hustlers and sonsabitches, listening to all the music, screams, and machine horns and stray gunfire, of a place he felt he belonged. The City.

Background information provided by: The Day the Laughter Stopped, David Yallop; The Forgotten Films of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, Mackinac Media; Frame-Up!, Andy Edmonds; Hammett: A Life at the Edge, William F. Nolan; Dashiell Hammett: A Life, Diane Johnson; Shadow Man and Discovering The Maltese Falcon and Sam Spade, Richard Layman; Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett, edited by Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett; The Dashiell Hammett Tour, Don Herron; the complete works of Dashiell Hammett; American Masters, “Dashiell Hammett: Detective, Writer”; Citizen Hearst, W. A. Swanberg; and The Chief, David Nasaw. My thanks to librarians at the University of Mississippi and the great reporters of ’21 for their coverage of the Arbuckle case in the San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco Examiner.

To David Fechheimer for sharing his personal stories of meeting Jose Hammett and Phil Haultain and shadowing Hammett while working as a private detective in San Francisco. Another Southerner made good in Frisco.

And to Don Herron, my guide to Hammett’s San Francisco, who provided the color and soul to this book. Anyone with any interest in Hammett’s life should make the pilgrimage and take his tour, which has been going strong for more than thirty years.

As always, this book wouldn’t exist without the guidance of my friends Neil and Esther. My great thanks to both of you for everything. And to Doris and Charlie, Tim Green, and my entire family for their unshakable support.

Also to Art Copeland for his endless trips up and down the Frisco hills with me to find some dive bar or back alley and countless journeys to Chinatown. You’re a great egg. See you on the next adventure.

And to Andrea Grimes and Tom Carey at the San Francisco Public Library for digging up forgotten files on the Rappe case, Ed Komara and the folks at the Louisiana Music Factory for helping me with the soundtrack, Joe Atkins for keeping me plied with bourbon and great noir, Rick Layman for patient answers to my nagging Hammett questions, Marc Harrold for being paid in cigars for legal questions, Bill Arney for his personal tour of the Hammett apartment, and Carl Kickery for serving us up a free round at the Ha-Ra.

The big thanks go to my wife, Angela-tough-as-nails former crime reporter and hard-boiled sister to Daisy Simpkins. You produced your best work yet this year with Billy. I can’t wait to introduce him to The City, the way my father did for me years ago.