Well, I attended a panel discussion at Clean Well-Lighted
Place for Books in San Francisco last night. The following
folks were there:
1) Hammett's daughter, Josephine Hammett Marshall 2)
Hammett's granddaughter, Julie Rivett 3) Joe Gores 4) Don
Herron (author of the Dashiell Hammett Tour) 5) Richard
Layman (one of Hammett's biographers and co-editor of the New
Black Mask series)
and several other Hammett experts whose names I'm afraid I
missed.
The topic was, of course, the volume of selected Hammett
letters that Layman and Rivett co-edited. (Hammett's daughter
wrote the forward).
I haven't had a chance to read the letters, but the
discussion was great and I thought I'd share a few Hammett
tidbits that I found interesting:
- No one on the panel could say for sure what Hammett thought
of Chandler, but they did know that Hammett very much
appreciated Chandler's essay, "The Simple Art of Murder".
Hammett even went so far as to retype the essay from the
magazine so that he could give out copies.
- There are about 600 more letters that didn't make it into
the book.
- Hammett destroyed all of letters he received from Hellman,
but Hellman kept Hammett's. Curiously, however, the only
copies extant of many of the Hammett-to-Hellman letters are
photocopies or photocopies of photocopies.
- There are original typescripts of Hellman plays with
Hammett's writing in the margins.
- The daughter of Peggy O'Toole (model for Brigid
O'Shaughnessy) is still alive and she remembers seeing about
20 letters Hammett wrote her mother. I guess only a few
remain.
I got a signed copy of the volume of letters (of course) and
I also got Layman to sign a first of his biography of Hammett
and Gores to sign the British first of his novel,
"Hammett".
But now I'm kicking myself for not bringing my firsts of Red
Harvest, Falcon and The Glass Key (don't get too excited: no
jackets) for Hammett's daughter to sign. Or would that not
have been a good idea anyway??
--Mark
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 23 Apr 2001 EDT