Jim Beaver wrote:
"At the end of the show, Welles relates a story about Hammett
in his P.I. days tackling the task of finding a stolen Ferris
wheel. It sounded apocryphal, but I'm not up on Hammett
enough to know if there's anything to it."
Around the time he was starting to appear in Black Mask,
Hammett wrote a short article for the Mencken-Nathan Smart
Set magazine, "From the Memoirs of a Private Detective." One
of his memories was: "I know a man who once stole a
Ferris-wheel." Welles made it a touch more dramatic, I guess,
by having Hammett find the wheel, though that may be the
implication in the article. The terse little notes are very
funny. "I was once falsely accused of perjury and had to
perjure myself to escape arrest." "A man whom I was shadowing
went out into the country for a walk one Sunday afternoon and
lost his bearings completely. I had to direct him back to the
city."
I suspect that the article, in what was considered to be a
prestigious magazine of the day, was meant to establish
Hammett's credibility as the real deal. Nice to know
self-promotion was alive and well back in the Twenties.
Dick Lochte
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