Results tagged “dashiellhammett”

-- Jackie Beat: Give 'Til It Hurts: It's a Christmastime cabaret with infamous dragster Jackie Beat. She will take some of your favorite holiday classics and render them tasteless and tacky, and you'll love every minute of it. Yes. Yes, you will. The show starts at 8 p.m. at the Empire Plush Room; $30-$32.50.

Negative portrayals of Asian-Americans and gays aside, we do still love Humphrey Bogart in the Maltese Falcon -- so you know we're avidly following the news that someone has stolen the famous jewel-stuffed bird from the John's Grill restaurant on the edge of the Tenderloin, where Dashiell Hammett used to hang out. There's a $25,000 reward for the bird's return. (We're just giving this story to you straight because, while the Chron's "hard-boiled" writeup of the story is pretty funny, we found it next to impossible to actually glean any actual information from the article as a result.)

It takes a very open mind indeed to look behind the unnecessarily gaudy covers, trashy titles and barely acceptable advertisements and recognize the authentic power of a kind of writing that, even at its most mannered and artificial, made most of the fiction of the time taste like a cup of lukewarm consommé at a spinsterish tearoom.

San Francisco knows noir. It's been 75 years since Dashiell Hammett's seminal masterwork, which set the standard for the genre, was finished on Post street. And just as Hammett used the crime novel genre to delve into deeper issues of class and politics, contemporary author Leonce Gaiter weaves social critique into his first novel . Set in our other favorite city, New Orleans, it centers on the machinations of a man out to avenge the cruel death of his mother.

The hard-bitten prose of the Tenderloin Dashiell Hammett returns with an update of the SFPD Northern District crime blotter (mirrored on sfwall.net). A highlight: man walking around trying all the door handles on cars, with his ding-dong hanging out. As our laconic narrator tells us,

One might call this brand of incident a crossover crime. If the suspect fails at one, he may succeed at another. We're being factitious here of course. Suffice it to say that the man was using his hands when he tried to open the car doors.

Someone give this cop a book deal! Remember the lady who found the finger in her Wendy's chili in San Jose? Well, the cops raided her house in Las Vegas. They're not saying why, but neighbors say they know her aunt died there recently. Hmmmmmmmmm! The cops say they don't know anything about the aunt issue, and the woman is very, very, very upset. The plot (and chili) thickens! And remember the throat-slasher girl by the Berkeley Rose Garden? Her friend, the one who stood by while the slashing happened and then whisked the slasher into her Miata and drove off, turned herself in to the Oakland PD. She's a social worker in the Berkeley psychology PhD program, and her family is active in the Sufi Islam community.