-- 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. -- Badmen, Hoe, Agent Deadlies, and Kittie Perm: Oh, the lunchtime grilled cheese-and-tomato sandwich memories we have from this venue.......

When I slap you, you'll take it and like it, see! 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......

In 1950, the great mystery writer Raymond Chandler wrote of the contemporaneous critical response to his stories and those of James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, et. al. that: 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......

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 Bourbon Street. Set in our other favorite city, New Orleans, it centers on the machinations of a man out to......

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.