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......