All told, the apartment was a miniscule 300 square feet. It had other telltale quirks, too, like a 90-degree bend in the hallway mentioned earlier in the novel. Apartment 401, the very unit up for rent, in the building’s northwest corner, fit the bill. “Just with those criteria, I was able to eliminate almost every apartment in the building,” he says.Įxcept one. To Arney, that was crucial intel: The room was shaped such that Spade could sit on the edge of the tub, within reach of the toilet seat, and still leave enough room for O’Shaughnessy to stand between him and the door. When he had finished he stood up holding her clothes out in his hands to her. No sound came from the living-room… He put his pistols on the toilet-seat and, facing the door, went down on one knee… He did not find the thousand-dollar bill. He sat on the side of the bathtub watching her and the open door. The Maltese Falcon ends with an iconic scene in which Spade searches the femme fatale, Brigid O’Shaughnessy, for a key piece of evidence in the bathroom of his apartment: The plans he found weren’t very detailed, but they did contain the original design of the bathroom. Then he compared those with a blueprint of the 1917 building. Arney, an architect by trade, sketched a layout of Spade’s flat based on descriptions from the book, mostly in three key scenes. First he turned to his well-thumbed copy of The Maltese Falcon, in which the protagonist, detective Sam Spade, lives in an apartment widely believed to be modeled on Hammett’s own. So, like a gumshoe from the Continental Op detective agency, Arney started digging for clues. Hammett’s letters from the time bear the return address of 891 Post Street, but never listed a specific apartment number. But he needed to know if the available unit was actually the great writer’s. Arney, already something of a Hammett fanatic, was buzzing. But the memory of the building stayed with Arney for more than a decade, until one night in 1993 when he passed by the corner in a taxi and noticed a “For Rent” sign in the window. The tour stopped outside the unassuming building at 891 Post Street, where the writer lived from 1926 to 1929 and wrote his first three novels, including his most celebrated, The Maltese Falcon. 1, was hooked.Ī year later, he signed up for a Hammett-themed walking tour of downtown San Francisco, visiting the real-life sites described in the novelist’s most famous stories. The tip resonated with Arney, who plunged himself into the classic San Francisco writer’s crime dramas, including The Continental Op, The Thin Man, and Red Harvest. Arney paired the hat with a gray trench coat, cutting such a striking figure around town that a friend suggested he start reading Dashiell Hammett’s hard-boiled detective novels. Turns out the fedora was a savvy move that winter was a wet one. Three months earlier, he’d arrived on a one-way ticket from Illinois with nothing more than his two suitcases and a job interview lined up. It was November 1981 the purchase was in celebration of his big move to San Francisco, the cool gray city. William Arney’s life took a turn the day he bought his gray fedora.
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