with Sam Spade for fourteen years. “I did not know for sure that it was really Spade’s apartment until I sat in there and read the novel,” Arney recalls. “Now, that was spooky. For the first months, it was incredibly spooky, to the point where it was hard to get to sleep at night.” 3
Arney noticed that his apartment had a bend and a small closet in the front passageway, just like Sam’s, and that there was a door between the passageway and the main room, which few other units in the building had. When the cops visit Sam’s place the night of Archer’s murder, Spade hears the elevator cagedoor rattling open. In those days, the apartment door was glass, therefore less soundproof, like the door between the passageway and the living room/bedroom, which Arney rescued from the basement. The bathroom’s layout also accommodated the famous strip search later in the novel, allowing Brigid to take off her clothes without being between the bathtub and the toilet (where Sam lays the pistols) or between the bathtub and the door. This keeps her discreetly out of sight of Casper Gutman and others in the adjoining room.
Sam’s kitchen has a breakfast nook, which Hammett’s did not (none in the building did), but Arney theorized that Hammett added the nook to the novel to accommodate certain scenes between Sam and Brigid. As he escorts Brigid into the bathroom, Spade warns his other guests, “unless you want a three-story drop, there’s no way out of here except past the bathroom door.” While many of the studio’s features were shared by others on that side of the building, that line put Sam’s place clearly on the fourth floor.
Once he was convinced, Arney began letting Herron bring tours through his place on Sunday afternoons. He now lived inside a novel, a masterpiece, but a novel just the same—with Brigid O’Shaughnessy on his couch and in his bathroom, Sam’s bed in the wall, police detectives in his hallway, the Levantine treasure hunter Joel Cairo worrying in his rocker, and Casper Gutman pontificating on a padded chair. His home became a pilgrimage, and toward the end of his tenure, he was putting himself to sleep listening to old radio recordings of “The Adventures of Sam Spade.” After fourteen years of hosting, Arney got married and moved to a larger place, one less freighted with literary meaning, but he held on to apartment401 for two more years, hoping to safely hand over the small museum he had built.
The Hammett aficionadoand founder of the Noir City Film Festival, Eddie Muller, got Arney in touch with a writer and philanthropist from Pacific Heights, Robert Mailer Anderson, who acquired the lease and turned a decorator loose in the place. Despite some glamorous touches, if the studio were clouded with a little Fatima smoke, it might seem Hammett had just left the room.
In The Maltese Falcon , Hammett presents Spade whole and unexplained, without a word about his past except the famous “Flitcraft Parable” Sam tells Brigid, about a man he once hunted in the Northwest. Writers have long puzzled over the inclusion of the Flitcraft story in the novel, a kind of extra pearl in an already sparkling necklace, and John Huston understandably left it out of his otherwise faithful movie version. Although every possible meaning has been gleaned from Hammett’s story by scholars, there seems little mystery about where he found this character’s name. During Hammett’s Pinkerton days, detectives working on insurance cases would consult a life insurance manual put out annually by a publisher in Oak Park, Illinois named Allen J. Flitcraft. Hammett, favoring the in-joke, later borrowed Flitcraft’s name for his parable. ‡
As Spade tells it to Brigid, a young real estate executive named Charles Flitcraft was on his lunch hour one day in Tacoma in the early 1920s when he was nearly killed by a beam that fell from a construction site and crashed beside him on the sidewalk, a piece of concrete even
Arney noticed that his apartment had a bend and a small closet in the front passageway, just like Sam’s, and that there was a door between the passageway and the main room, which few other units in the building had. When the cops visit Sam’s place the night of Archer’s murder, Spade hears the elevator cagedoor rattling open. In those days, the apartment door was glass, therefore less soundproof, like the door between the passageway and the living room/bedroom, which Arney rescued from the basement. The bathroom’s layout also accommodated the famous strip search later in the novel, allowing Brigid to take off her clothes without being between the bathtub and the toilet (where Sam lays the pistols) or between the bathtub and the door. This keeps her discreetly out of sight of Casper Gutman and others in the adjoining room.
Sam’s kitchen has a breakfast nook, which Hammett’s did not (none in the building did), but Arney theorized that Hammett added the nook to the novel to accommodate certain scenes between Sam and Brigid. As he escorts Brigid into the bathroom, Spade warns his other guests, “unless you want a three-story drop, there’s no way out of here except past the bathroom door.” While many of the studio’s features were shared by others on that side of the building, that line put Sam’s place clearly on the fourth floor.
Once he was convinced, Arney began letting Herron bring tours through his place on Sunday afternoons. He now lived inside a novel, a masterpiece, but a novel just the same—with Brigid O’Shaughnessy on his couch and in his bathroom, Sam’s bed in the wall, police detectives in his hallway, the Levantine treasure hunter Joel Cairo worrying in his rocker, and Casper Gutman pontificating on a padded chair. His home became a pilgrimage, and toward the end of his tenure, he was putting himself to sleep listening to old radio recordings of “The Adventures of Sam Spade.” After fourteen years of hosting, Arney got married and moved to a larger place, one less freighted with literary meaning, but he held on to apartment401 for two more years, hoping to safely hand over the small museum he had built.
The Hammett aficionadoand founder of the Noir City Film Festival, Eddie Muller, got Arney in touch with a writer and philanthropist from Pacific Heights, Robert Mailer Anderson, who acquired the lease and turned a decorator loose in the place. Despite some glamorous touches, if the studio were clouded with a little Fatima smoke, it might seem Hammett had just left the room.
In The Maltese Falcon , Hammett presents Spade whole and unexplained, without a word about his past except the famous “Flitcraft Parable” Sam tells Brigid, about a man he once hunted in the Northwest. Writers have long puzzled over the inclusion of the Flitcraft story in the novel, a kind of extra pearl in an already sparkling necklace, and John Huston understandably left it out of his otherwise faithful movie version. Although every possible meaning has been gleaned from Hammett’s story by scholars, there seems little mystery about where he found this character’s name. During Hammett’s Pinkerton days, detectives working on insurance cases would consult a life insurance manual put out annually by a publisher in Oak Park, Illinois named Allen J. Flitcraft. Hammett, favoring the in-joke, later borrowed Flitcraft’s name for his parable. ‡
As Spade tells it to Brigid, a young real estate executive named Charles Flitcraft was on his lunch hour one day in Tacoma in the early 1920s when he was nearly killed by a beam that fell from a construction site and crashed beside him on the sidewalk, a piece of concrete even
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