Locked rooms

Afterword

Thanks are due, as always, to the wise and capable people of the McHenry Library of the University of California, Santa Cruz, without whom this book would be a smaller and less lively thing.

Thanks are also due to Dick Griffiths, Jon Hart, and Fred Zimmerman of the Blackhawk Museum in Danville, California. If you want to see Donny's blue Rolls-Royce, that's where it lives.

To Abby Bridge, researcher extraordinaire, and the collections of the California Historical Society, the San Francisco Public Library, and the Mechanics' Institute Library; Don Herron, who knows all things Hammett; and Stu Bennett, who uncovered some insider's guides to the City.

Although none of the biographies of Dashiell Hammett I found, including that written by his daughter, Jo Hammett (Dashiell Hammett: A Daughter Remembers), mention this extraordinary meeting of minds in the spring of 1924, from all I can see, Miss Russell captures the man's essence, from the dapper clothes and weak lungs to the man's robust sense of ethics. It should be noted, regarding Hammett's disinclination to sell out his employer in this story, that this desperately ill, lifelong claustrophobe, an old man at the age of fifty-seven, spent twenty-two weeks in federal prison during the Red-baiting fifties because he refused to give up the names of men who had trusted him. As Lillian Hellman said in the eulogy of her longtime lover (which can be found in Diane Johnson's excellent Dashiell Hammett, A Life) Hammett submitted to prison because “he had come to the conclusion that a man should keep his word.”

No small goal for any of us.