When a man’s trench coat wears as thin as a specious simile, he’s supposed to do something about it. Basically, get a new trench coat. Fedoras, too. And shoes. Lots of ‘em — snazzy, sturdy, maybe gummed soles for stealth.
Don Herron’s a man who’s seen many a trench coat.
“How many? I can’t answer,” he says, spitting out snappy patter on the telephone line. “Probably around 10 at least.”
A heavy toll indeed, taken when you’ve spent four decades leading suspecting customers on Dashiell Hammett walking tours through the cold comfort of San Francisco, and you need to look the part.
Without the glad rags, though, Herron might not fit the mold. It’s hard to tell if his jaw is long and bony or short and stubby, since he looks, rather pleasantly, like a bearded Santa. But his gifts are gab and guidance, and he’s got the lowdown on Hammett’s hard-boiled detective novels, especially “The Maltese Falcon,” enough to flesh out his four-hour, $20 by-appointment tours.
These jaunts take the lid off the city – the setting for most of Hammett’s tales – and let people see the works, the real-life bars and food joints frequented by Hammett himself and by his fictional anti-hero, Sam Spade, all set back in the ‘20s – the 1900 kind.
For nigh on 43 years – with a brief pause for a triple bypass a few years back – Herron has followed the trail of Hammett’s private eyes, grafters, killers and broads through speakeasies and shadowy alleys. It’s the longest-lived literary walking tour in the country, he says, and most certainly, the longest done by the same guy. The mystery is: Why?
“Basically, I like the stories,” he says.
At the time of this writing, his in-person tours are dead in the water, shot in the back during the COVID-19 stay-home orders. But they’ll revive as soon as the world does. And in the meantime, interested parties can DIY the tour — or just vicariously enjoy it – with his guidebook, aptly named, “The Dashiell Hammett Tour,” first published in 1991 but expanded and republished in 2010 and still available. And his blog at www.donherron.com is full of tips on books, films and all things dark and moody and noir.
“You want it all, this is as close as you can get,” reads his guidebook chatter, “whether you gumshoe the actual Frisco streets or play armchair detective in the comfort of your own home.”
On the physical tour, Herron often starts at the Flood Building, on Market at the foot of Powell by the cable-car turnaround. Makes for a good meeting spot. Don’t come alone. Or do. He doesn’t care.
The spot’s spot-on, since Hammett, who spent about a decade in San Francisco in the 1920s, had signed on at the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, which was based in the Flood. It’s a glam dame of a building, all Beaux-Arts columns and balustrades. Not a lot to see Hammett-wise (The Gap is now the main tenant), just a feel to the place. There is, however, a mock-up Maltese Falcon in a glass case in the lobby.
From there the route varies, but usually includes the Geary Theater at Mason and Geary, the Palace Hotel on Montgomery where Spade “ate luncheon” like a gentleman, and the building at 891 Post St., where Hammett lived when he wrote “Maltese.”
Herron did tip us off to some must-sees. Burritt Alley, for one. It’s next to the Tunnel Top bar, near where Bush and Stockton streets meet. “It’s kind of the highlight of the tour,” Herron says. “That’s where Brigid O’Shaughnessy shoots Sam Spade’s partner, Miles Archer, in ‘Maltese Falcon,’ the first murder in the book. There’s even a plaque on the wall about it.
“It’s a pretty narrow, kinda dark alley, so it has that noir feel. But it’s basically just an alley. I’m not saying no one has ever actually been killed in there in real life. But it looks pretty much what you might expect. Your expectations will not be dashed.”
Another major location is John’s Grill at 63 Ellis St. “It’s essentially the only restaurant mentioned by name in ‘The Maltese Falcon,’” Herron explains. “Spade stops there for a quick meal before he goes on this wild chase down to Burlingame. It’s fairly antique looking – been there over 100 years. You can go in and have a drink and imagine you’re Sam Spade for a few minutes.”
Be sure to order Sam Spade’s Lamb Chops off the regular menu, at $39.95 a pop.
Herron’s own tale began in Tennessee. He grew up there, but grew out of it. “I didn’t like Tennessee, as it turned out,” he says. “I wanted to move to a cosmopolitan city. Went to New York once, but it’s too big. San Francisco in the early ‘70s, when I first came out here it was just right.”
He would eventually get a job as a night cabbie. “One of the great things being in a city then was you could wave your arm and a, cab would come. I was a cabbie for 30 years. Not any more, though. Can’t say I retired. I quit. Uber kinda killed it off for any kind of viable income.”
A book lover in general, he’s read “Maltese” a dozen-odd times. But it’s not even his favorite Hammett work. He’s a huge fan of the “Continental Op” tales, which predated “Maltese” and were also set in SF.
“Those stories are more fun,” he says. “It’s a first-person narrator who never tells his name, an operative for the Continental Detective Agency. He’s short and fat and not what you expect as a hero.”
Once settled in San Francisco, Herron was given an article called “Stalking Sam Spade” that had recently run in the Sunday paper, tracking Hammett locales through clues in the book. That piece was followed by some additional magazine articles.
“So I didn’t uncover the sites myself,” Herron admits. “Other people before me had found most of them. But I developed the tour,” he says. “Some people would say, ‘Oh, anybody coulda done that.’ I’d say, Yeah, but here’s a key distinction – I did it.”
He started holding the tours in 1977, at first every Sunday afternoon, year-round, charging only $1 a person. The largest group was 78 people. He gradually dropped it to summertime only and now just appointments. Not because of lack of interest in Hammett – it’s just the way Herron wants to do it.
The city has changed a bit too, with tech giants looming over much of downtown. “Yeah, part of the tour is, ‘This building is new, that wasn’t there, this wasn’t here.’ Definitely, you can’t find much down by Salesforce Tower area,” he says. “But if you know what you’re doing, you can still find parts of town where every corner has buildings that were up in the ‘20s.
“Everything changes, but Hammett’s pretty durable.”
Trench coats? Not so much.
