Gores: Gifted, Garrulous, and Generous

(Editor’s note: After hearing today that crime novelist Joe Gores had died, I asked his fellow author and friend, Mark Coggins, to write something in his memory. Coggins’ recollections are offered below.)

Green Apple Books, arguably the best used bookstore in San Francisco, offers a collectible books section near its front door. One day, maybe 15 years ago, when I was browsing through that area, I found a number of volumes from the personal library of one of my favorite mystery writers, Joe Gores.

These were rare and valuable first editions inscribed to Joe from some very well-known authors, many of whom thanked Joe for helping them to get their start, and I couldn’t understand how the store could have acquired those books. Worried that something tragic had happened to Joe, I tracked down a clerk and asked him. The clerk reassured me that Joe was fine. He went on to explain that Joe’s wife, Dori, was allergic to dust and the large library of books he had collected over the years was exacerbating her problem. The couple had culled their library in hopes of cutting down on the dust in their home.

At the time I didn’t know Joe Gores personally, but I knew him by reputation. Born in Minnesota, he’d taken an English Literature degree from Notre Dame University, come west to settle in San Francisco, worked for a dozen years as private eye and a “repo man,” and penned scripts for a variety of TV crime dramas, including Kojak, Remington Steele, Magnum, P.I., and B.L. Stryker.

Even better, I knew Joe for his books and admired him as a consequence. I was particularly fond of his Dan Kearney and Associates (DKA) series, perhaps the most faithful rendition of real-life private investigation work since Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op stories. But I also liked the unique and special Interface (1974), written in the same objective third-person point of view Hammett used in The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key, and featuring Neal Fargo, a hard-boiled 1970s detective who was every bit the match for 1920s Samuel Spade.

Over the course of the next decade and a half or so, I began to write and publish detective novels of my own, and like many of the writers whose books I saw on the shelves at Green Apple Books, I wrote to Joe Gores requesting that he supply a blurb for one of my novels. It was through that dialogue that I got to know Joe personally and came to understand that in addition to being a gifted writer, he was a wonderful raconteur and a witty, generous, and most thoughtful person.

So I was particularly saddened to hear today that Joe died in a Marin County hospital this last Monday, January 10, 2011, at age 79--50 years to the day after Hammett passed away.

Joe will be remembered for many things. He’ll be remembered for being only one of three authors to receive Edgar Awards in three separate categories: Best First Novel, Best Short Story, and Best TV Series Segment. (Donald E. Westlake and William L. DeAndrea were the other two). He will be remembered for winning Japan’s Maltese Falcon Award and for being entrusted by the Hammett family to write 2009’s well-regarded prequel to The Maltese Falcon, Spade & Archer. And he will be remembered for being the very knowledgeable Hammett scholar that he was. You need only read Joe’s essay, “It Was a Diamond, All Right,” which serves as the introduction to Vince Emery’s 2005 collection of Hammett yarns, Lost Stories, to appreciate the insights he had regarding Hammett’s many influences on literature, movies, and television.

I will remember Joe for other things, though. Prominent among them was his generosity. After I wrote him about that blurb for my novel Candy from Strangers (2006), he not only agreed to provide it, but he gave me an endorsement that ran to paragraphs. This was no generic puffery, no phalanx of clichés. Joe had read my book and enjoyed it for the very reasons I hoped others would enjoy it--and recorded those reasons with humor and sincerity.

Shortly thereafter, I attended a public presentation and signing scheduled around his 2006 novel, Glass Tiger, and he spent the first minutes talking about Candy and other writings of mine that he had sought out on his own. I finally had to interrupt him and ask him to stop.

At that same event and many others of his I attended, Joe displayed his tremendous gift for storytelling--another thing for which I’ll remember him. Drawing on his seemingly limitless reserves of real-life experiences as a private investigator, he always had a witty and entertaining story to share in support of the topic at hand. One of my favorites involved a ruse he used to convince a post office employee to provide the home address of a post office box holder. You can listen to Joe tell that story on one of the videos featured a bit farther down in this piece.

And although I’ve already touched on Joe’s familiarity with Hammett and his works, let me conclude here by saying that one thing that always impressed me was his encyclopedic familiarity with Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, in particular. As part of a fall 2007 event associated with the National Endowment of the Arts’ “Big Read” program, I had the opportunity to interview Joe on the subject of Falcon at the public library in Pleasanton, east of San Francisco. Being the conscientious sort, I prepared a page full of questions I wanted to cover during that 60-minute session. However, I managed to get through only about half of them, because Joe’s responses were so intriguing and his asides so entertaining, that I just let him talk. And talk. Nobody in the audience was disappointed, I’m sure.

If you want to learn about The Maltese Falcon, and more importantly, would like to watch and remember Joe Gores at the top of his game, you can do no better than to view the video record made of that Pleasanton event. I’ve embedded our discussion in six parts below.













A transcription of our discussion can be found here.

One final thing: I was sorry there wasn’t a special tribute or panel discussion devoted to Joe Gores during last October’s Bouchercon in San Francisco. Not only because he had made the city so much a part of his writing over the years, but because Spade & Archer brought a new wave of attention to Hammett’s relatively brief but important connection with San Francisco. There were many people at Bouchercon--authors and readers alike--who could have benefited from learning about (or teaching others about) Joe’s efforts on behalf of crime fiction.

It’s not really my place to suggest this, but perhaps Film Noir Foundation president Eddie Muller could somehow honor Joe during the ninth edition of Noir City, the San Francisco Film Noir festival, coming up later this month. Might I recommend a showing of Hammett, the 1982 movie made from Joe’s 1975 novel of the same name, in which a slightly fictionalized Dashiell Hammett himself takes center stage?

(Author photograph by Mark Coggins. Used with permission.)

UPDATE: A New York Times obituary quotes Gores’ stepdaughter, Gillian Monserrat, as saying that the author died from “complications of bleeding ulcers.” Meanwhile, Janet Rudolph reports in Mystery Fanfare that a memorial mass for Gores “will be held Friday, January 21, at 11:30 [a.m.], St. Sebastian Catholic Church” in Greenbrae, California.

READ MORE: “R.I.P., Joe Gores (1931-2011),” by Bill Pronzini and Steve Lewis (Mystery*File); “Mort: Joe Gores,” by Don Herron (Up and Down These Mean Streets); “Joe Gores, R.I.P.,” by Ed Gorman (Ed Gorman’s Blog); “Joe Gores,” by Russel D. McLean (Do Some Damage); “Joe Gores: The Telegraph Obituary,” by Michael Carlson (Irresistible Targets).

Gone, No Forewarning

As has been reported elsewhere, San Francisco crime novelist Joe Gores--creator of the Dan Kearney and Associates (DKA files) series, and the author of Spade & Archer, his prequel to Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon--has passed away at age 79.

More details to follow.

Title Search

I received a query the other day from a Rap Sheet reader who’s trying to locate a couple of novels, the names of which he can’t remember. I don’t recognize the books either, so I’m hoping that somebody else out there will help. Here’s the reader’s note:

I recently saw a reference to Joe Gores that reminded me of a wonderful, and unpublicized, twist he and Donald Westlake, writing as Richard Stark, pulled off several years ago. If my recall is accurate, Gores had a scene in one of his books describing one of the Dan Kearney and Associates (the DKA files) skip tracers following a lead and knocking on a house door in the Bay Area. The door was answered by Parker, Stark’s go-to bad guy, who gave the guy an acceptable answer and off the investigator went, none the wiser. Parker and his gang were at the house planning a caper and were quite suspicious when the DKA investigator showed up at the door. Joe Gores writes the scene from the eyes of the DKA investigator and Westlake (Stark) writes it from the perspective of Parker. Can you recall the names of the two books, one by Joe Gores and one by Richard Stark, that these scenes appear in? I had one of those déjà vu moments when reading the scene in the Stark book after reading the Gores book months before.

Thanks for your help.

If you know the titles this reader is seeking, please share that information in the Comments section of this post.

“Spade & Archer”: Can You Dig It?

My long-awaited (at least by me) review of Joe Gores’ most recent novel, the Maltese Falcon prequel Spade & Archer, has been posted on the Barnes & Noble Review page.

Before the Black Bird

On February 14, 2009, the 79th anniversary of the publication of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, San Francisco author Joe Gores (left) came to the “M” Is for Mystery bookshop in San Mateo, California, to discuss and sign his prequel to that iconic novel, Spade & Archer (Knopf).

Publisher and Hammett expert Vince Emery was on hand to interview Gores, but he also managed to work in a plug for an exciting new book project: Don Herron’s The Dashiell Hammett Tour: Thirtieth Anniversary Guidebook, which is scheduled for publication on March 16. That expanded edition of the book includes a preface by Jo Hammett (a surviving Hammett daughter), as well as an introduction by the late noir great Charles Willeford (Miami Blues).

Gores started the discussion by giving some of the back story on how his new novel came to be, covering a lot of the same ground he did during this videotaped interview I did with him as part of the NEA’s “Big Read” program at the Pleasanton Public Library in 2007 (start at about 1:37 to hear what he has to say about Spade & Archer).

At “M” Is for Mystery, Gores credited Hammett biographer Richard Layman, in particular, with the idea for doing a prequel. It seems Layman had once commented to Gores that Falcon was the great existential novel, since the reader is dropped into the middle of the action, is never allowed to enter into Spade’s head, and is given almost no background on any of the other characters. That motivated Gores to try to explain a few things in his novel, such as how Spade developed into the hard-boiled SOB he was, why he didn’t like guns or his partner, Miles Archer, and how he came to be having an affair with Archer’s wife, Iva.

Early on in Spade & Archer, for instance, we learn that Spade started out in Spokane, Washington, as a Continental operative (yes, the same Continental Detective Agency for which Hammett’s other famous fictional character, the nameless Continental Op, worked). There he went out with Iva (née Ida Nolan) before volunteering to fight in World War I with the Canadian army. Iva apparently tired of waiting for Spade and married Archer instead, leading to the animosity between Archer and Spade and Spade’s willingness to go “back to the well,” as it were.

Gores explained to his audience that the reason he put Spade in Spokane was because Hammett had mentioned that he based the character of Iva on a woman who worked in a bookstore there. Another Easter egg Gores inserted in the book for the Hammett (and Raymond Chandler) cognoscenti is that Spade’s regiment and uniform would have been the same as the real-life regiment and uniform Chandler fought with and wore in World War I.

At one point, Vince Emery (right) talked about the reception for this new novel, noting that it has received starred reviews from all of the trade publications, as well as raves in newspapers such as the San Francisco Chronicle, where local mystery writer Cara Black recently sang its praises.

Gores was pleased to see all the printed reviews, but it seems the most gratifying comment he received for the book came from Jo Hammett, who said that at times she forgot whether Gores or her father had written the prose, so Hammett-like did it read to her.

I had a little time to talk with Joe Gores before the event and he pointed out a dagger lapel pin he was wearing on his sport coat. He said that the pin was a gift from the Hammett family in appreciation of his effort--and that the pin had a special tie-in with the book.

At the event’s end, I joined a long line with the other attendees hoping to pick up a signed copy of Spade & Archer and have a picture taken with its author. I also took the opportunity to present Gores with a little gift of my own: a framed copy of my Spade and Archer photo, taken last year at the Dashiell Hammett Suite in San Francisco’s Hotel Union Square.

Authors both: Joe Gores with Mark Coggins

Calling a Spade a Gem

Only Joe Gores, the former private eye whose 16 fine novels include Hammett (1975), would have the guts to write Spade & Archer, the brand-new prequel to Dashiell Hammett’s famous 1929 novel, The Maltese Falcon--a feat akin to writing a new first volume of the Book of Genesis. And his story works, showing how the San Francisco private-eye firm came together and what Miles Archer was really like, and including many snazzy plot twists.

READ MORE: “Joe Gores on The Maltese Falcon,” by Nathan Cain (Independent Crime); “Even Death Can’t Keep Hammett Down,” by J. Kingston Pierce (Rap Sheet).

Even Death Can’t Keep Hammett Down

2008 isn’t even over--there’s still a presidential election to go, in addition to Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and Christmas. Yet I’m already anticipating the release of two historical crime novels next year--both having in some way to do with Dashiell Hammett, and the covers of which have suddenly appeared online.

The book that has me most excited at the moment is San Francisco author Joe Gores’ Maltese Falcon prequel, Spade & Archer. It’s set in 1921 and finds private eye Sam Spade taking on Miles Archer as his partner, even though Spade is still pissed at the man for stealing “his girl” while he was off fighting in World War I. The jacket art, shown at left, very much resembles the black-and-white title graphics of early 20th-century movie trailers, and should be eye-catching on bookstore shelves. Spade & Archer is due out from Alfred A. Knopf in February, though I’d be happy to get my hands on a copy well in advance of that. Even if Gores’ effort falls short of what readers might want from a Maltese Falcon prequel, this novel’s release will still be a historic event, no less significant than the 1989 publication of Poodle Springs, Robert B. Parker’s completion of a novel Raymond Chandler left unfinished at his death in 1959.

Due out in early April is Devil’s Garden, by Ace Atkins. It’s based on the scandalous, real-life 1921 death of 30-year-old actress wannabe Virginia Rappe, who breathed her last in a guest room at San Francisco’s downtown St. Francis Hotel--supposedly murdered during a sexual assault by famous film funnyman Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. The cover at right is in the same haunting, split-image style of Atkins’ previous two historical crime-fiction standalones, White Shadow (2006) and Wicked City (2008). Devil’s Garden shows what appears to be a San Francisco street on top, with the silhouette of a walking man on the bottom--ostensibly the shadow of Hammett, who in 1921 was working for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. In Atkins’ tale, the future author is assigned to investigate the Rappe murder by Arbuckle’s lawyers--just as he did in history. The San Francisco Chronicle recalled a few years back that Hammett worked for the Pinkertons “until he became too sick to spend nights in the frigid fog tailing some mark. One of his last jobs was snooping for the defense in the scandalous case of Roscoe Fatty Arbuckle ...” Hammett, the paper noted, “thought Arbuckle was framed by the district attorney.”

As much as I wish to revel in the closing weeks of this year, when I can finally relax a bit, after writing two historical non-fiction books in 11 months, I am looking forward to devouring Gores’ and Atkins’ latest novels in the first months of 2009.

It’s good to have goals, right?

Before the Beginning

So there I was, just leafing through the Alfred A. Knopf Spring 2009 publishing catalogue, when what should I spy but a page devoted to Spade & Archer, the impatiently awaited Maltese Falcon prequel by San Francisco author Joe Gores. While Amazon says that this novel is due out on February 10, the Knopf catalogue gives its publication date as April 2009. Here’s the short write-up:

A gritty, pitch-perfect noir novel: the authorized prequel to Dashiell Hammett’s classic, The Maltese Falcon.

We know what P.I. Sam Spade is about from the first pages of Hammett’s iconic book: straight talk, no favors, a protective shell he wears like a second skin. We know that his late partner, Miles Archer, was a son of a bitch; that Spade is sleeping with Archer’s wife, Iva; that his tomboyish secretary, Effie, is the only innocent in his life. What we don’t know is how Spade became who he is. Now, Spade & Archer completes the picture.

In 1921, Spade sets up his own agency in San Francisco. The next seven years see him dealing with booze runners, banking swindlers, gold smugglers, bumbling cops, and the illegitimate daughter of Sun Yat-sen; with murder, other men’s mistresses, and long-missing money. He’ll take on Archer as a partner, though Archer stole his girl while he was fighting in World War I. He’ll tangle with a villain who’s planned what he thinks is the perfect crime. And he’ll fall in love--though it won’t turn out for the best. It never does with dames ...

The work of a master mystery writer, Spade & Archer is destined to become a classic in its own right.

Coming from the author of Hammett (1975) and the DKA series, I’m hoping this will be one slam-bang, gams and guns and guts thriller. Do I really have to wait until next spring to find out?

Be Generous, Mr. Gores

Wouldn’t you know it? Not long after posting yesterday’s Carnival of the Criminal Minds extravaganza, I happened to visit Mark Coggins’ blog and see that he’d added a link to the third and final part of his audio interview with author Joe Gores (Glass Tiger, Hammett). In it, Gores addresses one of the subjects that was most on my mind yesterday: the Maltese Falcon prequel he is supposed to be preparing for print.

As I already knew, that novel will be called Spade & Archer. What I didn’t know, but that Gores relates during Coggins’ interview, is that his story will cover a period of time stretching between 1921 and 1928 (when the mysterious affair of the Maltese Falcon erupted); that it will relate how San Francisco private eye Sam Spade met his future partner, Miles Archer, and why he became so hardened; and that it will explain how, during World War I, Spade originally met and lost Iva, the woman who would subsequently marry Archer--all stuff that Dashiell Hammett left out of his 1930 novel. Gores suggests as well that Spade & Archer will contain lots of Chinese immigration history, plus a bit about San Francisco’s Greek community.

According to Joe Gores, Spade & Archer will be released by Alfred A. Knopf (which was Hammett’s publisher) sometime in mid-2008. That is excellent news, indeed.

To listen to the third part of Coggins’ talk with Gores, click here. Parts I and II are here and here, respectively.

FOLLOW-UP: Did you know that several U.S. communities have adopted The Maltese Falcon as their National Endowment for the Arts-sponsored “Big Read” project? Elizabeth Foxwell directs us to the schedule of associate events.

READ MORE: “891 Post Street,” by Mark Coggins.

Assignment: Munich

If you were alive and reading detective fiction in the late 1980s and early ’90s, you probably recognize the name Bernie Gunther. The captivating creation of then still-green British novelist Philip Kerr, Gunther started out (in March Violets, 1989) as a 38-year-old ex-soldier and former Berlin cop, who in 1936--during the run-up to World War II--worked the often seedy streets of Adolf Hitler’s capital as a private eye specializing in missing-persons cases, of which there were appallingly many. Tough-guy Gunther went on to star in two more novels, The Pale Criminal (1990), and German Requiem (1991), the latter of which finds the war over, Berlin in shambles, and Bernie married and seeking some solace in Vienna. But after that third book, his adventures were over. Kaput. Kerr went on to other things, writing a number of standalone crime works (such as 1993’s Dead Meat, 1999’s The Shot, and his wonderful Sir Isaac Newton sleuthing yarn, 2002’s Dark Matter). He even branched out into children’s lit, penning a series of fantastical novels under the name P.B. Kerr.

But now it seems Bernie Gunther is returning from the grave. G.P. Putnam’s Sons’ fall 2006 catalogue contains a page devoted to The One from the Other, the unexpected fourth installment of Kerr’s memorable historical P.I. series, due out in early September. Apparently, much has changed since we last checked in on our cynical German hero. As Putnam explains:

For Bernie Gunther, Berlin has become too dangerous, and he now works as a private detective in Munich. Business is slow and his funds are dwindling when a woman hires him to investigate her husband’s disappearance. No, she doesn’t want him back--he’s a war criminal. She merely wants confirmation that he is dead. It’s a simple job, but in postwar Germany, nothing is simple--nothing is what it appears to be. Accepting the case, Bernie takes on far more than he’d bargained for, and before long, he is on the run, facing enemies from every side.

At 400 pages long, it sounds like a classic Gunther thriller. The question is, though, whether author Kerr intends to stop with The One from the Other, or will be continuing the Gunther series from this point onward.

* * *

Speaking of books to be on the watch for, Mark Coggins reported on his blog not so long ago that author Joe Gores, who in his 1975 thriller, Hammett, imagined detective-turned-novelist Dashiell Hammett returning to the mean streets of San Francisco in pursuit of a killer, is going to write a prequel to The Maltese Falcon (1930), which introduced private eye Sam Spade. In a letter to Coggins, Gores explains that “My title is Spade & Archer and I’m revving up the research right now. I have my own research from 1975 for Hammett, and am digging out a great deal of new stuff now. I hope to start writing the novel in March or April ... It is a really exciting project to be working on.”

You can say that again. Sign me up for a copy.