Following his hospital discharge, on June 2, 1921, Hammett wrote her from Spokane to explain his own plans. He was healthier but nearly broke, and the “fat heads” in charge of Camp Kearney had offered “a ticket to Spokane or nothing.” He inquired innocently about the timetable for Jose’s “vacation,” and sometime later in June learned the truth behind her leaving her job. She was pregnant. The letter in which he discovered he would be a father is missing; nor does Jose seem to have saved his answer, in which he presumably offered to marry her. Perhaps she wasn’t proud of the circumstances around her marriage, or simply didn’t want to help her children figure out the math behind the proposal’s timing. “I haven’t any plans for the future,” he wrote her that June, “but I reckon things will work out in some manner.” 3
From Spokane he went to Seattle for about a week, and then, if the Hammett-like narrator of his novel fragment Tulip is to be believed, he planned to visit San Francisco for perhaps two months “before going home to Baltimore.” But he would never move back, staying on in San Francisco, a wide-open port town whose hills ran spectacularly down to the sea and whose people were taking the recent Volstead Act in easy stride in its wine flats and speakeasies. The town was run, in the grateful words of the city’s most successful madame, by “municipal swashbucklers.” This was probably the most beautiful place Hammett had ever been, a “sunpainted” town when the mists burned away, where he could find weekly fights at the Mission Armory, and trolleys and cable cars made it easier to do without an automobile.
“You’re from San Francisco?” a character asks in one of his Op stories. “I remember the funny little streetcars, and the fog,and the salad right after the soup, and Coffee Dan’s,” a downstairs speakeasy that guests entered by a slide and could beat the tables with wooden mallets if they liked the show. There was nothing like that in Spokane, Tacoma, Seattle, or Butte.
Hammett was thoroughly charmed by San Francisco, despite its being a steep city on foot, prone to a fog that was “thin, clammy, and penetrant,” and not ideal for his recovery. But beyond its hillsides and mournful ferry horns it was home to a criminal class that was growing with Prohibition—rumrunners, racketeers, and high-living politicians—a range of characters irresistible to a man trained in the cultivation of crooks. The city’s profitably lenient mayor, “Sunny Jim” Rolph, was a far cry from the dour preachers Hammett encountered elsewhere around the country. The combination made the town heady and attractive, if he could find any money for a family and his lungs improved. With nothing saved and having been in the hospital again since his discharge from Camp Kearney, Hammett asked Jose to join him in San Francisco and start their life together.
She came out by train from Montana the first week of July, and for chaste appearances he put up his pregnant fiancée in a hotel off Union Square, the Golden West (now Hotel Union Square), while they waited to get married. Hammett himself stayed in rooms across Ellis Street from Jose’s hotel. The wedding ceremony occurred on July 7 at St. Mary’s Cathedral, ** in the rectory rather than the nave because Hammett was notonly undevout (“I haven’t any God except Josephine,” he’d written her) but also vague about whether he had been baptized (in fact, he had). Then the couple moved into a ten-year-old apartment building in the Tenderloin district, at 620 Eddy Street, the Crawford Apartments.
“I … brought my still-frayed lungs to San Francisco,” he remembered, “and returned to sleuthing.” In the Crawford Apartments, the couple would start their family life and Hammett, frayed lungs or not, would have a few more detecting adventures before he was invalided out.
----
* Like “Joe’s.”
** Some errors about Josephine’s family
From Spokane he went to Seattle for about a week, and then, if the Hammett-like narrator of his novel fragment Tulip is to be believed, he planned to visit San Francisco for perhaps two months “before going home to Baltimore.” But he would never move back, staying on in San Francisco, a wide-open port town whose hills ran spectacularly down to the sea and whose people were taking the recent Volstead Act in easy stride in its wine flats and speakeasies. The town was run, in the grateful words of the city’s most successful madame, by “municipal swashbucklers.” This was probably the most beautiful place Hammett had ever been, a “sunpainted” town when the mists burned away, where he could find weekly fights at the Mission Armory, and trolleys and cable cars made it easier to do without an automobile.
“You’re from San Francisco?” a character asks in one of his Op stories. “I remember the funny little streetcars, and the fog,and the salad right after the soup, and Coffee Dan’s,” a downstairs speakeasy that guests entered by a slide and could beat the tables with wooden mallets if they liked the show. There was nothing like that in Spokane, Tacoma, Seattle, or Butte.
Hammett was thoroughly charmed by San Francisco, despite its being a steep city on foot, prone to a fog that was “thin, clammy, and penetrant,” and not ideal for his recovery. But beyond its hillsides and mournful ferry horns it was home to a criminal class that was growing with Prohibition—rumrunners, racketeers, and high-living politicians—a range of characters irresistible to a man trained in the cultivation of crooks. The city’s profitably lenient mayor, “Sunny Jim” Rolph, was a far cry from the dour preachers Hammett encountered elsewhere around the country. The combination made the town heady and attractive, if he could find any money for a family and his lungs improved. With nothing saved and having been in the hospital again since his discharge from Camp Kearney, Hammett asked Jose to join him in San Francisco and start their life together.
She came out by train from Montana the first week of July, and for chaste appearances he put up his pregnant fiancée in a hotel off Union Square, the Golden West (now Hotel Union Square), while they waited to get married. Hammett himself stayed in rooms across Ellis Street from Jose’s hotel. The wedding ceremony occurred on July 7 at St. Mary’s Cathedral, ** in the rectory rather than the nave because Hammett was notonly undevout (“I haven’t any God except Josephine,” he’d written her) but also vague about whether he had been baptized (in fact, he had). Then the couple moved into a ten-year-old apartment building in the Tenderloin district, at 620 Eddy Street, the Crawford Apartments.
“I … brought my still-frayed lungs to San Francisco,” he remembered, “and returned to sleuthing.” In the Crawford Apartments, the couple would start their family life and Hammett, frayed lungs or not, would have a few more detecting adventures before he was invalided out.
----
* Like “Joe’s.”
** Some errors about Josephine’s family
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