Successful Spadework

Detective-fiction readers hate saying the long goodbye. They want new cases solved by their favorite sleuths even after those heroes' author/creators have died. Publishers and estates sometimes oblige them. Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe was resuscitated at the hands of Robert B. Parker. Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe entertained more clients with the help of Robert Goldsborough. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes is ever with us, thanks to dozens of pastiche artists. But until a year ago, no writer had been allowed to summon the ghost of Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade, the 1920s San Francisco private eye who starred in three short stories and the classic 1930 novel "The Maltese Falcon."

Hammett's sole surviving relative, Jo Hammett Marshall, his daughter, didn't think anyone anyone could ever do a good follow-up piece on it." 

Joe Gores, a Northern California author whose books include the 1975 novel "Hammett," and who—like Mrs. Marshall's father—worked as a detective before turning to a life of fiction. "I said, 'I can't write a sequel to it,'" he recalls telling Mrs. Marshall during a 2005 celebration marking the 75th anniversary of "Falcon"'s publication, noting that most of the book's main characters by the end are dead or in prison, except for Spade. He proposed writing a prequel instead.


"Vince Emery, the publisher who did Hammett's 'Lost Stories,' gave me a whole bunch of research books," says Mr. Gores. "Jo [Hammett Marshall] sent me books about Sun Yat-sen. That's how I came up with the plot for the Chinese girl. And there's a research librarian at the Fairfax [California] library, Theresa McGovern, who is fantastic." (In tribute, Mr. Gores has Sam Spade encounter a Bay Area librarian named Theresa McGovern.)