Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, May 26, 1994                   TAG: 9405260067
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: By JAMES O. CLIFFORD ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO                                LENGTH: Medium

TO DASHIELL HAMMETT FANS, HIS POPULARITY IS NO MYSTERY

Mystery writer Linda Grant says the end of this month is when readers begin stocking up on books for vacation.

Hammett, born May 27, 1894, will undoubtedly be on many shopping lists, since such classics as ``The Maltese Falcon,'' ``The Dain Curse,'' ``The Glass Key,'' ``Red Harvest'' and ``The Thin Man'' are required reading for mystery fans.

Hammett entered this world in Great Mills, Md., described as ``just a spot in the road'' by Lois Coryell, the reference librarian for St. Mary's County, Md.

``Some distant relatives still live here, but there's nothing planned that I know of to mark the occasion,'' she said about the anniversary of Hammett's birth.

The event may go unnoticed there, but it certainly won't in San Francisco, where Hammett was first published and wrote most of his novels.

Grant and fellow members of the Mystery Writers of America have devoted an entire issue of Mystery Week magazine to Hammett. They've also held Hammett panel discussions and a walking tour of the many spots in San Francisco associated with the author.

Remembering Hammett is a minor industry in his adopted city. Don Herron, appropriately clad in trench coat and snapbrim hat, led similar treks for 18 years.

Now semiretired, Herron took small groups to places where Hammett lived or worked and to the haunts given a life of their own in his books.

Many people are lured to the tours by the movie adaptations of Hammett's books, said Herron.

Herron, author of ``The Literary World of San Francisco & Its Environs,'' rates Hammett's San Francisco as ``one of the great literary treatments of a city.'' He places it in the same category as Joyce's Dublin or Dickens' London ``for its evocation of place and time, the days in the 1920s when night-fog cloaked the hills and a certain fat man was afoot.''

That may seem like hyperbole, but Herron's praise is added to a long list of kudos, including Raymond Chandler's view that Hammett ``wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.''

Earlier detective novels often were refined and bloodless, with suspects gathered in the mansion drawing room to hear the sleuth expound logic and exclaim: ``The butler did it.''

Sure, there were some tough guy gum-shoes in the pulp magazines of the 1920s where Hammett, who died in 1961, got his start. But Hammett gave them long-lasting life in his books.

Hammett, along with Chandler, established ``the tradition many of us write out of today, a subgenre that is enjoying a second golden age,'' said Grant, a Berkeley author whose most recent novel is ``A Woman's Place.''

But things change a great deal, if modern plots devised by many San Francisco Bay area writers are an indication.

Grant's book involved sexual harassment at a software company. William Babula, a teacher at Sonoma State University, has his character, San Francisco private eye Jeremiah St. John, on the ``trail of nine cats liberated from a university experiment by an animal rights group.''

And, of course, there's Susan Dunlap of Albany, billed as ``one of President Bill Clinton's favorite mystery writers.'' In ``Time Expired,'' she delves into a campaign to humiliate meter maids that gets out of hand.