Take a walk through streets of San Francisco in Sam Spade's shoes

SAN FRANCISCO — It was cool outside. The rain had stopped, but the dampness seeped into our bones with the chill of death. We walked from our hotel down through the Tenderloin, a no man's land of desperate panhandlers, to John's Grill, where we took a window table on the second floor and ordered the chops, baked potato and sliced tomato.

This was the meal Sam Spade ordered in the hard-boiled mystery classic "The Maltese Falcon." We didn't ask the waiter to hurry it, as Spade did. We had no other place to be. We ate, then sat back and waited to see if a "youngish man with a plaid cap set askew above pale eyes" would come tell us the car was ready for a run to Burlingame to rescue Brigid O'Shaughnessy.

'Falcon' trail

Dashiell Hammett Tour

Four-hour walking tours led by Don Herron. Noon each Sunday in May, departing from 100 Larkin St., San Francisco. $10. No reservations. Also short tours for groups by arrangement, $5 per person. More information: www.donherron.com

Hammett sites

• The Flood Building, 870 Market St., downtown. Historic 1904 office building where Hammett worked for the Pinkerton Agency. www.floodbuilding.com

• Hammett's apartment, 891 Post St., downtown. Where Hammett wrote "The Maltese Falcon" and thought by fans to be the model for Sam Spade's apartment.

• Burritt Street: This Nob Hill alley south of Bush Street, just west of Stockton Street, is where Spade's partner, Miles Archer, was murdered in "The Maltese Falcon."

Hammett eatery

John's Grill, 63 Ellis St., Union Square. Old-style chophouse, packed with tables, where Sam Spade waited for his car. Entrees $20-$30. 415-986-3274 or www.johnsgrill.com.

Tourist info

San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau: 415-391-2000 or

www.sfvisitor.org/

Traveler's tip

The guidebook "San Francisco Noir"(by Nathaniel Rich, The Little Bookroom, $17.95) describes city sights linked to dozens of film-noir movies, including "The Maltese Falcon."

Los Angeles Times and Seattle Times staff

No man in a cap showed. Still, the moment was fun.

In the 75 years since Dashiell Hammett maneuvered private detective Sam Spade through the streets of San Francisco in his mystery novel, this city has changed. But not so much that "Falcon" fans can't still find the ghost of Spade's partner, Miles Archer, hovering "where Bush Street roofed Stockton before slipping downhill to Chinatown" — the alley where O'Shaughnessy plugged him.

Part of the fun of "The Maltese Falcon" (which later became an enduringly popular noir film) is Hammett's emphasis on place as much as character, moving Spade among hotels, restaurants and apartment buildings selected from the writer's haunts in the 1920s.

Don Herron, a cabby, part-time writer and Hammett fanatic, has been leading walking tours through the heart of San Francisco since the 1970s, pointing out the past, both real and fictional. On a spring day, , my 14-year-old son, Michael, and I caught a short afternoon tour. (The long version covers three miles in four hours.) Fog would have added to the fun — Spade awakened one night to the lonely echo of the Alcatraz foghorn — but we got rain.

We started at the Flood Building, where Hammett worked intermittently from 1915 to 1921 as a detective for the Pinkerton Agency. Herron whisked us past a small display in the lobby and out the Ellis Street door to John's Grill, marked by a plaque and a falcon silhouette on its awning. It's the only restaurant where Spade ate that still exists.

"The Maltese Falcon" begins with O'Shaughnessy — using a fake name — hiring Spade and Archer to find her sister by trailing Floyd Thursby, who she said was helping the girl. It's a ruse; O'Shaughnessy, Thursby and three others are all looking for the Maltese falcon, a priceless statue whose gem-encrusted surface is hidden beneath black enamel. Thursby and Archer get murdered, and Spade's pursuit of the killers — and the falcon — propels the plot.

As we walked, Herron pointed out key spots and a detail new to us. For reasons that remain unclear, Hammett used real restaurants in his books but gave hotels pseudonyms. In an intriguing hair split, he identified the Palace Hotel because Spade ate there, but no characters checked in.

Our soggy trek continued along Geary, passing the intersection with Leavenworth (where Thursby was gunned down) before arriving at 891 Post St., where Hammett lived from 1926 to 1929 and wrote "The Maltese Falcon" and two other novels, "Red Harvest" and "The Dain Curse."

Herron and other aficionados think Hammett lived in a corner unit on the fourth floor, though some hold it was the third. A plaque was added to the outside of the building this spring marking it as a literary landmark.

A friend of Herron's has rented the fourth-floor studio, so it often is included on the walking tour, as it was this day. In the late 1920s, Hammett was married with two children but had contracted tuberculosis, so he took this small apartment with a Murphy bed to avoid infecting his family. Fans believe he made it Spade's apartment too.

This is where Spade had his run-ins with the police, his romantic encounter with O'Shaughnessy and his showdown with Gutman, Cook and Cairo. And it's where, placing justice ahead of emotion, he handed O'Shaughnessy to the cops.

Soaked, we peeled off Herron's tour here and grabbed a cab to our hotel. After drying out, we hopped on a cable car, jumping off at Stockton for the key "Maltese Falcon" setting: Burritt Street, actually a dead-end alley where Archer was killed, his body tumbling downhill to the Stockton tunnel. A plaque marks the spot, but the slope where Archer died has been built over. There's a massage parlor there now.

Saturday, after doing more traditional tourist things — Chinatown and Fisherman's Wharf — we were back in the heart of Hammett's San Francisco, at John's Grill for our 6:30 reservation.

We were sent up a back staircase to the Maltese Falcon Room, where movie stills and other "Falconalia" line the walls. Our corner table at the window overlooking Ellis Street was in turn watched over by Archer himself — a black-and-white of actor Jerome Cowan.

The restaurant nudges up to the line of overdoing the "Falcon" connection. The menu includes a "Bloody Brigid" vodka drink and, of course, the "Sam Spade lamb chops" with a baked potato and sliced tomato, though Hammett never specified whether Spade ate lamb or pork. Enjoying the meal, like enjoying the fiction, required a certain suspension of skepticism.