Up in Sam Spade’s Room

[Bill Arney, who passed away the other day, is known mostly as the hardboiled growl behind the curtain as the Noir City Film Festival at the Castro Theatre. For most the festival’s run until 2020, it was he who introduced host and Noir City found Eddie Muller before each screening. I’d met Bill through literary historian Don Herron in the mid-1990s at one of the occasional tributes to The Maltese Falcon held at John’s Grill, in San Francisco, where I also met Dashiell Hammett’s daughter Jo, and his granddaughter, Julie Rivett.

It was a hell of a time as Bill and I hoisted our share at several watering holes in the City. But time moved on and so did we. We’d always hoped to get together again . . . but mourning is always seeded with regret at chances missed. My wife and I last saw him at Noir Alley 2019, as we were leaving, standing outside, dapper in his tux. He missed the next year but I figured he’d be back. I hate being wrong about things like this, especially this time.

The following piece, first posted on my old page in 2009, tells of one of our last evenings together at the Bill’s apartment on Post Street, the very apartment where Dashiell Hammett wrote the Maltese Falcon in the late 1920s. It’s a swell story. Fortunately, a local philanthropist, Robert Mailer Anderson, stepped in, took over the apartment and has kept it as Bill left it, a most fitting memory.]