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…