A few days after this picture of 11th and Pacific was taken a steel girder frame skyscraper started going up.

A few weeks after the June 1920 photo was made a young Spokane based Pinkerton detective named Samuel Hammett began experiencing the early stages of tuberculosis.

A few months after the photo Hammett arrived in Tacoma and was admitted to the Cushman Public Health hospital after his weight dropped below 130 pounds. He was coughing blood.

Six months after the photo, a young beat cop fired a warning shot at a running figure in the dark warehouse district. The man died from the completely random ricochet off a granite curb. He was a forty nine year old carpenter named Samuel Hamblet and the chilling name similiarity was noted by the young detective.

Seven months after the photo, work stopped abruptly on the Scandinavian Bank Building being constructed on the corner leaving an iron skeleton on Tacoma’s most prominant intersection.

Nine months after the photo, Hammett relocated to a hospital in California leaving behind the nurse who would become his future wife and memories of standing with her on the corner.

Two years after the photo, Hammett was married with a daughter, living in San Francisco and recovered enough to get his first short story published by H.L. Mencken.

Nine years after the photo Dashiell Hammett published an American literary masterpiece, The Maltese Falcon. In the book a man named Flitcraft stands on the corner in the photo. He narrowly avoids being killed by a steel I-beam that falls off an uncompleted skyscraper.

Today the corner is occupied by the Washington Building, once Tacoma’s tallest skyscraper and forever the inspiration for Noir fiction.

Tacoma Artist Stan Shaw’s graphic retelling of the Flitcraft Parable from Dashiell Hammett’s Maltese Falcon

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