SF Murder Mystery
September 7, 2010
The SF Kid brings us Dell murder mystery novels set in SF, with maps.
No crime in the Mission? Clearly fiction.
Oh no, big trouble in Bernal Heights:
Hey, it’s Big Flora!
Hmm, any relation to Flora Grubb? I can see it now: “MURDER AMONG THE PALMS!” Or — “RITUAL SUICIDE!”
Hey, this gives me an idea. Please leave your ideas for current day SF murder titles in the comments. No Maltese Falcon, but some starter ideas:
“STREET FOOD PSYCHOPATH!”
“VALENCIA – A BICYCLE BUILT FOR DEATH!”
“BURRITO BLOODBATH!”
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Burrito Justice 
Way Way Way Too Much Habanero
From “The Big Knockover” by Dashiell Hammett:
“Between us we finally convinced him that his only safe bet was to go somewhere where he could hide while he got the right kind of care. We didn’t actually convince him — we wore him out and he gave in because he was too weak to argue longer.
He gave me an address out by Holly Park.
Hoping for the best, I pointed the machine thither.
The house was a small one in a row of small houses. We took the big boy out of the car and between us to the door. He could just about make it with our help. The street was dark. No light showed from the house. I rang the bell.
Nothing happened.”
This is Big Flora’s house. She has “the look and the poise of a woman who could have managed the looting and the double-crossing afterward.” It has an upstairs, because Red O’Leary, the wounded man who told Percy Maguire (the narrator) to go to the house, is taken up to lie on a bed. The window and back door are “reinforced with heavy planking and braced with timbers nailed to the floor.” There’s a cellar, where Maguire and a “shabby little old man” hide with the proceeds of the loot.
I wonder if Hammett really ever came to 94110? In “Fly Paper,” he does “spend the night in a dump over on Army Street”!