So Hammett quit and took a full-time job as the advertising manager for a jeweler. When Cody refused, it was the last straw for Hammett, who was already frustrated with the insistence on stories with more action and annoyed by an outstanding payment of $300 he believed was due to him. In the fall of 1925, Hammett learned that his wife, Jose, was pregnant with their second child, and he needed a raise-an increase in the rate-per-word paid for his stories, which were largely responsible for the magazine’s growth in readership. Published in the March 1926 issue of The Black Mask, “Creeping Siamese” is the last Hammett story to appear under the editorship of Philip C. Fans and biographers-and Hammett himself-have pointed to other stories that contain elements that he perfected in The Maltese Falcon, such as the final scene of “ The Gutting of Couffignal,” which is a rough preview of the famous climactic confrontation between Sam Spade and Brigid O’Shaughnessy. It wasn’t the first time Dashiell Hammett had used such a scene in his fiction the 1926 story “Creeping Siamese” opens with a tall man entering the offices of the Continental Detective Agency and dropping dead on the floor. The man, Captain Jacobi, was dead on the spot, having delivered to Spade the mysterious falcon, which turns out to be a fake-assuming the “real” statue ever existed.

Holding himself stiffly straight, not putting his hands out to break his fall, he fell forward as a tree falls. He put his other hand over the hand that held the ellipsoid. He said, 'You know-' and then the liquid bubbling came up in his throat and submerged whatever else he said. The tall man stood in the doorway and there was nothing to show that he saw Spade. In “The Third Murder,” a memorable chapter from The Maltese Falcon, a gruff man “nearly seven feet tall,” clutching a football-shaped parcel, staggers into Sam Spade’s office. In the wake of the box-office success of the 1941 adaptation of The Maltese Falcon, King Features licensed several early Hammett stories for republication. This copy is from the El Paso Times, May 31, 1942, and is courtesy of Davy Crockett’s Almanack.

Title illustration by Stuart Hamilton for “The Case of the Creeping Siamese,” a reprint of the 1924 story “Creeping Siamese” distributed by King Features Syndicate to newspapers for their Sunday supplements in 1942.

“ Experience of a Chinese Journalist,” Wong Chin Fooĭashiell Hammett: Crime Stories & Other Writings.

“ Zigzags of Treachery,” Dashiell Hammett.

“ The Complete Continental Op: An Interview with Dashiell Hammett's Granddaughter, Julie M. “ America’s ‘smartest and most literate detective story author’” (Richard Layman, Christie’s)

Gumshoe America by Sean McCann