Vintage crime, vintage cars

Yesterday I wrote about Dashiell Hammett. Today some cars from Hammett's time showed up at the DooWop Car Show & Street Festival in my neighborhood, though I heard no doo-wop, just three guys playing Credence Clearwater Revival and Stealers Wheel on acoustic guitar, drum machine and electric keyboard.

Nick and Nora Charles could have waved out of that first car's window to well-wishers in mid-town Manhattan. The Continental Op would have felt at home leaning out the same window firing shots, and Sam Spade might have rifled the interior for registration papers.

(John Huston's 1941 film of The Maltese Falcon has made such a strong impression that some people may forget Hammett wrote almost all his fiction in the 1920s and early '30s. The Ford Model A that I saw today and that you see at the top of this post rolled off the assembly line in 1929, the same year The Maltese Falcon began appearing in serial form in Black Mask.)

This little number at left takes us into late Raymond Chandler territory, and which fictional detective would have driven the humongous licorice-and-strawberry ice cream sundae on wheels that brings this post to a close? Travis McGee? James Garner's Philip Marlowe, perhaps?

Which cars (or other modes of transport) do you associate most closely with a favorite fictional detective, story or movie?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010