Joe Gores was the son Dashiell Hammett never had.

An accomplished mystery writer in his own right, Gores devoted two books to channeling the father of hard-boiled detective fiction: the  1975 novel Hammett, and the 2009 prequel to The Maltese Falcon, Spade & Archer.

From Friday’s New York Times obituary:

In “Hammett“ (1975) Mr. Gores skillfully blended fact and fiction, inventing a murder case for his protagonist to solve at the time the actual Hammett was finishing “Red Harvest.” Critics praised Mr. Gores’s evocation of Hammett’s literary style and character, as well as his fictional world.

“Gores in his way is as resourceful as the Master himself, and has dreamed up an evocative picture of San Francisco in 1928 — with its beauty, its venality, its dirty cops and politicians,” wrote Newgate Callendar (the book-reviewing pseudonym of the music critic Harold C. Schonberg) in The New York Times Book Review.

The book was made into a less than successful 1982 film by Wim Wenders, but it helped convince Hammett’s daughter, Jo Marshall, that only Mr. Gores could be trusted to write a sequel to “The Maltese Falcon.” Mr. Gores, pointing out that most of the characters are either dead or in prison by the end of the book, proposed a prequel instead, and “Spade & Archer“ was published in 2009.

Recently the hardworking staff read a chunk of Spade & Archer and found it true to the master’s legacy.

I always thought Hammett was Homer to Raymond Chandler’s Virgil.

So . . .

Ave atque vale, Joe.