The hard-boiled detective novel deserved higher esteem than had been accorded the genre by critics of American literature, so Arion Press set out to honor the premier example in the town where Hammett wrote the book, researching the story to illustrate it with photographs, found mainly in old newspaper morgues and library archives, taken in the late 1920s, of the actual streets and buildings where Sam Spade solved the mystery. Contemporary views were photographed by Edmund Shea. A trade edition was published by North Point Press in 1984.