Many of you know the work of Dashiell Hammett and his creation, the hard boiled San Francisco detective, Sam Spade. With Sam Spade, Hammett began the prototype detective for the California mystery genre. He brought the San Francisco fog, cable car bells and fog horns into the lives of his international readers through his short stories series, A Man Called Spade, in tales like “They Can Only Hang You Once” (1932). The chic and fashionable upper middle class of Northern California was his inspiration, and he used his alter ego Sam Spade to uncover less than pretty secrets of San Francisco society.

Raymond Chandler’s seminal protagonist, Philip Marlowe, “the Los Angeles detective’s Los Angeles detective”, is perhaps the most beloved American sleuth, and although Hollywood did a great job translating classics like Time to Kill (1942),Murder, My Sweet (1945), The Big Sleep (1946), and Lady in the Lake (1946) to the big screen, there is no substitute for reading Chandler’s breathtaking prose. “The doll wore Christian Dior silk stockings.” Or: “The blonde could have been anywhere from eighteen to forty. She was that type. She had a figure and didn’t act stingy with it.” If you like this kind of detail, pick up any Raymond Chandler novel.

Fashionlines’ Senior Photography Director, Winston Boyer, recommends the work of Michael Connelly, creator of the Harry Bosch LAPD series, and cites The Black Echo (1992) and The Concrete Blonde (1994) as two of his favorites.

Joseph Hansen, who began the gay detective genre with his protagonist, Dave Brandstetter, recently died at the age of 81 at his home in Laguna Beach, California. Under the name James Colton, Hansen wrote mysteries dealing frankly with homosexuality. Beginning in 1970, Fadeout was the first of the twelve Brandstetter novels, ending with the 1991 A Country of Old Men in which the author acknowledged his world had been diminished by AIDS.

The Northern California Mystery Writers is an organization devoted to the genre, and their website is www.mwanorcal.org . The craft, begun by Dashiell Hammett in San Francisco in the Twenties, remains in good hands with many of the actively publishing writers. I confess, the detective genre is probably my favorite, and I wrote and published a mystery novel in 1985 called Clinic under my maiden name, Christine Johnson. Interested Fashionlines readers can inquire by emailing rosenstein@fashionlines.com .

Turn off the television and curl up with a great California detective novel. These sleuths epitomize high style, and with their trench coats, fedoras and short but eloquent ways of talking, they are now enshrined in fashion history.