Dots on the literary map

San Francisco, on the weekend: Cutting down to Market Street, we came across this 'grill'.

"Why is it called 'the home of the Maltese Falcon'?" I asked the concierge. The answer: because Dashiell Hammett lived next door and it was in this establishment that he wrote most of the 1930 novel, The Maltese Falcon.

Okay, fair enough, I know that in Australia you can still see where Patrick White lived in Centennial Park or the swimming pool in Fitzroy where Helen Garner's characters in Monkey Grip hung out, but it seems to me that in the US the literary map is much more densely populated.