I've been to San Francisco many times. The weather isn't always the best, but who really cares? San Fran is famous for so many things ... its hills, its trolley cars, its bay, its bridge, its waterfront piers, sea lions, liberal attitudes and rainbow parades. Those liberal attitudes can sometimes make a visit decidedly weird: walking through the Haight-Ashbury district -- center of the cultural revolution of the Sixties -- can be like getting all caught up in someone else's rather surreal dream,


But San Francisco was also the home of two of my very favorite writers, crime guru Dashiell Hammett and fantasy master Fritz Leiber, and their city provided them with a good deal of inspiration.

Inspiration is a strange thing, though. It isn't always the most obvious features of a city that provide it. Two things in particular sparked the idea for 'The Vanished,'  fifth adventure in THE ASTONISHING ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY. One was arguably the worst part of central San Francisco, the section of Market Street at the heart of the Tenderloin district, a considerably less than salubrious area filled with homeless beggars. And yet San Fran's street people are featured largely in this tale.

The second spark? My wife and myself took a ferry over the bay to the town of Sausalito. It's a lovely place, but doesn't appear in the tale. What does appear is the huge cloud of fog -- almost permanently there -- which a ship has to pass through when it's halfway across, a very atmospheric thing to experience and almost ghostly in its way.

But then Sherlock Holmes is more than used to fog, now isn't he?