NHA News Release: February 1, 2012



PI And Author Josiah Thompson OBOI Lecturer Feb. 18

Want to know what it’s really like to be an undercover private investigator? Put on your fedora and trench coat and rendezvous at the Whaling Museum on Saturday, February 18, at 7 PM for a special presentation by San Francisco-based writer and private investigator Josiah “Tink” Thompson. Thompson will discuss his true-life experiences as a private detective as part of the island-wide One Book One Island.

One Book One Island is a collaborative island project of community partners and sponsors that seeks to promote reading, literacy, and community by encouraging the entire population of Nantucket to read, discuss, and reflect on the same book. This year’s title, The Maltese Falcon, is a 1930s-era detective novel by Dashiell Hammett, and is widely cited as one of the original “hard-boiled” detective novels, a genre popularized by such works as The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, as well as The Maltese Falcon.

Thompson, the author of Gumshoe: Reflections in a Private Eye, will describe many of his most remarkable cases and discuss how Dashiell Hammett’s novel Maltese Falcon is reflected in his career on the world’s modern day mean streets. Thompson’s cases run the gamut from recovering $30,000 from under the floorboards of an attic to saving an innocent man from the gas chamber.

Josiah “Tink” Thompson’s lecture will begin at 7 PM inside the NHA Whaling Museum at 13 Broad Street, with a themed cocktail reception to follow (doors open at 6:45 PM). Admission for the lecture and reception is free and open to the public. And just in case you haven’t yet read the book, there’s no need to sleuth around to find one. Copies are available at the Nantucket Historical Association’s administrative offices at 15 Broad Street. For more information, check the NHA calendar or call 508-228-1894, ext. 0.