Rumors of Stein’s penchant for crime fiction had reached Chicago, and one night they were invited to ride in the back of a squad car with a battalion of homicide police detectives, searching for criminals at large. They were collected from a lively dinner where Stein had ignited a heated debate with several academic philosophers over the relative merits of various eighteenth-century writers: she made the case for Swift, and professed for good measure that it was more important to teach students the history of literature than of politics. “Government is the least interesting thing in human life,” she argued, rising to her feet, “creation and the expression of that creation is a damn sight more interesting… the real ideas are not the relation of human beings as groups but a human being to himself inside him.” Just as Toklas was trying to calm her down, the maid burst in to announce the police were at the door—which caused momentary commotion, until everyone realized this was merely Stein’s next entertainment (“ no murders,” she lamented, “but lots of fun”). She was thrilled, too, at a different brush with the world of crime, when the writer Dashiell Hammett—the person she claimed she was most eager to meet in America—joined her for dinner in Beverly Hills, along with Charlie Chaplin, Lillian Hellman, and Anita Loos. “It is very nice being a celebrity,” wrote Stein in Everybody’s Autobiography, her memoir of the tour, “a real celebrity who can decide who they want to meet and say so and they come or do not come as you want them. I never imagined that would happen to me to be a celebrity like that but it did and when it did I liked it.”
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