Hammett, Dashiell - The Maltese Falcon (1930)

Hammett's most famous detective is Sam Spade, who appears only in this novel and three rather trivial short stories produced on demand from his publishers. This mystery became John Huston's classic movie with Bogart, Lorre, Greenstreet, et al., and lifted dialogue intact from this book - that's how vividly written it is. One of the early but hardly surpassed (if ever) hard - boiled detective stories.

The mood of this masterpiece puts it right up there with the best of the 'noirs' (cf. Ambler and Thompson). [It can be fun to point to later movies like Chinatown, Bladerunner, and yes, Batman, that sort of capture a similar mood.] Like all Hammett books, it is short (some 200 pages), but its terse and economical style contains enough detail for a much longer novel. It is crammed with details and events. Hence the movie necessarily crops a lot out of the sub - plots and other incidentals. Most scenes hold up remarkably intact in spirit, including word - for - word reproduction of the dialogue. And Sam Spade, described as a 'blond Satan', built like an Easter Island statue and defined by the letter V as to his facial features, is not Bogart, quite - he is also somewhat sleazy, not just hard - boiled but venal. He also hand - rolls his cigarettes, which like pipe - tamping adds a casual deliberation to scenes, insouciance that cannot be conveyed as well by somebody just taking one out of a pack.

Lorre, of course, was perfect as Joel Cairo, and Greenstreet as Casper 'By - Gad - Sir' Gutman (though in the book Cairo is more blatantly homosexual and Gutman far more grossly fat, defined by 'jouncing bulbs' as Hammett puts it).

Sex is something that was downplayed in the movie because of the time it was made, but the book makes it clear (though not in as much explicit detail as would be written now) that Spade slept with Brigid and that he had an adulterous relationship with his partner's wife Iva - that sub - plot mostly glossed over in the film although it makes more explicable the reason why the cops are on Spade's case so vehemently. Also eliminated, or cut back, were the amusing scenes involving Spade and his lawyer, Sid Wise (“Just one more client like you and I'd be in a sanitarium - or San Quentin.” / “You'd be with most of your clients...”).

A fine scene where Spade is called in to the DA's office, where the latter is trying to make a connection between murder victim Thursby's involvement with a missing gambling mobster and Spade's client - a traditional mystery red herring not even mentioned in the movie. (Spade's whole ethic throughout is to protect the privacy of his clients from meddling law folk, a theme that is basic to the book.) Gutman's drugged daughter. The affectionate relationship with his pip of a secretary Effie Perine. Spade's burglary of Brigid's apartment. Spade's relations and friendships as a professional private eye with the like of hotel dicks and other aides and informers and his cop friend Polhaus - he is no Lone Ranger. The full and fascinating history of the Falcon itself. Above all, the 'parable' Spade narrates to Brigid about Mr. Flitcraft (pointed out by Steven Marcus in his introduction to The Continental Op), a man who abandoned his prosperous and humdrum career and his family after nearly being killed by a falling piece of construction work while walking to lunch, having an epiphany that life is a crap - shoot and subject to randomness, so do as thou wilt, then in another place established an almost identical life - style as somebody else: “He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.”

This defines Spade's existential attitude and explains, in a sense, his basically honorable final action, a kind of return to normalcy, to what standards he has at base. As a mystery plot, i.e., involving detection, this book is not in the Golden Age of Detection vein, more like pure pulp thriller, because nearly everybody in it is basically treacherous, including the hero; there's that wonderful scene toward the end where Spade and Gutman deliberate on who to shop for the murders, the palming of a thousand - dollar bill, the gyrations of treachery worthy of the old Romans or the Borgias - one of the most cynical and dramatic endings in all detective fiction.

The wise - cracking style later improved on by Chandler et al. became part of the genre after Hammett, such as this minor but typical example where Cairo comments: “You have always, I must say, a smooth explanation ready” and Spade replies “What do you want me to do? Learn to stutter?” A throwaway exchange with the driver of a borrowed car: “Your partner got knocked off, didn't he, Mr. Spade?” / “Uh - huh.” / “She's a tough racket. You can have it for mine.” / “Well, hack - drivers don't live forever.” / “Maybe that's right,” the thick man conceded, “but, just the same, it'll always be a surprise to me if I don't.” Certainly at a higher level than the gangsterese popular at the time. Note too that Hammett has the gunsel Wilmer utter “two words, the first a short gutteral verb, the second 'you'“ - even Black Mask drew the line in those days.

Wyatt James

Hammett's first real novels, as opposed to story sequences, are The Maltese Falcon (1929) and The Glass Key (1930). I don't like these books very much. Both are written with an unusual, even experimental technique, in which the characters' behavior is shown from the outside, but where their thoughts and feelings are not directly revealed. Critics have had a field day trying to resolve the ambiguities about what the characters are really thinking, but I just find the technique annoying. It seems to paint a woefully incomplete picture, and the characters seem to be just stick figures. Most of the characters in these tales seem unsympathetic, too. In addition, Hammett is a long way off from the outstanding plotting of his best Continental Op stories here. Critics have often pointed out that these books are more like mainstream novels than most mystery fiction of their era. This is true, but are they good mainstream novels? Many people have ascribed great literary merit to these books, but how much literary merit can there be in books with wooden characters, little plot, written in Basic English, and with nothing to say about society, nature, science or religion?

One might note some literary ancestors of Hammett's characters. Brigid, with her constant lying, and her never ending supply of plausible sounding fabrications, recalls the equally fluent liar James Dangle, in Freeman Wills Crofts' The Cheyne Mystery (1926). Like Brigid, Dangle also enters the novel under a pseudonym. The Cheyne Mystery also resembles The Maltese Falcon in that Dangle is part of a criminal conspiracy of several sinister characters, who are working together to recover a lost treasure. A character in the novel not part of the conspiracy is the sleazy private eye, Speedwell. His name recalls Spade, as do his corrupt methods, his pretty secretary, and the name of his small agency, Horton and Lavender's Private Detective Agency. Crofts' novel is utterly non-hard-boiled in tone, however, and Speedwell is a much less important character in it than Spade; he appears most prominently in Chapters 3, 9 and 14.

The pompous fraud Caspar Gutman, a purported English gentleman, recalls the character of Major Hoople in Gene Ahern's comic strip Our Boarding House (1923 - ). Both characters have a similar way of talking. Bill Blackbeard and Martin Williams' The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics (1977) reprints a 1929 sequence of Our Boarding House starring the Major.

Mike Grost

See also: http://at-scene-of-crime.blogspot.ca/2012/04/birds-of-prey.html