The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
THE MALTESE FALCON (1930) established the benchmark for the private eye subgenre. The odorous Miss Wonderley hires Sam Spade to find her sister, who has eloped with a louse named Floyd Thursby. However, Miss Wonderley is actually the gorgeous and cunning Brigid O’Shaughnessy, and when Spade’s partner Miles Archer is shot while following Thursby, Spade finds himself in a double-bind: can he discover the jewel-encrusted bird before the Fat Man tracks him down?
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
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- Used Book in Good Condition
The Maltese Falcon was one of Mark Billingham’s picks for A Good Read, a British crime magazine. When I read it, I could see that he was right when he said it was the noir/hardboiled mother lode. All of us have seen the Bogart, 1941 movie, but the novel is considerably richer. Sam Spade, meanwhile, is a piece of work. The police start phoning after the murder of Miles Archer to press him for information about his client’s name and place of business. But because he will never, ever lose confidence, Spade dodges, defends, evades, outwits, and eventually takes a punch.
If Spade had even a trace of Hammett in him, he would have known not to tip off the anti-communist McCarthyists. Instead, he was imprisoned. That is personality.
Back to the DNA issue, though. The reason the “Falcon” story sounds familiar is in part because Hammett established a model in it. Although Marlowe and Chandler are more well-known today, I see Raymond Chandler writing The Big Sleep in 1939 with Hammett at his side.
Hammett passed away in a very short time, at age 65. Part of the problem was emphysema, and as I watched Sam Spade smoke cigarette after cigarette, I couldn’t help but wonder whether Hammett was incorporating his own way of life into the narrative.
The plot’s explanation by the fat guy Gutman that the jewel-encrusted bird was a gift from the Knights Templar to some long-forgotten King was a masterclass in half-truth, mostly plausible fakery and a complete joy. Additionally, Spade tells femme fatale Brigid about a case he worked on involving a wealthy family man with the improbable name of “Flitcraft,” who vanished without a trace and was later found alive and well, carrying on with his usual activities, years after his first disappearance. The answer is nothing less than an exquisitely nested short tale within a novel…
