"What's this bird, this falcon, that everybody's all steamed up about?"
"You're a fine lot of lollipops!"
--PI Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1930)
Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, published 95 years ago this month, is such a landmark archetype of detective fiction that it feels kind of hard to say anything original about it at this point. If you had to compile a list of the ten most important detective novels it would have to be on there, along with what? The Moonstone? The Mystery of Orcival? The Hound of the Baskervilles? The Murder of Roger Ackroyd? Those few titles come immediately to mind. I suppose some people would include Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, but I've always felt that one was actually somewhat dreadful, the wonderful fractured stained-glass similes notwithstanding.
From the previous year American reviewers had loved Hammett's Continental Op crime novels Red Harvest and The Dain Curse (the latter, to be sure, to a lesser extent) and they were primed to embrace Hammett's new tough detective, Sam Spade. In the United States, anyway, they simply went bonkers over The Maltese Falcon. Author and El Paso Times book review editor Eugene Cunningham raved: "I shall be surprised if it doesn't find a niche among the Best Detective Stories of All Time." Popular newspaper columnist and satirical wit Franklin P. Adams, a member of the fabled Algonquin Round Table, pronounced The Maltese Falcon "the only detective tale that I have been able to read through since Sherlock Holmes."
It was the realism of the book that appealed most strongly to reviewers: the realism of the cops, the crooks and most of all the private detective. They felt like they had read an account of something that really might have happened on the streets of San Francisco, where the novel is set. The precious falcon statuette which nominally drives the plot--the dingus as Sam calls it--is something out of an Edgar Wallace thriller, sure, but the desperate, dangerous characters hiding it and hunting for it make the story feel real. The vitality of Hammett's writing makes these people live.
"Until the coming of Mr. Dashiell Hammett in Red Harvest and now in The Maltese Falcon," observed Donald Douglas in the New Republic
the memorable detectives were gentlemen. The ever-delightful M. Lecoq and his copy, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, are fair gods against the gnomes. Their only worth successor, Father Brown, is a priest. Scratch every other detective and you'll find an M. Lecoq. Now comes Mr. Hammett's tough guy in Red Harvest and Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, and you find the Pinkerton Operative as a scoundrel without pity or remorse, taking his whiffs of drink and his casual amours between catching crooks, treating the police with a cynical contempt, always getting his crook by foul and fearless means, above the law like a satyr--and Mr. Hammett describing his deeds in a glistening and fascinating prose as "American" as [Ring] Lardner's, and every bit as original in musical rhythm and bawdy humor.
There is nothing like these books in the whole range of detective fiction. The plots don't matter so much. The art does; and there is an absolute distinction of real art. It is (in its small way) like Wagner writing about the gnomes in "Rheingold." The gnomes have an eloquence of speech and a fascinating mystery of disclosure. Don't get me wrong, bo. It's not the tawdry gum-shoeing of the ten-cent magazine. It is the genuine presence of the myth. The events of The Maltese Falcon may have happened that way in real life. No one save Mr. Hammett could have woven them to such a silver-steeley mesh.
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| Alberich in Wagner's Das Rheingold |
Reviewers in England generally seemed less enamored with the novel than besotted Americans. I think the public school honor code ethos still held greater sway among the Brits, at least the elite tastemakers in the papers and journals.
Sam's motivations were a mystery to a lot of people because of the way Hammett weaves his silver-steely mesh, his exterior third person narrative capturing people's words and actions but not their thoughts. So in judging Sam we can only judge him by what he does and says. And for most of the characters in this book their words aren't worth shit, to be blunt, and their actions are elliptical, if not downright shameful.
The plot that so many found startlingly original at the time seems fantastically familiar a century later. So imitated was Hammett that the plot must have seemed cliched even a decade later. The whole thing opens at the detective offices of Sam and his partner Miles Archer. Their secretary Effie Perine ushers in to see them a luscious young redhead, wonderfully named Miss Wonderly. The lady explains that she wants someone to shadow a certain unsavory character named Floyd Thursby, who has run off to San Francisco with her younger sister Corinne, only seventeen, five years younger than she. Archer, obviously very smitten with Miss Wonderly (as is Sam but he keeps a better grip on himself), volunteers for the job.
That's the end of chapter one; chapter two opens with Sam learning from the cops that Archer has been found shot dead in the night on the job; soon afterward he learns that Thursby has been shot dead as well. Sam himself is suspected by the cops in their murders. Worse yet, he also finds that Miss Wonderly has been lying to him (which he already suspected) and that her name is not even Wonderley but, supposedly, Brigid O'Shaughnessy. She's a crook of some sort, and there are other crooks in the game as well.
What is the game? Well, whatever it is, it involves a statuette of a black bird known as the maltese falcon. A certain dingus as Sam Spade colloquially calls it--a gizmo or a thingummybob, say.
Alfred Hitchcock would have called it a macguffin--the mystery object that propels the story's plot, even if we never actually see it. The thing everyone is after. Hammett certainly didn't invent this sort of plot--you can look back to Conan Doyle's "The Six Napoleons," for example--but he certainly put a new, modern gloss on it.
Maltese Falcon is such an epochal work of mystery fiction that most of us can never capture the excitement of the novelty which 1930 readers felt when first perusing it. But we can feel excitement at seeing so many genre tropes really come together and into scintillating life for the first time.
And, here, I guess, I'm going to get into some SPOILERS, so if you actually haven't read it yet and you keep on reading, I WARNED you.
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| Humphrey Bogart playing Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941) It's the iconic hard-boiled detective on film, although Bogart looking nothing like Same Spade as described in the novel ("pleasantly like a blond satan") |
First we see here the client who lies to the detective. And, man, does Brigid lie! Practically every word out of this woman's mouth is a lie, including "and" and "the." She is, for all practical purposes, a malignant sociopath, the mother of all femmes fatales. The story is largely the story of a man, Sam, overcoming his poisonous attraction to this fatal woman. Brigid killed one man outright and is directly responsible for two other men getting killed. And then she expects Sam to play the sap for him! Sensibly Sam declines.
Hammett establishes the whole PI ethos here with the line "I won't play the sap for you"--no man is going to let himself be taken advantage of by a woman--and also his honor system: "When a man's partner is killed he's supposed to do something about it." Brigid killed Archer--whom Sam didn't even like and in fact was cuckolding by having an affair with his wife--and now she has to take the rap for it.
That's it, there you have every hard-boiled detective novel for years to come. Spillane may have made his detective an outright psychotic, which Spade emphatically is not, but he's simply imitating Hammett. It was Ross Macdonald who finally brought something new to PI detective fiction, by bringing psychology and sensitivity into it--taking the egg out of the boiling water a couple of minutes earlier, as it were, where Spillane left it in so long the yolk hardened into an unpalatable slab of sulphurous rock.
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| Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre) in The Maltese Falcon |
Hammett also introduced decadent queer villains into the hard-boiled detective story, in the form of that emphatically gay Levantine, Joel Cairo, with his chypre-scented handkerchiefs, not to mention notorious gunsel Wilmer Cook and the falsely avuncular fat man, Caspar Gutman.
I don't know why people assume Gutman necessarily is gay--he has a daughter, Rhea, and unctuously refers to Wilmer as being like a son to him. However, Joel Cairo undeniably is flaming. He's your classic crime fiction queen, elegantly nasty and frequently bitchy. It's not long before he and Brigid are literally scratching at each other like cats and slanging like a pair of dolled-up Dynasty divas.
Bridgid resents it when Joel sneers to her that long-lashed pretty boy killer Wilmer was "the one you couldn't make" in Constantinople. (The city's name was changed to Istanbul the year Falcon was published.) It's Joel who cooingly caresses Wilmer when he is dealt a great blow late in the novel. It's obviously they who have been intimate, not Wilmer and Gutman. It's hard, actually, to imagine anyone having sex with Gutman, certainly in the present day of the novel. (Did anyone else see him, by the by, as inspiration for Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe)?
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| Wilmer (Elisha Cook, Jr.), Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet), and Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre), all perfectly cast |
I always read that Hammett in referring to Wilmer slipped in the word "gunsel," meaning catamite, tricking publishers into thinking the word meant gunman. But Cairo gets called a fairy and a pansy and there's not any doubt what those words meant in 1930! So just why would gunsel have been such a tough sell? Hammett also alludes to Wilmer, that nasty little tyke, telling Sam "Fuck you" without actually spelling the words. Sam calls the whole queer gang "a fine lot of lollipops," which may be another example of Twenties gay slang.
I have to say Chandler ripped off a lot of this in the very derivative, vastly inferior novel The Big Sleep. When Ray got mad about Ross Macdonald ripping off "his" The Big Sleep idiom in The Moving Target, he should have thought about how a decade earlier he had brazenly ripped off from The Maltese Falcon actual plot elements, like Wilmer, in The Big Sleep. But then almost everyone in the field ripped off Hammett in one way or another.
END SPOILERS
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| What is it about this damn bird? |
Often the central theme of The Maltese Falcon feels like "Women are the very devil." Brigid, of course, is no picnic shall we say, but then there's Iva too, Miles Archer's wife whom Sam is having an affair with and at this point just wants taken off his hands. As portrayed in the novel she is a genuine pain.
Spade is attracted to women, but also repelled by them. The only woman in the book he actually likes is his loyal secretary Effie Perine, who is always being described as boyish-looking and desexualized. (Well, Joel Cairo might have been attracted to her.)
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| Mary Astor as Brigid and Humphrey Bogart as Sam in The Maltese Falcon Both are too old for their parts by a decade are more, as described in the book, yet both of them are great in the film. |
"You're a damned good man, sister," Sam tells Effie, rubbing her cheek. This, incidentally, is another one of the classic hard-boiled tropes, the loyal secretary in love with her boss whom he never actually has sex with. Spillane ripped this element off as well, making sure for good measure to satisfy his and his readers' sadistic urges by having Hammer's secretary get stripped and tortured. (Brigid is only forced to strip before Sam in Falcon.)
My friend of a quarter century now (!), the brilliant blogger Nick Fuller, hates this book and deems Sam Spade a sociopath. All I can say is he should meet Mike Hammer. Or maybe not, I really wouldn't wish that crazy, murderous bastard on anyone. I can happily abide the company of Sam Spade, however, and I love The Maltese Falcon.
