Fans of hard-boiled detective fiction know what they want. Fast plotting, snappy patter, just enough violence or the threat of same to keep it interesting, and not too much of the mushy stuff.
The Maltese Falcon not only delivers on all those points, it works the template to perfection. Just reading the first two chapters awakens you to the fact that before they were tropes, such things as mysterious dames and foggy crime scenes could be so evocative and alive.
Making it all snap together is the dynamic central character of Sam Spade, a tough-talking detective with honest-to-God principles, most especially that no one’s gonna make a sap of him.
Here he is summing up the plot of the novel:
“As far as I can see, my best chance of clearing myself of the trouble you’re trying to make for me is by bringing in the murderers – all tied up. And my only chance of ever catching them and tying them up and bringing them in is by keeping away from you and the police, because neither of you show any signs of knowing what in hell it’s all about.”
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| Miles Archer (Jerome Cowan) buys the farm in the famous 1941 movie adaptation. Archer's death sets in motion a plot rife with secrets and betrayal, if little actual gunplay. Sam Spade makes a point of never carrying a gun. |
What seems like a straightforward missing-person case for Spade becomes a double murder. One of the victims is Miles Archer, Spade’s business partner. Spade isn’t sentimental; he disliked Archer and wanted to be rid of him, perhaps because Spade had been bonking Archer’s wife. But the principle of losing a partner bothers him; so does being blamed for the crimes.
At times Hammett seems to channel the coming movie adaptation with Humphrey Bogart. For one thing, there are those mannerisms. When Spade is tense, his lips draw back in a rictus grin to bare a single eyetooth, just like Bogie did on screen. And like Bogie, Spade is a man of few words with a casually sardonic sense of humor.
From the opening description we are put on edge. Spade’s face is word-painted as a parade of V-shapes, from thick brows to hooked nose to jutting jaw. “He looked rather pleasantly like a blond Satan,” Hammett writes. In this and other ways, Spade carries something of an anti-hero quality the same way The Maltese Falcon has an air of noir about it, even if those terms belong to a time that has not quite arrived.
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| Author Dashiell Hammett. A terrific blog post by Mark Coggins includes an extensive interview with mystery writer and Hammett fan Joe Gores, who points out a strong physical resemblance between Spade as described in the novel and the author. Image from https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/dashiell-hammett-about-dashiell-hammett/625/ |
Falcon is part of an earlier era when mysteries were still “whodunits.” Simple questions are presented early and remain in focus throughout. Who killed Archer? Who killed the man Archer was tailing? Is it the same person threatening the woman who hired Spade in the first place?
Hammett develops these in tandem with the foggy atmospherics of San Francisco at night and how adept Spade is at handling tricky situations, always working angles. Plenty of humor, but always with a harsh edge:
Cairo hesitated, said dubiously: “You have always, I must say, a smooth explanation ready.”
Spade scowled. “What do you want me to do? Learn to stutter?”
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| 891 Post Street in San Francisco, where Hammett lived while writing The Maltese Falcon and believed to also be the basis for Sam Spade's apartment. If so, it is one of several city locations and addresses from the novel still extant today. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashiell_Hammett |
Eventually we discover the reason for our famous title. Centuries ago a famous statue of a falcon, cast in pure gold and encrusted with jewels, was sent to the King of Spain by a very well-off circle of knights. Now the statue’s whereabouts has been traced to San Francisco, where it attracts the obsessive interest of some desperate people.
The chief of these is one aptly named Mr. Gutman, whose physical description stands out in a book distinguished by many of them: “The fat man was flabbily fat with bulbous pink cheeks and lips and chins and neck, with a great soft egg of a belly that was all his torso, and pendant cones for arms and legs.”
The fat man is the main instigator of the hunt for the falcon, as much for the criminal aesthetics of taking such a prize as any value that can be derived from its illicit resale. He is aided by a surly gunsel named Wilmer who drops a couple of F-bombs on Spade and lives to regret it. “The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter,” is Spade’s verdict.
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| An instant bestseller, The Maltese Falcon was quickly made into a movie...for the first of three times over the next ten years. Here in the original version, Sam Spade (Ricardo Cortez) gets the call about Archer's murder. Image from https://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/1764/the-maltese-falcon/#overview |
Also along for the ride, though with his own agenda, is Joel Cairo, or as Hammett calls him, the “Levantine,” as if that were code not for Middle Easterner but homosexual. Hammett’s description of Cairo makes his transgressive nature pretty clear:
His trousers fitted his round legs more snugly than was the current fashion. The uppers of his patent-leather shoes were hidden by fawn spats. He held a black derby hat in a chamois-gloved hand and came towards Spade with short, mincing, bobbing steps. The fragrance of chypre came with him.
Cairo is as underhanded as anyone in the story, but he is the only one in it who seems to really love anyone. Spade himself is rather short with Miles’s widowed wife after having had his fun with her and, in the case of the main female character, let’s just say it is complicated.
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| In 1936 came a second Maltese Falcon movie, this starring Bette Davis and titled Satan Met A Lady. The names are changed, but Davis assays Brigit as a scheming two-timer who is the focus of a more comedic effort. It flopped. Image from https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0028219/mediaviewer/rm992351232 |
In keeping with the trope she represents, we get three different names from her, though the last of these, Brigit, seems to fit. She is the person most immediately entwined with the business of both the Falcon and of Miles Archer’s murder. Spade picks up on this and makes clear his distrust from the start:
“You won’t need much of anybody’s help. You’re good. You’re very good. It’s chiefly your eyes, I think and that throb you get into your voice when you say things like ‘Be generous, Mr. Spade.’”
But he’s also under her spell and unable to help himself that way. Or maybe he is shamming for sex. The book keeps you guessing.
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| The version everyone knows came out in 1941 and introduced such well-quoted movie lines as "When you're slapped, you'll take it and like it" (also in the book) and "It's the stuff dreams are made of" (which isn't.) Image from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boZoLR17If8 |
The Maltese Falcon is a winning blend of attitude and atmospherics. Hammett never loses sight of the plot (indeed the way it holds together with so many twists is a feat easy to lose sight of), but throughout the novel he pulls our attentions to other matters, like the strange case of a man who walked out on his family and moved to another city after a steel beam nearly fell on his head on his way to play golf. Realizing his seemingly-secure life could have been snuffed out so randomly made him decide to skip town and never look back.
“He went like that,” Spade said, “like a fist when you open your hand.”
The parable is a brief one, told to Brigit in a rare unguarded moment between the pair. It signals a core underpinning of the book, one more transgressive than Joel Cairo’s perfumed handkerchief: Life is cheap, and the people who live it best are not as loyal or as dependent on others as we are brought up to think.
People who aspire toward anything noble or pious are just embarrassing themselves. The same may be true for the villains, presented here as near-laughing stocks for their trust in shifting fortunes.
Spade even chides them at one point: “Is this the first thing you guys ever stole? You’re a fine lot of lollipops! What are you going to do next – get down and pray?”
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| Bogie's Sam Spade lays it on the line for three key culprits in the 1941 movie: Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre), Brigit (Mary Astor), and Sidney Greenstreet as Gutman. Both Greenstreet and director John Huston began their legendary screen careers here. Image from https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/2307 |
He certainly doesn’t take them seriously. The same is true with the law. Spade respects legal authority – he even takes time out in the middle of the book to consult with his attorney – but he knows better than to trust them not to make him a patsy. When they press him for details about his case, he reminds them of his Constitutional rights.
The phrase “Most things in San Francisco can be bought, or taken” comes up early, and while the cops Spade tangles with are not depicted as corrupt, they come across as rather bull-headed and worth keeping a distance from. The implicit trust in law enforcement you expect in Golden Age detective fiction is certainly not there.
But the book is definitively a mystery. The plot really does matter. Unlike Raymond Chandler, the best-known exponent and champion of Hammett’s style, most story elements in The Maltese Falcon make sense in retrospect. A couple that don’t, Spade getting drugged and the brief appearance of a woman who shows up late in the novel claiming to be Gutman’s daughter, do add notes of desperate atmosphere and are only at worst brief distractions from this garrote-tight yarn.
The best thing you can say about the novel is it holds up very well after seeing the famous 1941 Bogart movie. The movie is better than the book, but mainly because its perpetual 3 AM atmospherics play better on screen than on the page and because Bogart and Mary Astor find surprisingly emotional resonances in Hammett’s unsentimental depiction of the relationship between Spade and “Brigit.”
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| Sam Spade's debut in the September 1929 issue of Black Mask magazine, where the original version of The Maltese Falcon ran through the following January. By this time, Hammett was well established for his Continental Op series, a Black Mask staple. Image from https://thepulp.net/pulpsuperfan/2021/09/13/a-look-at-black-mask/ |
Hammett had aspired to be a writer of high-brow fiction but found a platform in detective pulp magazines, specifically one called Black Mask, where The Maltese Falcon made its debut as a five-part serial in 1929-1930. While Falcon is his best-known book, it was Hammett’s only one to feature Spade, though the character returns in short stories.
Perhaps this was because Hammett had more success with more conventional Golden Age
detectives, specifically the Continental Op and Nick and Nora Charles, whose
novel The Thin Man also remains famous. Or perhaps it was because Maltese
Falcon’s combination of wry cynicism and dangerous intrigue was hard to
pull off.
Spade is warned: “You always think you know what you’re doing, but you’re too slick for your own good, and someday you’re going to find it out.” It’s a warning like many others that falls on deaf ears, and anyway isn’t borne out by events. As tough guys go, Spade may not be indomitable, but he holds up well with his ingenuity and hard charm.
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