The Maltese Falcon

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The past is a different country and I may need more of a roadmap.

My previous experience with Dashiell Hammett is with watching the Bogart classic, The Maltese Falcon. The charm of the movie is really the odd characters - Peter Lorre's oleaginous Joel Cairo, Sydney Greenstreet's pompous “Mr. Guttman” and, of course, Humphrey Bogart's “man's man,” Sam Spade. The movie marches through its paces with these different odd characters vying for the “McGuffin” of a fabulous gem-encrusted statue, while Spade plays catch-up without letting anyone know that he doesn't know the whole story.

The movie maps onto the book in an almost - but not quite - one for one relationship. I listened to the book as an audio book and the reader gave Cairo and Guttman the famous Lorre/Greenstreet voices. From the book, I found a real sense of Hammett as a scriptwriter for movies. His novel reads as a movie script, which is to say it is all superficial, objective movement, description and dialogue with no internal thoughts or reactions of the characters. (The audio book was an excellent presentation, by the way.)

For the rare person who doesn't know, the story is set in San Francisco in the 1930s. Sam Spade is a private detective hired by a very hot redhead to find her little sister. Spade turns over the simple job of trailing the cad who ran off with the sister. Then, Spade learns that Archer was shot and killed on the job, and that the cad, a man named Thursby was also shot and killed, and that he is being fitted for at least one of the murders. Then, no longer than it takes to strip Archer's name off the firm's door, and try to cool an affair with Archer's wife, Spade learns that there was no little sister, that his client's name is really Bridget O'Shaugnessy, and that she is competing with some very odd characters to find a McGuffin, but what it is and what it all means is something that Spade needs to figure out.

have to say I don't understand why this is such a classic. Was it the romance of the exotic - San Francisco in the 1930s, a treasure dating from the Middle-Ages, and a crazy bunch of characters so different from the American middle-class? For myself, reading this book as a piece of literature at a remove of 100 years, I don't quite understand. None of the characters were likeable. One reviewer has described two of the characters - Spade and O'Shaugnessy - are sociopaths, which is honestly an apt description. Were people in the '30s really indifferent to what an immoral louse Spade was, much less that O'Shaugnessy is lying conniver who would frame Spade in a red-hot second if it could net her a steak dinner? Did Americans of 100 years ago believe that the relationship between Spade and O'Shaugnessy was real or attractive in any sense? There is a lengthy conclusion where O'Shaugnessy keeps telling Spade that he loves her and keeps saying that maybe he does, and though it all, I was annoyed because of the absence of any “chemistry” between” the two.

Was there chemistry on the movie? I don't think so, but I was kept amused by Lorre and Greenstreet, so I had no cause to complain.

Another odd feature is the “screenwriting” style of the book. Spade does things and says things because he just knows to do and say those things. The reader isn't let in on Spade's reasons because the reader doesn't learn anything that isn't something that can be objectively witnessed from the outside. This leads to some unexplained behavior and developments, as well as the occasional bit of laughably inept exposition to bring the reader up to speed.

The other bit of awkwardness is how everything just seems to come to Spade. I didn't notice it in the movie, but in the book, Spade really doesn't discover anything by sleuthing. Instead, he gets approached - usually by people holding guns - by O'Shaugnessy, Cairo, Wilmer and, finally, Captain Jacoby (played in the movie by Walter Huston) with the McGuffin. OK, fine, it moves the story along, but for a writing style that is based on “show, don't tell,” it seems that Spade's insight and cleverness is all “tell, don't show.”

Finally, one wonders how long before this book gets the same treatment as Huckleberry Finn for its fossilized sexism. Women are treated as children or sex objects by Spade. He chucks them on the chin and calls them “angel” and discounts their views as if they were children. Perhaps the attraction of the book was that in a culture that treated women as children, Bridget O'Shaugnessy is depicted as a woman willing to murder like any man? I am not someone interested in listening to contemporary grievances about paternalism, but you can see in this book how much things have changed.

A plus feature for the book is that occasionally Hammett will toss out a line of classic dialogue or insert a phrase that became a classic of the detective genre. This is the book that taught America that “gunsel” was a hired “gun” rather than a “homosexual.” Likewise, at one point, Spade mentions that Wilmer was on the “gooseberry lay,” which I naturally assumed was obscene, but in fact involves stealing clothes.

However, because of my idiosyncratic interest in history, I found The Maltese Falcon interesting as a piece of history. There is a view of a slice of American Culture in The Maltese Falcon which is fascinating. Likewise, for anyone who knows San Francisco, the references to locations in old San Francisco are fascinating (and tempt me to make a visit to them the next time I am in San Francisco.) If this was a contemporary mystery book, I would probably find it to be too cliche, too confusing, with too many fortunate accidents for Sam Spade, and unattractive characters, and give it a soft three, but as a bit of history, I give it a four.