The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett: Review
Book: The Maltese Falcon. Date of Publication: January 1, 1930. Pages: 217. Genre: Mystery.
This is quite a special novel. On the surface it is a well-written if predictable detective story. But, like the motivations of our main character, there are tumultuous eddies swirling just under the surface.
Sam Spade is a private eye based in San Francisco. He and his partner Miles Archer are solicited by a woman named Ruth Wonderly to tail Floyd Thursby who has run off with her sister. When Archer and Thursby turn up dead in quick succession we find that things are not so simple. Miss Wonderly is actually Brigid O’Shaughnessy and Thursby was one of her partners in a mission to obtain a priceless treasure, the Maltese Falcon. They ran out on the others who soon turn up for get-back. Casper Gutman, shrewd and calculating. Joel Cairo, slippery if slightly inept. And Wilmer Cook, Gutman’s baby-faced hired gun who Spade antagonizes almost as fast as the police he leaves in the dark.
In this complex web of shifting loyalties and double crosses Spade’s flexible code of ethics and lack of sentimentality serve him well. When he learns of his partner’s passing he has his name painted over on the door to their office on the very same day. He deftly plays the former business partners against each other, although this doesn’t go over well with Brigid who he has started a relationship with. Spade is one to take such matters extremely lightly though as he is messing with his partner’s wife, his secretary, and Brigid all at once. And, as would become a staple of the genre, he is not afraid to use threats, intimidation, and greased palms to keep the upper hand.
Sam Spade is an irredeemable jerk. But what the novel does brilliantly without once diving into his head is explaining why he is such a terrible person. For one, he’s been quite successful at it. He proclaims that San Francisco is his turf and we’re inclined to believe it. When he and Brigid are waiting for Cairo to turn up for a business meeting Spade tells a seemingly innocuous off-the-cuff story about one of his former clients.
Mr. and Mrs. Flitcraft are happily married until one day when Mr. Flitcraft disappears without a trace. His family are well provided for by his estate and life goes on until Mrs. Flitcraft spots a man, years later, who looks eerily like her presumably deceased husband. Spade is contracted to investigate and he confirms this is indeed Mr. Flitcraft who has started a new life with wife, baby, and business in a new city. On the day he vanished Mr. Flitcraft was walking down the street when a falling beam from construction work narrowly missed him by twenty feet. At once he realizes how fragile and temporary his existence is. He sheds his model life as easily as Spade sheds his romantic attachments when they start to become inconvenient. The callous detective speaks of Mr. Flitcraft and his revelation with a palpable admiration that scant else draws:
But that’s the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.
[Pg. 64]
Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but Hammett himself was a WWI veteran who drew on his experiences as a PI to create Spade. Perhaps that was the falling beam that taught Spade life’s too short to spend it on being good. Maybe when you clean up other people’s messes for a living causing a few of your own is no object. The man who is the quintessential hard-boiled film noir detective has become a myth, the archetype on which countless others have been grounded. But in The Maltese Falcon, the man is also a man.
