What I Am Reading: "The Maltese Falcon" by Dashiell Hammett

This was my second crack at this book. I picked it up a few years ago mainly, as is my occasional habit, out of interest in the author. Dashiell Hammett, co-grandfather of pulp-era hard-boiled detective fiction, was also a left-wing activist and victim of the second red scare; and went to prison for several months in 1951 for refusing to name names during a hearing concerning a bail fund he was a trustee of.

I like Hammett more than I like this book, a famous classic and important book in the history of detective fiction though it may be. It was made into a film starring Humphrey Bogart as the main character: calculating, poker-faced, amoral private investigator Sam Spade. I have never seen that film, but I still managed to read every line of Spade's dialogue with Bogart's voice in my head (I've been on an old movie kick recently, though sans much viewing).

The plot concerns the pursuit of a macguffin / treasure, the Maltese Falcoln, supposedly a bejeweled, golden statute that was sent by the Knights of Malta as a gift for their landlord, the King of Spain, who rented them their island in exchange for the token sum of one (normal) falcon. We are briefly given a history of the object's travel through the centuries to San Francisco, but this, and the knowledge of the item itself, is not imparted until the middle of the book. The first half involves Sam Spade taking on two cases: one, that of an attractive young woman who wishes to have a man tailed, leads to the death of Spade's partner, Miles Archer. The other is on behalf of a gay Greek man (embodying the era's dismissive stereotyping precisely as much as you'd expect) who wishes to have a package retrieved and is squirrelly about its contents and whereabouts. The plot is linked together already, but only in Sam Spade's head. Instead, we as the reader are treated to a series of interactions with these characters and others that are opaque to us, though they need be remembered later to understand the plot, twisted and labyrinthine as it is. I believe this is why I put the book down a few years ago: in the first third or so it is legitimately hard to know what the hell is going on. The reader absorbs without understanding.

All is revealed to Sam eventually though, and he deigns to reveal it to us. The woman (Brigid), the Greek man, and his boyfriend, a young tough who is tailing Sam, are all working for a rich, obese gentleman who is after the falcon. This squad had attempted to heist it together in Constantinople; but a series of double-crosses, deceptions, and shifting alliances brought it to San Francisco, along with Brigid, who doesn't have it but does know its whereabouts. In the end, after Sam uses his smarts to sort the story out and his masculine strength to impose his will on the situation, the falcon is a fake and the bad guys are all arrested.

Spade, the archetype of an amoral noir hero, is considered by genre scholars to be one of the inspirations for countless literary and film descendants. He's calculating behind a lazy and carefree facade, prone to bursts of violence and ultimately focused on self-preservation, especially in the face of these outsiders who come to do business in his city of San Francisco. He bullshits with the cops, but they can’t do anything about it because they need him. So far, so “hard-boiled.” He expresses affection toward Brigid and toward Effie, his secretary, and was sleeping with his partner's wife prior to the former’s murder.

This relationship, which Spade is weary of and is hoping to end, is more believable than his professed love for Brigid at the end, which is written more as a titillating seduction and counter-seduction, where Spade comes out of the arrangement holding all of the cards. Grizzled and laconic, he is much better at expressing annoyance than he is affection. It is all a fantasy of rugged (though urban) masculinity.

The book has a few fun period-piece historical notes, including identifiable but quaint slang ("pump" for heart, "pills" for bullets, etc.) and the existence of fancy hotels with hotel detectives or morning and afternoon editions of newspapers. In the end though, a piece in the literary history puzzle is all that I got out of it. I'm hoping that The Thin Man will be better.