Review by C.J. Bunce
Although you’d be right to think of Nick, Nora, and their dog Asta when the subject of Dashiell Hammett comes up on New Year’s (as we did five years ago here at borg), let’s dig into his more famous book, the detective novel The Maltese Falcon to start the year. The Maltese Falcon´s claim to fame is being Hammett’s work that sparked the hard-boiled pulp noir detective novel, the form that carries through in detective stories in books, TV, and movies to this day. Do you recall Jim Rockford ducking into a building and quickly dashing out the back and into another to lose a tail on The Rockford Files? Hammett’s Sam Spade gets the ball rolling in this story first released as serialized in 1929. Put aside what you know about the 1941 Humphrey Bogart movie–the original Spade is described as looking like a blond Satan, and that’s definitely not Bogart.
We’ve a second reason for reviewing the book today. The work is entering the public domain, and we’ll be discussing the first book to take Sam Spade and Hammett’s other characters forward next week in our review of Return of the Maltese Falcon from Hard Case Crime, written by celebrated crime writer Max Allan Collins, available for pre-order now here at Amazon.
Although the set-up will seem pretty simple for fans of the genre today, the second act of the book is good fun, the reason readers today still gravitate to pulp crime novels. But you’ll be in for several surprises. A true MacGuffin as discussed so many times in the context of Alfred Hitchcock and his movies, the “real” falcon of the title doesn’t actually make an appearance in the book. Even in the story you’ll have doubts as to whether it’s simply a hoax intended to mislead the players.
One section of the novel is more Dan Brown than detective genre fodder. That’s right, the back story of the “jewel-encrusted falcon”–painted over with enamel to hide the gold–involves a detailed historical summary that reads just like The Da Vinci Code. The rather long-winded account reads more like a history of the Popes than the stuff of damsels and femme fatales. Who knew?
Sam Spade has a small detective agency in San Francisco in 1928. Just as he and his partner take on a new client, a shifty woman named Brigid O’Shaughnessy (hiding under another name), Sam’s partner is killed. And so is the man his partner was following for the Brigid case. The cops show up, one who gives Sam the benefit of the doubt, the other who just wants to slug Sam. Then the wife of Sam’s partner shows up. It turns out Sam and his partner’s wife were having an affair. Did she get rid of her husband to be with Sam? Is Sam the killer?
You might want to take notes as you read this one. Just count all the tropes now infused into every prime time TV mystery, police procedural, or detective show. Another surprise is the profanity, even a few F-bombs conveyed clearly in the novel via innuendo and clever writing by Hammett. In the 1920s? It’s a surprise the censors allowed this to get to publication, let alone be adapted into several movie versions. And it’s no surprise for the genre that Spade refers to the women as “girls” and we know Spade’s likely cause of death is likely going to be either lung cancer or COPD because of all that smoking.
If Hammett was alive today he’d be creating the stuff of Quentin Tarantino. It’s groundbreaking, gritty writing, about bad people in dark corners on the fringe of society, but at the same time Sam Spade is difficult to like. That said, the first isn’t always the best. As a femme fatale doubling as damsel in distress, Brigid isn’t very layered or interesting. Like in The Thin Man, the ending gets wrapped up too abruptly with too many details, and the book is filled with a lot of matter that doesn’t drive the plot forward. Were you to put the novel with 100 of the best crime novels written since Hammett penned this story (books by Donald E. Westlake, James M. Cain, Ed McBain, and Erle Stanley Gardner come to mind), and you were to give them to new readers unfamiliar with the stories or writers, I don’t think The Maltese Falcon would fare all that well. It’s good, it’s interesting, but the dark and dreary characters aren’t much fun–not as fun as Gardner’s Cool and Lam, Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch, or Max Allan Collins’ Nolan. It also lacks the sex and steam of later novels in the genre. Hammett also spends a great deal of time on clothing and less on environment. He’s taking his characters through San Francisco’s downtown haunts, but mainly via street signs. The unmistakable atmosphere of the city by the bay is just not there.
Our hero gets knocked out, he gets double-crossed, he gets to scheme, he leverages relationships with the law, he has a one-nighter with the lady client, he confronts the thugs and the villains behind the mystery. Is he a good guy? No. Is he a nice guy? No. Is he just out to make a buck? Yes. And that seems an unlikely hero for such a celebrated work. But again–Hammett deserves credit for getting it all rolling. And that MacGuffin is a powerful selling point.
As a classic, like The Thin Man this novel is not a bit dated, in fact its best feature is creating dialogue and characters that could exist in the underworld corners of society in 2025. If you’re just starting out in the genre or you’ve read everything else you’ll want to look back on this seminal work. Pick up Hammett’s original crime novel The Maltese Falcon, now available here at Amazon in a shiny trade edition from Vintage Books. And come back next week for our review of Max Allan Collins’ Return of the Maltese Falcon.
