Dashiell Hammett

by Cline, Sally; Penzler, Otto;

  “I’m glad you liked The Maltese Falcon. I’m sorry you think the to-bed and the homosexual parts of it should be changed. I should like to leave them as they are. . . . It seems to me that the only thing that can be said against their use in a detective novel is that nobody has tried it yet. I’d like to try it” (July 14).

  Hammett’s view prevailed.

  Persuasively, Hammett wrote to Block: “While I wouldn’t go the [sic] the stake in defense of my system of punctuation, I do rather like it and I think it goes with my sort of sentence-structure.” 1

  However, Hammett was making significant changes to his style and structure. His two previous books had relied on an episodic structure following the Black Mask installment method. The first novel, Red Harvest, was in four installments in Black Mask before it was published as a novel. The second book, The Dain Curse, was in four installments in Black Mask but was published as a novel with a three-section structure. This third novel was nonepisodic, which allowed more intimacy, and greater unity. Instead of an elaborate plot with many subplots and a huge number of characters, Hammett has a small cast of suspects, fewer storylines, fewer misleading clues. He has only four murders, all offstage.

  Hammett has also moved from first- to third-person viewpoint, which is sharper for dialogue and a better fit for his drama. The first-person viewpoint offered intimacy and openness: no use to Hammett now. A third-person narrator could instead be rigidly neutral and detached. Spade, like Hammett, was private and closed. No one understood Spade. Using the third person made him morally ambiguous. It also allowed Hammett to analyze Spade in the way that the Op had examined other characters.

  The Op—dumpy, middle aged, and unappealing—had been supplanted by a stand-alone private eye. A loner, a survivor, a tall romantic hero (whom it is difficult to distinguish from Humphrey Bogart, his most famous film persona), Spade was as reclusive, solitary, unpredictable, and occasionally as cruel as Hammett, who gave him his own name: Sam.

  The names of Hammett’s characters were rarely random. Before he became a professional writer, Hammett called himself Sam. When he stopped writing novels and, desperate for some structure, reenlisted in the army in 1942, he again called himself Sam, proudly signing his letters “Private Samuel D. Hammett.” During his short time as an established novelist, he used the name Dashiell, yet when it came to his most famous novel, he labeled his alter ego Sam, not Dashiell.

  Sam, the sick scribbler, had invented the author Dashiell Hammett along with Dashiell’s five exceptional novels. When Dashiell later failed to keep writing, Sam at least was immortalized in The Maltese Falcon.

  Hammett described Spade as a “dream man in the sense that he is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been and what quite a few of them in their cockier moments thought they approached.” 2

  Spade did share several characteristics with the Op. He, too, was caught up in a shifting universe of random violence, where a detective survived only by adhering to an inflexible moral code of professional obligation and honor. Like the Op, Spade was a man who could be tempted but could not be bought. Persuasive enough to charm, he was also ruthless enough to survive.

  The story in the novel is about a group of shady characters chasing a certain bird across two continents. The glorious falcon is said to be made of gold and encrusted with jewels from head to foot. The narrative hinges entirely on fraud and deceit, though, for the final twist reveals that the falcon is a fake. No jewels, no gold, merely an artificial bird of worthless lead.

  Fat Man Gutman tells thin man Spade the legend. In the sixteenth century, the Hospitallers of St. John gave a falcon every year as a tribute to the King of Spain for the use of the island of Malta. The first year’s falcon was not a living creature but a golden bird of inestimable value decorated with precious stones. Subsequently, the fabulous falcon changed hands, then disappeared.

  Gutman, a crook who wants the bird badly, hires beautiful Brigid O’Shaughnessy to find it. She links up with homosexual gangster Joel Cairo. They decide to double-cross Gutman, but Brigid betrays Cairo then outwits another violent falcon-seeker, Floyd Thursby, and arranges his murder.

  Hammett later said that he drew the plot partly from Henry James’s Wings of the Dove, but he also drew on his own earlier stories. He raided “The Whosis Kid” for another manipulative seducer who tried to tempt the Op before her avatar tried to tempt Spade. From “Laughing Masks,” Hammett borrowed another exquisite heroine, rescued by a detective from an evil genius’s tyranny. In “The House in Turk Street” and “The Girl with the Silver Eyes,” he found models for Gutman and Brigid.

  In Falcon, Hammett pays greater attention than previously to the relationship between his two main characters: the tough guy in the trench coat and the mysterious, treacherous liar. As the famous fog settles over San Francisco’s shadowy streets, the beguiling Brigid bursts into Spade’s office. Miss Wonderly, her first alias, flaunts provocative red curls, wears two shades of blue to match her eyes, and spins Spade a yarn about her missing seventeen-year-old sister who has run away from New York with Floyd Thursby, a married gangster. Miss Wonderly believes that Thursby is holding her sister in San Francisco. She begs Spade and his partner Miles Archer to shadow Thursby, who has arranged to meet her that night. Archer gallantly agrees.

  Both Archer and Thursby are murdered. Miss W. checks out of her hotel, but Spade tracks her down and she reveals she has told him a “story.” Spade reassures her: “We didn’t exactly believe your story. . . . We believed your two hundred dollars.” 3

  Trust me, Brigid implores Spade. No way, thinks Spade. For Brigid lies about everything. Yet, she uses the word “trust” like a leitmotif, initially seven times in nine sentences. Hammett hammers home her untrustworthiness. He writes some form of the word “trust” thirty times during the novel. 4

  Hammett refines his already curt dialogue here, too. Between Spade and Brigid it crackles crisply. “Help me. I’ve no right to ask you to help me blindly, but I do ask you. Be generous, Mr. Spade. You can help me. Help me.”

  Spade, languid, lean, and laconic, uses language hard as flint. “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.’”

  Spade does sleep with her, does confess “it’s easy enough to be nuts” about her, but ultimately hands her over to justice. Brigid does not understand when Spade tells her that when a man’s partner is killed, that man is supposed to do something about it. She is shocked at Spade’s ultimatum. “Well, if I send you over I’ll be sorry as hell—I’ll have some rotten nights—but that’ll pass.” He admits he probably loves her but is adamant: “I won’t play the sap for you.” 5

  This novel provided an accurate record of a period blanketed by crime and corruption. Between 1910 and 1930, the number of police in America doubled as the urban crime rate increased. Corruption was common in many city police forces, partly because the average police wage was only $1,500 a year. Crime victims now turned to private detective agencies.

  Hammett’s novels often depicted repellent prejudices he had absorbed. In the Falcon, we clearly see his lifelong fear and hatred of homosexuality. Hammett cynically mocks the effeminate characteristics of Wilmer, Gutman’s homosexual gunman, and Spade calls him a “gunsel,” a derogatory term for a catamite or boy kept for lewd sexual purposes. Hammett’s venomous hostility toward homosexuals in fiction and in life, together with his increasing inability to enjoy heterosexual sex (except with whores), seemed to spring from fears about his own masculinity.

  Critic Sinda Gregory describes the novel’s central theme as the omnipotence of mystery and the failure of human effort to dispel it. Biographer Richard Layman says it is the destructive power of greed. The Maltese Falcon does incorporate these themes, but like Red Harvest and The Dain Curse, its primary theme is how appearances belie reality, how nothing is ever as it seem
s, how order and meaning are mere human fabrications, and blind chance is the only thing on which we can rely.

  Hammett uses the falcon, whose reality is that it is an imitation with no value, to emphasize his point that we all construct our own realities and make of them what we need. In the novel’s most important passage, memorably a nonfiction one, Spade tells Brigid an anecdote to illustrate this. It is about a man named Flitcraft.

  Flitcraft was a stable, content, and prosperous real estate dealer in Tacoma. One day, he left for lunch and never returned. Mrs. Flitcraft searched in vain for five years, then arrived at Spade’s agency to say she had seen a man in Spokane who looked like her husband. Spade discovered that the man, now known as Charles Pierce, was indeed Flitcraft, who had a new wife, baby son, successful automobile business, and usually played golf after 4:00 p.m. on weekdays, just as he had in Tacoma.

  Hammett’s preoccupation with philosophical puzzles shows in the name Charles Pierce, for Charles Peirce (one letter rearranged) was a nineteenth-century American philosopher who wrote about chance, probability, and how people lived according to their illusions.

  When Spade talked to Flitcraft, he learned that after lunch five years previously, as Flitcraft had passed a building being erected, a beam suddenly fell ten stories and smashed into the sidewalk, narrowly missing him. Flitcraft, frightened, felt that somebody had taken the lid off his life and let him look at the works. Until that moment, Flitcraft had led a happy life in step with his surroundings. He believed his safe life had meaning. Now, a falling beam had shown him life was disorderly and unsafe. His new view was that, by sensibly ordering his life, he had got out of step with it. So he decided to make a radical random change: he would disappear. But after two years’ wandering, he settled in Spokane with a new wife and a new routine, astonishingly similar to his old life and old routine.

  Spade tells the uncomprehending Brigid that the part he loves best is that Flitcraft did not appear to know what he had done, that he had adjusted himself to beams falling, then, when no more fell, he adjusted himself to their not falling.

  Despite everything Flitcraft had learned about the random disorder of existence, he persisted in behaving as if life was rational. For Hammett, this provided an explanation of what guided both Spade’s conduct and his own.

  That he dared to insert into a crime novel a long nonfiction passage of deep philosophical meaning showed that he was now prepared to experiment with literary content in a genre novel.

  In 1941, Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Peter Lorre, and Sydney Greenstreet helped make Hammett’s book a massive bestseller. Did Hammett appreciate the irony that his most famous and meaningful passage, which gave The Maltese Falcon its point and stood as a symbol for all his work, was entirely left out of this iconic film directed by John Huston?

  The Maltese Falcon became a five-part monthly serialization in Black Mask the month before Hammett finally left San Francisco in October 1929. The published version by Knopf came out on Valentine’s Day 1930. Hammett dedicated it to Jose for her unwavering support and commitment during the long years of unbearable illness and financial insecurity. It was reprinted seven times in America in its first year. The film rights were sold to Warner Brothers.

  Nevertheless, despite the golden notices, the sales for The Maltese Falcon were disappointing. Blanche, Alfred, and Hammett all thought that the novel’s enormous potential for commercial as well as literary success was cut short by the Great Depression. During the preceding autumn, on October 24, 1929, a day that became known as Black Thursday, Wall Street crashed. Investors ordered their brokers to sell at any price as the bottom fell out of the market in stocks and shares. During that first terrible day, 12,894,650 shares were sold. Investors lost as much money on that day as the United States had spent fighting World War I. Herbert Hoover, America’s president at the time, was unable to hold back or deal with the oncoming recession. Automobile sales, the heart of the twenties’ consumer boom, collapsed, and manufacturing fell drastically. The economic disaster rapidly spread worldwide. Unemployment and poverty dominated the lives of most people in Europe and the United States. In America in 1929, the unemployment rate had averaged 3 percent. Now, in early 1930, between a quarter and a third of all American workers were unemployed. 6

  By 1932, 5,000 out of America’s 25,000 banks had gone out of business. By a year later, four years after the crash, the stock market had lost almost 90 percent of its value. As early as 1932, 34 million people belonged to families with no regular, full-time wage earner. By 1933, family incomes had dropped by 40 percent, a quarter of all workers and 37 percent of nonfarm workers were unemployed and in a tragic situation. While Hammett wrote on and on during the Depression, in those same years 13 million other Americans became unemployed.

  When Hammett looked around him, he could see thousands out of work, their lives ruined. Yet, as America’s bubble burst, he himself seemed safe inside a small bubble of his own. Startlingly, good fortune set in for him at exactly the point it ran out for other people. His financial success was astonishing. Just as he was now healthy after years of being sick, so he was now becoming wealthy after years of being poor. Both conditions, good in themselves, had terrible effects on him. Already, in the summer of 1930, he was heady with too much money. He claimed later that he had made $800 a week during that first year of the Depression. The contrast between Hammett’s sudden comparative wealth and the fate of his 4 million unemployed countrymen, or even the few employed people—whose average annual salary of about $1,600 was less than Hammett’s fees for two weeks—must have seemed dreadful. But there is no record of what he felt about it, and his actions were those of a careless, callous, materialistic Gatsby.

  He more than anyone knew what living on the breadline meant. But high on his new status, his focus suddenly and ruthlessly was on expensive restaurants, stylish clothes, and ever more alcohol.

  His behavior also changed. Gone was the sick, sensitive young man. His attitudes began to resemble the worst aspects of Fitzgerald’s, Faulkner’s, and Hemingway’s machismo. A lifetime of illness and poverty had exercised some restraints on Hammett’s masculine excesses. Now that his disease was in remission and his fiction earning him wealth beyond dreams, those fetters were lifted. When sober, he was still the shy, secretive writer who had been valued by Annie Bond and Jose Dolan. But when drunk, he no longer respected anyone’s feelings. He became abusive, violent, heartless, and cruel. He had lost his capacity to treat women lovers as equals or friends. Drunk most nights and half the days, he saw women as commodities whom he preferred to buy. Hammett was also bad-tempered with fellow crime writers. On April 5, 1930, he began a six-month job as a book reviewer of mysteries for the New York Evening Post; by October, he had reviewed eighty-five books, but he had become impatient and terse with poor writing as more alcohol and months went by.

  His talent, however, was recognized everywhere. By mid-1930, he was viewed as America’s best detective novelist and one of America’s most talented fiction writers. His reviews were brilliant. And on March 10, Blanche’s firm issued an advertisement proclaiming him “Better than Hemingway.” This pleased Hammett greatly, as he was an enthusiastic admirer of both Faulkner and Hemingway.

  Otto Penzler called The Maltese Falcon “possibly the best American detective novel ever written.” Blanche used Penzler’s words as the jacket quote.

  Franklin P. Adams in New York World said that The Maltese Falcon was “the only detective tayle [sic] that I have been able to read through since the days of Sherlock Holmes.” 7 L. F. Nebel (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 21, 1930) wrote: “It seems a pity that this should be called a detective story . . . it is so much about a detective that he becomes a character, and the sheer force of Hammett’s hard, brittle writing lifts the book out of the general run of crime spasms and places it aloof and alone as a brave chronicle of a hard-boiled man, unscrupulous, conscienceless, unique.”

  Alexander Woollcott praised Falcon as “the best detective
story America has yet produced,” 8 and New York Herald Tribune (February 23) suggested that “It would not surprise us one whit if Mr. Hammett should turn out to be the Great American Mystery writer,” yet both still saw Hammett as a crime writer, albeit at the peak of his powers. Many critics, both at the time and certainly today, believed Hammett had elevated crime writing to literary fiction.

  New Republic critic Donald Douglas suggested Hammett’s novels displayed “the absolute distinction of real art.” In Outlook and Independent (February 26), Walter Brooks confirmed: “This is not only probably the best detective story we have ever read, it is an exceedingly well-written novel. There are few of Mr. Hammett’s contemporaries who can write prose as clean-cut, vivid and realistic.”

  William Curtis (Town and Country, February 15) believed that Hammett was “an amalgamation of Mr. Hemingway . . . Morley Callaghan and Ring Lardner.” Hammett had something “quite as definite to say, quite as decided an impetus to give the course of newness in the development of the American tongue, as any man now writing.”

  Hemingway remained the main comparison. Listen to Ted Shane: “The writing is better than Hemingway; since it conceals not softness but hardness” (The Judge, March 1).

  Hammett was most thrilled with two pieces of praise. When Herbert Asbury in a letter to Hammett praised the book, Hammett wrote to him on February 6: “I can’t tell you how pleased I was with your verdict. . . . It’s the first thing I’ve done that was—regardless of what faults it had—the best work I was capable of at the time I was doing it.” 9

  When Gilbert Seldes in the New York Evening Graphic said: “[T]his is the real thing and everything else has been phony,” Hammett was so pleased that he copied out the best parts and posted them to Jose.

  Years later, in 1983, critic William Marling pointed out that the estimation of The Maltese Falcon as Hammett’s best work had not changed. By 2012, the verdict was still the same.