{"id":17654,"date":"2022-12-21T19:57:12","date_gmt":"2022-12-22T00:57:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=17654"},"modified":"2022-12-21T19:57:12","modified_gmt":"2022-12-22T00:57:12","slug":"the-maltese-falcon-by-dashiell-hammet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=17654","title":{"rendered":"‘The Maltese Falcon,’ by Dashiell Hammet"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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He went out, walked half the distance to the elevators, and retraced his steps. Effie Perine was sitting at her desk when he opened the door. He said: \u201cYou ought to know better than to pay any attention to me when I talk like that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf you think I pay any attention to you you\u2019re crazy,\u201d she replied, \u201conly\u201d\u2014she crossed her arms and felt her shoulders, and her mouth twitched uncertainly\u2014\u201cI won\u2019t be able to wear an evening gown for two weeks, you big brute.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He grinned humbly and said, \u201cI\u2019m no damned good, darling,\u201d made an exaggerated bow, and went out again.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Working my way <\/strong>through books I\u2019ve read and remember fondly, I picked The Maltese Falcon<\/a><\/em> by Dashiell Hammet off my shelf. It\u2019s a fascinating book, and I have much to say about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, it\u2019s impossible to contemplate this work without considering the looming image of the classic 1941 movie directed by John Huston, starring Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor. After I finished reading, I immediately took out my DVD and watched the flick. I also watched a few clips from the original 1931 version, starring Ricardo Cortez, available on YouTube. It\u2019s a much inferior movie, far more loosely paced, and Cortez (physically a better casting choice) plays the role with a constant leer, as if it\u2019s all a joke, even when he\u2019s giving up the girl he \u201cloves.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first thing you learn when you read the book is that Sam Spade looks nothing like Humphrey Bogart. He\u2019s tall, broad-shouldered, muscular. His face is \u201cmade up of v\u2019s,\u201d so that he looks \u201crather pleasantly like a blond Satan.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In case you\u2019ve never read the book or seen the movie, Sam is a San Francisco private eye, in partnership with a guy named Miles Archer (with whose wife he\u2019s carrying on an affair). When beautiful, young Brigid O\u2019Shaughnessy walks in and asks them to put a tail on a man who\u2019s holding her sister against her will, they lick their lips (both at the fee and at Brigid) and Miles takes the job. The next morning Sam learns that Miles has been shot to death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What follows is a complicated dance that goes on for some time before Sam even learns that Brigid is in competition with some other sinister types to get ahold of a figurine of a black falcon, believed to be worth a fortune.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Maltese Falcon<\/em> is a seminal book in the history of mystery literature, an archetypal hard-boiled tale. And hard-boiled it is. Sam is a shockingly tough character \u2013 he appears utterly insensitive, not only to the woman he\u2019s committing adultery with, but to his starry-eyed young secretary (far more vulnerable in the book than the tough cookie played by Lee Patrick in the 1941 film); with men he\u2019s just brutal. He\u2019s big and strong, and it does no good to pull a gun on him, because he\u2019ll just take it away from you. He appears to have no principles, either \u2013 he deals and double-deals on equal terms with the Fat Man and Joel Cairo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s only at the end that you begin to see something deeper. This is a man with a list of certain principles \u2013 probably not a long list, but the ones he has he sticks to. At the end of the story, he stands left with nothing, and it\u2019s by his own choice. Which makes Humphrey Bogart, in the end, a better Sam Spade than Ricardo Cortez. Bogart expresses the foundation of the character; Cortez portrays its fa\u00e7ade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a running theme of sacrifice (of a cynical kind) in The Maltese Falcon<\/em>. The famous scene at the end (spoiler here) where Sam tells Brigid he won\u2019t \u201cplay the sap\u201d for her is paralleled earlier by the scene where Gutman decides to sacrifice Wilmer, his catamite, as the \u201cfall guy\u201d for the murders. Author Hammet had it on his mind that there are things more important than being in love. Since Hammet was a Communist, I couldn\u2019t help thinking of Stalin\u2019s callous murder of millions \u201cfor the greater good.\u201d But a Christian can also appreciate this, as our Lord told us that whoever loves father or mother, son or daughter more than Him is not worthy of Him. (Communism is, after all, only the most successful Christian heresy.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In style, Hammet was, I think, a little inferior to Raymond Chandler. You look in vain here for Chandler\u2019s lyrical, epigrammatic descriptive passages. The Maltese Falcon<\/em> is heavy on description, but it\u2019s punctilious description. Hammet tells you what everyone wears, down to details of style and color. He likes to set a scene, to leave nothing to the imagination. The dialogue, however, is sharp and tight. Read the book and watch the film, and you\u2019ll see that the script writers\u2019 main job was cutting. What you hear the actors saying in the film is almost always straight out of the book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Maltese Falcon<\/em> is a tremendous hard-boiled mystery. Highly recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

He went out, walked half the distance to the elevators, and retraced his steps. Effie Perine was sitting at her desk when he opened the door. He said: \u201cYou ought to know better than to pay any attention to me when I talk like that.\u201d \u201cIf you think I pay any attention to you you\u2019re … Continue reading ‘The Maltese Falcon,’ by Dashiell Hammet<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7,15],"tags":[660,4475,4476],"class_list":["post-17654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","category-reviews","tag-dashiell-hammett","tag-sam-spade","tag-the-maltese-falcon"],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17654","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17654"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17654\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17656,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17654\/revisions\/17656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}