The Fabulous Falcon

I: the novel

Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961), born near Baltimore, served as a sergeant in both World Wars and worked for the Pinkerton Detective Agency from 1918 to 1922.  His masterpiece, The Maltese Falcon (1930), has intriguing characters; complex and convincing plot; constant movement, often in the middle of the night, in and out of speeding taxis, luxurious hotel suites, and the detective’s office and flat.  Its laconic, colloquial, wise-cracking dialogue was influenced by the terse style of Hemingway’s “The Killers”, yet in a rare simile Hammett calls a woman “alive, conscious, but quiescent as a plant.”  In the Introduction to the Modern Library edition (1934), Hammett wrote that his private detective is a  “hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent by-stander or client.”  The seedy, tough but decent Sam Spade, neither heroic nor glamorous, moves easily in the criminal world but lives by his own moral code.

The greatest scenes in the novel are the first appearances of Brigid O’Shaunessy, Joel Cairo, and Casper Gutman (halfway through novel); the sacrifice of Wilmer Cook as fall guy so the other three criminals can escape; the late discovery of the false Falcon; and Spade’s final showdown with Brigid.  The Maltese Falcon portrays lies, intrigues and betrayals, and slowly unveils the foot-high, jeweled bird of incalculable worth.  Since all the characters have something to conceal, Spade must search for and finally reveal the truth.

Hammett gives detailed and amusing descriptions as the characters make their dramatic entrance.  Sam Spade’s name suggests a sharp-edged tool that digs up clues and evidence as well as the ace of spades that warns of death.  Spade’s name suggests the earth; his partner’s name, Miles Archer, suggests the sky.  In the astrological sign of Sagittarius archers are adventurers and risk-takers, but he’s mysteriously murdered at the start of the novel.  Spade constantly rolls and smokes cigarettes and pours drinks.  Endangering his life for $25 a day, plus expenses, he’s threatened with guns by two short criminals and easily disarms both of them.  Tough and stoical, hard-boiled and cynical, a loner who operates outside the law, Spade is more effective than the police and hostile to them.  He’s punched by police Lieutenant Dundy, and kicked in the head when unconscious by Wilmer, whom he later vengefully knocks out.

Spade has affectionate names for women and calls them sweetheart, angel, precious, honey, darling and sister.  He attracts and deftly juggles three ladies who are in love with him.  He’s had an affair with Iva, unhappily married to Miles Archer and now his widow.  She pursues him, but he keeps her at a distance and tells her to run along.

His client Brigid O’Shaughnessy, who suddenly appears in his office like a heroine in a Sherlock Holmes story, is fearful, pleading and mendacious, panic-stricken, trembling and twitching.  She uses the false but wonderful name of Miss Wonderly, and Spade wonders about her honesty and character.  She wants to find the criminal Floyd Thursby, who might have the valuable Maltese Falcon.  The experienced detective Miles Archer trails Thursby and is shot dead by an unknown killer.  Brigid repeatedly confesses, “I am a liar.  I’ve always been a liar,” but she can’t stop lying.  Spade tells this beautiful and deceitful woman, “You won’t need much of anybody’s help.  You’re good.  You’re very good.”  She flatters him by saying, “You’re absolutely the wildest person I’ve ever known. . . . You’re altogether unpredictable.”  He sleeps with Brigid, but also suspects and distrusts her.  Hammett turns the elegant and sophisticated client, who pretends to be weak and helpless, into a loose woman, thief and murderess.

Spade is fond of his devoted secretary Effie Perine, relies on her and praises her, but is not sexually involved with her.  Effie, whose Greek name Euphemia means well-spoken and articulate, is the only innocent character in the novel and acts as Spade’s moral conscience.  She naively defends Brigid and tells her boss: “Sam, if that girl’s in trouble and you let her down, or take advantage of it to bleed her, I’ll never forgive you, never have any respect for you, as long as I live.”  She makes him honour his own moral code and he tells her, “You’re a damned good man, sister.”

Catering to readers of his own era, Hammett harshly satirises Joel Cairo, a Levantine Greek, as a “queer” and a “fairy”.  Cairo wears elegant clothes and ostentatious jewels; he has a thin, shrill, high- pitched voice, plump hips, a mincing walk and soft flaccid hands.  His yellow gloves allude to the 1890s Yellow Book associated with the homosexuals Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley.  Cairo’s bathroom cabinet is stocked with cosmetics, unguents and lotions.  When Wilmer is knocked out by Spade, Cairo sits beside his “boy-friend . . . smoothing his hair back from his forehead, whispering to him.”  Threatening but weak, Cairo is also a congenital liar.  When he cries, “This is the second time that you laid hands on me!,”  Spade replies, “When you’re slapped you’ll take it and like it.”

Their sharp exchange shows how Hammett uses idiosyncratic diction to define his characters.  Spade specialises in tough talk, wisecracks and the impatient “quit stalling,” while Cairo whines.  Wilmer warns Spade, “Keep on riding me and you’re going to be picking iron out of your navel.”  The alliterative “picking lead out of your liver” would have been even better.

Brigid has a “breathy schoolgirl manner, stammering and blushing”.  The speech of Cairo and Casper Gutman is elaborate, mannered and ironically formal.  Cairo tries to comfort Spade by asking, “May a stranger offer condolences for your partner’s unfortunate death?”  When Spade asks for prompt payment, Cairo replies, “You wish some assurance of my sincerity?”  Cairo sometimes takes the upper hand by telling Spade, “though you may have the falcon yet we certainly have you.”  The criminal gang is composed of grotesque figures: an obese monstrosity, a homosexual Greek and a juvenile assassin.

The leader Casper Gutman “was flabbily fat with bulbous pink cheeks and lips and chins and neck, with a great soft egg of a belly that was all his torso, and pendant cones for arms and legs.”  He expresses his own values and admiration for the straight-shooting Spade with grandiloquent speech, often prefaced with “By Gad”: “I distrust a man that says when” when he’s offered a drink.  “I’m a man who likes talking to a man who likes to talk”; “I do like a man who tells you right out he’s looking out for himself”; “Here’s to plain speaking and clear understanding”—exactly the opposite approach of Gutman himself and his gang.  “You’re a chap worth knowing, an amazing character”; “You are certainly a most headstrong individual.”  In a witty exchange, Gutman refers to the original owners of the Maltese Falcon and asks, “Have you any conception of the extreme, the immeasurable, wealth of the Order at that time?,” and Spade counters with, “If I remember, they were pretty well fixed.”

Spade constantly taunts Wilmer, the childish-looking but vicious and inhuman “gunsel”, underworld slang for a young homosexual used by an older man.  When they need a fall guy to take the blame for their crimes, Spade suggests Wilmer.  Gutman at first refuses with the heartfelt plea, “I feel towards Wilmer just exactly as if he were my own son.”  But soon after, when his own skin is threatened, he briskly tells Spade, “You can have him,” and explains, “If you lose a son it’s possible to get another—but there’s only one Maltese falcon.”

In the sexiest scene in the novel, Spade forces Brigid to strip naked in the next room to see if she’s hidden the missing $1,000 that Gutman has paid him: “She removed her clothes swiftly, without fumbling, letting them fall down on the floor around her feet.  When she was naked, she stepped back from her clothing and stood looking at him.  In her mien was pride without defiance or embarrassment.”  Spade, who’s seen her naked when they had sex, gets down on his knees like a silk fetishist and carefully examines her fallen underwear.  For once, Brigid is innocent.  Gutman shamefully admits that he palmed the cash and hands it over to Spade.

When Spade finally gets and gives them the Falcon, they chip off the enamel and discover that it’s as fake as they are.  Seizing the upper hand, Cairo rages at his sometime master: “ ‘You bungled it!  You and your stupid attempt to buy it from the Russian!  You fat fool! . . . You imbecile!  You bloated idiot!’  He put his hands to his face and blubbered.”  In the comic denouement, the clever thieves realize they’ve been outwitted and deceived.

When Spade finds that Brigid has murdered Archer, he bids her a bitterly ironic farewell: “I’m going to send you over.  The chances are you’ll get off with life.  That means you’ll be out again in twenty years.  You’re an angel.  I’ll wait for you.  If they hang you I’ll always remember you.”  Like Homer’s Odysseus, Spade is a “headstrong individual,” cunning and courageous, a “man of many resources and nice judgment . . . able to take  care of himself in any situation.”  Like Odysseus with his wife Penelope, Spade will return to Brigid after a delay of 20 years.  He concludes, with significant doubts, “maybe you love me and maybe I love you.”  But he’s willing to sacrifice his personal feelings to achieve justice: “I don’t care who loves who.  I’m not going to play the sap for you.”  Brigid is an evil character and would make a terrible wife.  She’s great to sleep with but not to marry, and a really good detective never gets married.

It seems that Gutman has sufficient funds to support himself and three others in luxury while traveling around the world, from Constantinople to Hong Kong to San Francisco, for 17 years.  He obsessively declares, “I’m not a man that’s easily discouraged when he wants something.”  Despite the formidable obstacles and expense, he plans to continue the search.  Since no one has clear title, he hopes to sell the fabulous bird back to the original owners, the Order of St. John in Malta.  But his quest is ruined when he and his cohorts are arrested.

II: the film

The screenwriter and director John Huston gets brilliant performances from the actors in the superb film version of The Maltese Falcon (1941), which brings the fictional characters to life.  Bogart, speaking rapidly like Spade, “drew his lips back over his teeth in an impatient grimace.”  Mary Astor slept with Huston while making the film.  He relied on notorious public image, colourful past and scandalous sex life, with three divorces, addiction to alcohol and several suicide attempts, to suggest Brigid’s character.  Peter Lorre plays Joel Cairo, whose homosexuality is less emphatic and more subtle than in the novel.  Dandified in appearance and manner, with brilliantined curly hair and simpering behavior, he suggestively places the ivory end of his walking stick next to his lips.  The obese Gutman, marvelously acted by Sidney Greenstreet, who weighed 360 pounds, is also more subtle.  Huston emphasised his bulk with low camera shots up to his massive belly.

Huston used most of Hammett’s perfect dialogue and plot, which couldn’t be improved.  Stripping the novel down to its cinematic essentials, he expertly eliminated several non-dramatic scenes that interfered with the rapid narrative.  He cut Rhea, Gutman’s beautiful 17-year-old daughter who’s drugged in the  novel.  She was born and abandoned when the 17-year search started, and there’s no sign of Gutman’s wife, if he ever had one.  Huston deleted the long and rather puzzling digression on Flitcraft, a man who changed his commonplace life after a near-fatal accident; Spade’s two consultations with his lawyer Sid Wise; and Gutman’s long description of the historical books on the Falcon.  Instead, Huston placed an effective four-line account after the opening titles and has Gutman describe the bird more concisely.  Effie no longer asks her academic cousin Ted to confirm if the histories are accurate.

The Hollywood censors forced Huston to cut the scenes of Spade and Brigid having sex, Brigid asleep in his bed and “young Spade bearing breakfast” while Brigid remains in bed.  Huston also had to omit the erotic scene when Spade humiliates Brigid and forces her to strip naked to see if she’s hidden the missing money.

In the brilliant visual conclusion invented by Huston (and superior to Hammett’s), an elevator gate closes in front of Brigid as if she were already behind bars.  When a cop picks up the heavy Falcon and asks, “what is it?”, Spade quotes Shakespeare’s The Tempest.  Emphasising the hopeless illusion of the search, he says, “the stuff that dreams are made of.”

In “The Simple Art of Murder” (1950), Raymond Chandler emphasised Hammett’s originality and contrasted his work to Agatha Christie’s polite country-house crimes: “Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley.  Hammett is the ace performer.  He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all.  He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.  He served the supreme purpose of giving the detective story back to people who commit murder for a purpose and not just to provide a corpse.”

Jeffrey Meyers has published lives of Humphrey Bogart (1997) and John Huston (2011).

A Message from TheArticle

We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout these hard economic times. So please, make a donation.