The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammet

 

244 pages

You can buy The Maltese Falcon...here

You can find out more about Dashiell Hammet...here

Our Rating...4⭐s

• The Blurb...

Sam Spade is hired by the fragrant Miss Wonderley to track down her sister, who has eloped with a louse called Floyd Thursby. But Miss Wonderley is in fact the beautiful and treacherous Brigid O'Shaughnessy, and when Spade's partner Miles Archer is shot while on Thursby's trail, Spade finds himself both hunter and hunted: can he track down the jewel-encrusted bird, a treasure worth killing for, before the Fat Man finds him?

• Our Review...

Well this was a pleasant surprise. I don't really know why I decided to read this novel, probably a sense of lacking depth. A sort of " i haven't any 1930s hard bolied noir before, it's a notable genre, I suppose i had better read the daddy... The Maltese Falcon." I'm glad I did. I found it very enjoyable. I Genuinely returned to it night after night out of a desire to find out "what happens next" rather than out of a sense of duty, and that hasn't happened for a while.

It's got all the tropes, cynical tough Private Investigator (P.I.), duplicitous femme fatale, sneaky oily villains. The plot has more twists than Chubby Checker's corkscrew. So very stereotypical, but sometimes that's a good thing. The reader knows the route to follow. 

The characters are great too. We come for the plot but stay for characters. Whenever I hear that saying the example that always appears in my head is Only Fools And Horses. Originally we start to watch for the storyline but the gems are Del Boy, Trigger, Grandad, Trigger et all. The same applies to this Sam Spade isn't really a good guy, he's having an affair with a married woman. How he feels about his Miss Wonderly, his distraught client, who throws herself on his mercy is very mercenary. He is cynical to the point of being emotionally dead inside. The three villains are very different but all are very self-centred (as indeed is Sam Spade.) To this end having now read the book, I must commend the casting of the black and white film directed by John Huston. The acting troupe of Bogart, Greenstreet, Lorre and Astor fit precisely into the characters on the page.

Throughout the book a question that kept me on tenterhooks was what would Spade end up doing with Miss Wonderly. While not as overly evil as Gutman, Cairo or Wilmer she was the cause of much destruction. Would Spade rescue her or destroy her or maybe something in between. I think this was the question that intrigued me the most.

It may be a me thing, but while reading this novel I feel there are underlying themes of good and evil and particularly the bible (see first selected quotes in describing Sam Spade.)  Spade calls his secretary his angel on several occasions, and indeed she is probably the most moral character, while Miss Wonderly is very contrasting in her duplicity and using her womanly charms to lure men to their doom like a siren. While the falcon itself may be seen as a false idol that drives men into greed, betrayel and murder. Or perhaps I am thinking too much and seeing patterns that exist only in the chocolate fudge of my brain.

One thing that did surprise me, after reading the novel I was browsing an afternote that stated throughout the novel Hammet did not have an inner monologue. No thoughts or emotions are described and to my surprise I realised that this was true. The author had just discarded one of the writer's best, most versatile rules. I hadn't noticed, that may be a testament to the skill of the author. I have read Cormac McCarthy and I did notice when he did it. Also this very visual style of writing maybe why The Maltese Flacon transferred so well to the big screen. 

Whatever the ins and outs this was an enjoyable thrill ride through the dangerous jungle of deception and double cross. Well worth a read.

• Selected Quotes...

his pale brown hair grew down from high flat temples in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan.

Tom Polhaus poked his own left breast with a dirty finger. "Got him right through the pump with this." He took a fat revolver from his coat-pocket and held it out to Spade.

Spade nodded. His face was stupid in its calmness.

We believed your two hundred dollars." "You mean?" She seemed to not know what he meant. "I mean that you paid us more than if you'd been telling the truth", he explained blandly "and enough more to make it all right."

the lie was in the way I said it, and not at all in what I said."

The fat man 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. As he advanced to meet Spade all his bulbs rose and shook and fell separately with each step, in the manner of clustered soap-bubbles not yet released from the pipe through which they had been blown.

distrust a close-mouthed man. He generally picks the wrong time to talk and says the wrong things. Talking's something you can't do judiciously unless you keep in practice.

The looseness of his lower lip and the drop of his upper eyelids combined with the v's in his face to make his grin lewd as a satyr's.

I want you to know that I couldn't be any fonder of you if you were my own son; but well, by Gad! if you lose a son, it's possible to get another and there's only one Maltese falcon.

the shortest farewells are the best.

I'm a detective and expecting me to run criminals down and then let them go free is like asking a dog to catch a rabbit and let it go.

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