This is by Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961). It first saw the light of day in 1929, when it was serialized over five editions of the magazine Black Mask. It was published in book form in 1930. The action is set in San Francisco, over a six-day period in December 1928. I would definitely recommend the audio-version, which is brilliantly read by Robertson Dean.

Hammett was among the most influential writers of his era. And he was an unlikely candidate for that distinction. He came from a poor family, and left school at 13. After a string of odd jobs, he worked for several years for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency (1915-18 and 1920-22). But when he got married, in 1921, and then had a child to support, he needed to earn more. "So he 'decided to become a writer,' he told the Eagle. 'It was a good idea. Having had no experience whatsoever in writing, except writing letters and reports, I wasn't handicapped by exaggerated notions of the difficulties ahead.'" The choice to write, though, was also partly due to his poor state of health.

Though he had little in the way of formal education, his Pinkerton experience gave him an air of authenticity, and he was aided by his long-standing record as a voracious reader. He began with short stories. But when he found that writing wasn't bringing in enough either, he turned to advertising. Then poor health canned that as well. The turning-point came when the editor of Black Mask offered him more money, and a brief to write longer pieces. That was when "an eight-year period of astonishing productivity began". And it was quality stuff: "He wasn't a mere genre writer; he was a modernist innovator. The Maltese Falcon, which opens with a beautiful woman walking into a PI's office with a fat bankroll and a sketchy story, reads as the ur-text of modern American crime fiction. It is what Raymond Chandler would describe, in a tribute to his master, as a scene 'that seemed never to have been written before.'"

Eventually, Hammett stopped writing for publication, and started partying and spending. "And he would just as soon be overshadowed by Chandler... Hammett didn't publish anything in the 26 years between The Thin man and his death." But he did lots of other things, including joining the Communist Party, teaching a class in mystery writing, and spending six months in jail (for contempt of court, after refusing to give evidence to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951).

The Maltese Falcon, which ran into seven printings in its first year, became his most famous book. It's No. 54 of The Guardian's 100 best novels. It was rated by Dorothy Parker, and by Raymond Chandler (who admired its "guts and life"). James Twining cites it as an example of how to write a great thriller. And Armistead Maupin praises its sense of place: "You can see the fog-blurred neon. You really feel that you are back in that time and place. San Francisco is very much a noir city."


San Fran, 2001

But my way-in was none other than Gertrude Stein... She was very keen on detective fiction, and when she and her partner did a tour of America (on the back of the fame that come to them through The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas), she specifically asked to meet him. This is recounted in a subsequent work called Everybody's Autobiography (which I've not read in its entirety yet). I'll quote the relevant text in full, because it's classic, punctuation-phobic Stein:

"I never was interested in cross word puzzles or any kind of puzzles but I do like detective stories. I never try to guess who has done the crime and if I did I would be sure to guess wrong but I like someone being dead and how it moves along and Dashiell Hammett was all that and more. So Alice Toklas rang up Mrs Ehrman [their hostess] and said we wanted to meet Dashiell Hammett.

"She said yes what is his name. Dashiell Hammett said Miss Toklas. And how do you spell it. Alice Toklas spelt it. Yes and where does he live. Ah that said Alice Toklas we do not know, we asked in New York and Knopf his editor said he could not give his address. Ah yes said Mrs Ehrman now what is he. Dashiell Hammett you know The Thin Man said Alice Toklas. Oh yes said Mrs Ehrman yes and they both hung up."

Good old Mrs Ehrman succeeds in hunting him down; he duly turns up for dinner; and the two authors have an interesting (if somewhat reductive) discussion about male and female authors and their respective characters.


The dashing Dashiell

The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book also refers to Hammett to introduce her chapter on killing things: "When we first began reading Dashiell Hammett, Gertrude Stein remarked that it was his modern note to have disposed of his victims before the story commenced. Goodness knows how many were required to follow as a result of the first crime. And so it is in the kitchen. Murder and sudden death seem as unnatural there as they should be anywhere else. They can't, they can never become acceptable facts. Food is far too pleasant to combine with horror. All the same, facts, even distasteful facts, must be accepted and we shall see how, before any story of cooking begins, crime is inevitable."

And, interestingly, Azar Nafisi mentions this author in Reading Lolita in Tehran (there's a post coming soon) [POSTSCRIPT 19 May: Here it is]. Nafisi's mentor, mirroring her enthusiasm, talks about Hammett in the same breath as Austen and Nabokov. She reads Hammett during Iraqi missile attacks on Tehran; she regrets "the shameful disrespect for the detective story in Iran"; and, influenced by him and others, she adds a section on mystery stories to her class.


It's worth listening, if you can, as Dean does the voices brilliantly, but the text is available at Internet Archive

The Maltese Falcon was the first to include Sam Spade, Private Investigator, who is as "hardboiled" as they come. I never really knew what hardboiled meant (apart from eggs, obviously). But the term describes a then-new type of investigator -- one who is not purely intellectual and generally hands-off (a la Sherlock Holmes), but rather is physical, not averse to violence from time to time, and very gritty (a hard-smoking, hard-drinking, and tough-talking type).

Sam is all this. He's still smart, as these guys are, but the smartness is tinged with cynicism: "Spade looks at others through a prism of distrust, dishonesty and deceit." (There's much more on the hardboiled crime fiction genre here. It arose in the 1920s, against a background of Prohibition, and peaked in the 1930s-1950s. Hammett did much to popularize the style.)

So... To the story. Which I won't recount in detail, as it's a thriller, after all, and part of the interest lies in seeing through the false leads and deceptive characters (of which there are many). There is a full summary here, but I'll just sketch a few vaguely indicative bones:

Sam Spade runs a detective agency, and the book opens with an approach by a beautiful woman, who asks, shyly and delicately, for his services in keeping an eye on one Floyd Thursby. Not long after their first encounter, Thursby is dead, and so is Spade's partner, Miles Archer, who had taken on the task of tailing him.

The woman, who initially produces a false name and a wildly untrue story, and wouldn't know the truth if it jumped up and bit her, is called Brigid O'Shaughnessy. We gradually learn that she's a consummate actress, endlessly inventive, and always on the make. She's a great character, although thoroughly unlikeable.

Then we have Spade himself. Suppose you overlook, as products of their era, the homophobia and borderline racism (he's pretty nasty to a "Levantine" character called Joel Cairo, who is consistently depicted as effeminate), and the rampant sexism (Spade has no idea how to relate to women other than in sexual terms, and he never seems to know their names, addressing them all as "angel", or "precious"). Even after lots of overlooking, though, he's a guy you wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of. And Hammett is brilliant at expressing the ambivalence that cloaks him throughout. Sam Jordison notes: "One of the things that most fascinated me about The Maltese Falcon is its morality. There is a value system in the book, a sense of right and wrong, but no one sticks close to it. No one is without fault or shade... In the end, Spade comes good. Or at least, he does the right thing as far as the law is concerned. He also does right by the code he sets out: 'When a man’s partner is killed he’s supposed to do something about it.' And yet, for most of the book, Spade is a difficult, troubling presence. You can argue a way around most of his actions... But it's harder to argue a way around Spade's physical tells. The physical cues Hammett provides about his leading man are sinister and worrying. Spade is frightening." It's true. He's brilliantly depicted. But you don't like him either.

Overall, the only genuinely sympathetic character is Effie Perrine, Spade's long-suffering assistant. He's a bit touchy-feely with her too, but she's the only one he actually treats with a modicum of respect.


Four key characters, Spade, Cairo, O'Shaughnessy, and Casper Gutman (played by Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Mary Astor, and Sydney Greenstreet), in the 1941 film version

The action revolves around the quest for the eponymous falcon. This highly valuable, highly sought-after statue of a bird draws its inspiration from the history of the Order of Knights of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem, aka the Knights Hospitaller (which we got very interested in during our long stay in England in the winter of 2021-22). The idea of a priceless statue is made up, but the gift of a falcon was real: "The knights were without a territory of their own until 1530, when they were granted possession of the Maltese Archipelago by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. A provision was made that each year the Order would pay a tribute of one falcon to the emperor’s Viceroy of Sicily on All Saints Day (November 1). The annual falcon tribute was paid each year until 1798 when the Order was driven out by Napoleon."


The Museum of the Order of St John, London, 2023

The falcon leads our villainous characters on a merry dance, and the path to the denouement is littered with deception and betrayal.

I won't go into the ending. Suffice it to say that James Scott Bell, in a book called The Last Fifty Pages (subtitle: The Art and Craft of Unforgettable Endings), categorizes it as a "Lead Loses ending".

There's another little curiosity that's worth mentioning. That's the tale that Spade tells O'Shaughnessy, about a third of the way through. It seems to come out of nowhere, and its import is left for us to decide. It's about a man named Flitcraft, from Tacoma, who miraculously escapes an accident (a falling beam), runs away from his family to enjoy to the full the life he now finds doubly precious, and eventually slides back into his former habits, but in a new place and with new people. Spade comments: "I don't think he even knew he had settled back naturally into the same groove he had jumped out of in Tacoma. But that's the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling."

Jordison wonders what Spade wants us to understand from the Flitcraft story: "That happiness comes through adapting to circumstance? That circumstances change but people don't? That you follow patterns even if you don’t want to? That your duty to personal truth is greater even than your duty to your family? That the major moments in your life are often just random accidents? That trying to set yourself a moral compass is as absurd as judging your actions on the chance fall of a piece of wood? Hammett leaves his readers with more questions than answers."

Which is always a good thing.

Anyway, I'm not sure hardboiled detectives are my favourite type, but I would happily take in some more of Hammett's offerings (and go to Malta...).