This month features The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett, Orion, £6.99, 0752847643
|
|
|
Deadpan.
‘Spade said nothing in a blank-faced definite way.’
And more deadpan.
‘“Go ahead.” Spade’s voice was as empty of expression as his face.’
And yet more deadpan.
‘Spade was lighting his cigarette. His face was tranquil.’
And then, this:
‘Red rage came suddenly into his voice and he began to talk in a harsh guttural voice. Holding his maddened face in his hands, glaring at the floor, he cursed Dundy for five minutes without break, cursed him obscenely, blasphemously, repetitiously, in a harsh guttural voice.’
We spend a great deal of The Maltese Falcon observing the face of private detective Sam Spade – it is our clue, it is our hope. It is also the first thing described in the whole book, and that description is remarkable (particularly the last sentence):
‘Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brow rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down – from high flat temples – in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blonde satan.’
In writing about Spade, Dashiell Hammett was creating the archetypal hardboiled detective. He sits in his cramped office; he flirts with his devoted secretary; he awaits the arrival of… a mysterious woman (Miss Wonderly who is really called Miss O’Shaugnessy, probably) who seductively pleads with him to take on her case, and then pays him a suspiciously large amount of money to do so. Within couple of dozen pages, there will have been two murders.
Although I hate myself for doing so, it’s impossible to think of Spade without thinking of Humphrey Bogart. It takes a slight mental nudge to picture Bogie as a blonde satan, but this is him as surely as anything:
‘Spade ran his tongue over his lips and pulled his lips back over his teeth in an ugly grin. His eyes glittered under pulled-down brows.’
(Casting the film of The Maltese Falcon was a cinch. Of course Peter Lorre had to play the camp, insidious Joel Cairo – “I am trying to recover an – ah – ornament that has been – shall we say? – mislaid”; of course Sydney Greenstreet had to play the Fat Man – “And I’ll tell you right out that I’m a man who likes talking to a man who likes to talk.”)
As with most archetypes, it takes another sort of mental effort to scrub from them the taint of cliché. If a lot of The Maltese Falcon’s moves are so familiar, that’s because they choreographed a whole ensuing genre.
Now let’s talk about the black bird.
Certainly the most fantastic passage in The Maltese Falcon comes when the Fat Man, details the long history of the object they are all – he, Miss O’Shaugnessy, Cairo, Spade – in desperate pursuit of:
‘“What do you know, sir, about the Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem…?”
Spade waved his cigar. “Not much – only what I remember from history in school – Crusaders or something.”…
“Have you any conception of the extreme, the immeasurable, wealth of the Order at that time?”
“If I remember,” Spade said, “they were pretty well fixed.”’
Everything and everybody, in The Maltese Falcon, is pretty well fixed – and in just about every imaginable way. But is the black bird itself immensely valuable and important and symbolic or it is merely a MacGuffin?
(MacGuffin: a word popularized by Alfred Hitchcock, applied to any object in a film that is the focus of the plot but which has no significance to the plot itself. For example, in the Pink Panther, the diamond is the MacGuffin.)
“Everybody,” Spade responded mildly, “has something to conceal.”
|
Author interviews
