The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

Where to start? This is a novel overshadowed by a movie, a novel that stands as the most successful piece of a stunted career, a novel that's more conventional than a reader might think, a novel that doesn't necessarily show well against later entries in the same genre.

I've been reading Hammett and Chandler recently, and as a guy with an English degree, Chandler runs rings around Hammett in every way possible - character insight, striking language, verisimilitude, atmosphere. There's nothing wrong with Hammett, but his work comes across, a hundred years later, as workmanlike and interesting rather than compelling and fresh.

The Maltese Falcon was published in 1930. The famous movie - the third adaptation, actually; Hollywood was quick in those days - came a decade later. Hammett's writing career was over by then, and his fall from grace with the public just about to come: it turns out that America wasn't fond of avowed Communists in the post-war era.

I think I need to mention the plot, though it almost seems absurd to do so. Sam Spade is a detective in San Francisco; he gets a client in a young woman who tells him and his partner (Miles Archer) a story about a runaway younger sister that neither of them believe. Archer is killed that night, following the man the girl says lured away her sister.

There is no sister, and that other man is killed later that night. The cops half-heartedly try to pin one or both murders on Spade, mostly to see if it will work, but it doesn't. Spade is hard-boiled, spitting tough dialogue at the cops and everyone else, and heads out to investigate - there's that famous speech at the end where he talks about the death of Archer. (There are four or five famous passages in Falcon; speeches you probably already know, from the book or the movie. I don't want to pooh-pooh those: they made it into the movie because they're said exactly right, because they're perfect expressions of their moments.)

Anyway, it turns out there's a fantastically valuable statue that the girl - Spade eventually learns her name is Brigid O'Shaughnessy - and several others have been chasing around the world. Spade learns more, runs around San Francisco for a few days, gets involved with one more murder, gets (basically out of nowhere) a package with the statue, has a tense meeting with all of the major players at the end, and hands over the killers to the cops so we can have an ending. The plotting is decent enough, though it does suffer from the mystery-novel issue of being all running around and talking to the same people over and over again, like a particularly unpleasant fetch quest in an CRPG.

The idea of the falcon is slightly silly, the ending is a dying fall in a way that doesn't quite strike me right, and I've never quite bought that Spade and O'Shaughnessy "loved" each other, as the dialogue at the end wants to say. Spade is a bit too much the stereotypical tough guy to really become a fully-rounded person - for me at least.

And, just saying, in the book he's tall and blonde.

All in all, for me, The Maltese Falcon is no Red Harvest. It's iconic and famous and full of moments familiar from later parodies and references, but, on its own, it's just a solid B- hard-boiled mystery novel from early in the genre, told mostly in a meat-and-potatoes style and featuring a main character without a whole lot to make him distinctive other than "hard-boiled PI."