The Maltese Falcon

Introduction to the Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Edition (2023)

Writers don’t read like civilians. We’re like wizards at a magic show, less interested in the illusion itself than how it was pulled off. After all, we might want to use that same trick—or one like it—ourselves one day. I wasn’t a writer when I first read The Maltese Falcon and it would be a decade at least before I entertained thoughts of becoming one. What I recall admiring as a civilian reader was the book’s propulsive, if serpentine, plot, the way mysteries were piled on top of mysteries. Who killed Miles Archer? Who killed Thursby and, later, Jacobi, the ship captain who delivers the falcon to Sam Spade? What is the black bird, anyway, and why does everybody want it? More than a Hitchcockian MacGuffin, the falcon requires a lengthy history lesson to explain its value. Every time one question is answered, two more are begged, though gradually the reader’s questions get answered, as they must in a good detective novel. I loved all of that.

Rereading the book recently, I found my attention drawn to more writerly mysteries. Perhaps because of Humphrey Bogart’s indelible portrayal of Sam Spade on the screen, I’d mostly forgotten how he was portrayed on the page, how determined Hammett was to establish and maintain an uneasy relationship between the reader and the book’s main character. Not being a writer back then, I had no idea what an effaced point of view was or how it might be used and I doubt it even registered that we’re constantly looking at Spade, never through him, as events unfold. Now a novelist myself, it was the fact that Dashiell Hammett didn’t want us in Spade’s head that drew and held my attention. On the first page we’re told that Spade resembles a blond Satan, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. Again and again Hammett reminds us of Spade’s yellow-grey eyes, his powerful sloping shoulders. His smile is wolfish, showing the edges of his teeth far back into his jaw. Instead of the easy kinship with the detective we’re used to feeling in other mystery novels, we’re intentionally kept at arm’s length. In time we may come to see things Spade’s way, but we’re not supposed to like him, at least not yet. We sense that behind those yellow-grey eyes and wolfish smile there lurks an amoral, if not downright immoral, man. You’ll play hell with her, you will, Spade tells his lecherous partner, Miles Archer, in reference to their drop-dead gorgeous new client. That Archer plans to take advantage of the girl doesn’t seem to trouble Spade in the least. The novel’s first mystery, then, posed before the plot gets under way, is: Who exactly is Sam Spade? Is he a good guy? Or a very, very bad one?

It’s an unusual strategy. I came to hard-boiled detective fiction through Ross Macdonald and his detective Lew Archer (yeah, his last name is no coincidence) in the early 70s, then read backward through Raymond Chandler to Hammett. And before that I devoured most of Agatha Christie, Josephine Tey, and Dorothy Sayers, the golden age British murder mysteries that my mother so loved. As not a few critics have pointed out, British detective novels tend to be about justice and the restoration of order. These have been temporarily upended by murder most foul, but Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple or Inspector Grant or Lord Peter Wimsey will put things right. The narratives are often told from the point of view of the detective’s sidekick (à la Sherlock Holmes’s Watson), a device that allows readers an occasional glimpse of the detective’s thinking but also draws a curtain lest we learn too much too soon, allowing the final solution to come in a single big reveal in the book’s final chapter. Hard-boiled American detective fiction, starting with Hammett, is different. Here the landscape is often full of crooked politicians, cops on the take, and corrupt institutions. Justice is available only to those who can afford to buy it. If this is the prevailing order, why restore it? American tough-guy detectives like Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer are under no illusions about the world they live in or, just as importantly, about human nature. What matters to them is not the corruption they see all around them but the fact that they themselves are honest. It’s an individual moral code they embody, not a societal one, which may be why American crime novelists gravitate toward first-person storytelling, which not only emphasizes the detective’s isolation but allows the reader to identify more closely with the detective hero. We readers become Marlowe and Archer.

To me, what’s fascinating about The Maltese Falcon is that Hammett, who birthed the American tough-guy detective hero, wanted exactly none of that in his most famous novel. No identifying with or cozying up to the detective is encouraged here. Every time the reader begins to admire Spade (he’s clearly smart and dead-game in the face of danger), Hammett warns us through Spade’s callous dialogue ("Have Spade & Archer taken off the door and have Samuel Spade put on, he instructs Effie Perine, the day after Archer is murdered) and shady behavior (he’s always taking people’s money) that he might simply be out for himself. On the other hand, when we start getting used to the idea that Spade might be corrupt, Hammett again wrong-foots us. Don’t be too sure I’m as crooked as I’m supposed to be, Spade warns Brigid O’Shaughnessy, advice she’d do well to listen to. Amazingly, Hammett seems determined that we dwell in such moral ambiguity right to the bitter end. The entirety of the novel’s last chapter, which is traditionally devoted to the plot revelations—who killed whom and why and how—is devoted instead to letting Spade explain himself. Many of the book’s most famous lines (I won’t play the sap for you…. I won’t because all of me wants to) come from Spade’s stunning, extended soliloquy in that final chapter. And yet, despite its remarkable thoroughness, that soliloquy doesn’t—at least to my mind—resolve the question posed in the first chapter: Even though the dust has settled, it’s still not entirely clear whether Spade is what he looks like (a blond Satan") or the book’s hero. That Spade doesn’t seem to know either makes it all the richer.

It’s ironic, but I think we come closest to understanding Spade through the parable he tells Brigid O’Shaughnessy early in the book about a man named Flitcraft, who is passing a construction site on his way to lunch one day when a beam falls from the sky. It misses him, but a shard of concrete from the sidewalk bounces up and strikes him beneath one eye. Though his injury is minor, the incident rocks Flitcraft to his core. It felt, he explains, as if somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works. To this point he’d always assumed that life was a clean, orderly, sane, responsible affair. Now he saw that it was instead haphazard, ruled by blind chance. And so, in protest, he simply walks away from his life. When Spade locates him years later, he’s living a life that is nearly identical to the one he left. Why? Because, he explains to Spade, no more beams fell. He first adjusted to beams falling, then to them not falling.

Past critics have interpreted the Flitcraft parable as a warning to Brigid O’Shaughnessy. People don’t change. They may want to and try to, but in the end they fall back into old, familiar patterns. To me, the Flitcraft story makes better sense as an explanation of who Spade is and why. The problem with being a detective is that beams never stop falling. With each new client the lid is likely to get ripped off your client’s life, and maybe, if you aren’t careful, your own. At every turn you are reminded that life is haphazard and ruled by blind chance. Who is Sam Spade? Like so many of us, he is what he does.

RICHARD RUSSO

2023

Richard Russo is the author of ten novels, most recently Somebody’s Fool, Chances Are…, and Everybody’s Fool; two collections of stories; and the memoir Elsewhere. In 2002, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls, which was adapted into a multiple award–winning miniseries; in 2017, he received France’s Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine. He lives in Portland, Maine.

1

SPADE & ARCHER

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 brows 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 blond satan.

He said to Effie Perine: Yes, sweetheart?

She was a lanky sunburned girl whose tan dress of thin woolen stuff clung to her with an effect of dampness. Her eyes were brown and playful in a shiny boyish face. She finished shutting the door behind her, leaned against it, and said: There’s a girl wants to see you. Her name’s Wonderly.

A customer?

I guess so. You’ll want to see her anyway: she’s a knockout.

Shoo her in, darling, said Spade. Shoo her in.

Effie Perine opened the door again, following it back into the outer office, standing with a hand on the knob while saying: Will you come in, Miss Wonderly?

A voice said, Thank you, so softly that only the purest articulation made the words intelligible, and a young woman came through the doorway. She advanced slowly, with tentative steps, looking at Spade with cobalt-blue eyes that were both shy and probing.

She was tall and pliantly slender, without angularity anywhere. Her body was erect and high-breasted, her legs long, her hands and feet narrow. She wore two shades of blue that had been selected because of her eyes. The hair curling from under her blue hat was darkly red, her full lips more brightly red. White teeth glistened in the crescent her timid smile made.

Spade rose bowing and indicating with a thick-fingered hand the oaken armchair beside his desk. He was quite six feet tall. The steep rounded slope of his shoulders made his body seem almost conical—no broader than it was thick—and kept his freshly pressed grey coat from fitting very well.

Miss Wonderly murmured, Thank you, softly as before and sat down on the edge of the chair’s wooden seat.

Spade sank into his swivel-chair, made a quarter-turn to face her, smiled politely. He smiled without separating his lips. All the v’s in his face grew longer.

The tappity-tap-tap and the thin bell and muffled whir of Effie Perine’s typewriting came through the closed door. Somewhere in a neighboring office a power-driven machine vibrated dully. On Spade’s desk a limp cigarette smoldered in a brass tray filled with the remains of limp cigarettes. Ragged grey flakes of cigarette-ash dotted the yellow top of the desk and the green blotter and the papers that were there. A buff-curtained window, eight or ten inches open, let in from the court a current of air faintly scented with ammonia. The ashes on the desk twitched and crawled in the current.

Miss Wonderly watched the grey flakes twitch and crawl. Her eyes were uneasy. She sat on the very edge of the chair. Her feet were flat on the floor, as if she were about to rise. Her hands in dark gloves clasped a flat dark handbag in her lap.

Spade rocked back in his chair and asked: Now what can I do for you, Miss Wonderly?

She caught her breath and looked at him. She swallowed and said hurriedly: Could you—? I thought—I—that is— Then she tortured her lower lip with glistening teeth and said nothing. Only her dark eyes spoke now, pleading.

Spade smiled and nodded as if he understood her, but pleasantly, as if nothing serious were involved. He said: Suppose you tell me about it, from the beginning, and then we’ll know what needs doing. Better begin as far back as you can.

That was in New York.

Yes.

I don’t know where she met him. I mean I don’t know where in New York. She’s five years younger than I—only seventeen—and we didn’t have the same friends. I don’t suppose we’ve ever been as close as sisters should be. Mama and Papa are in Europe. It would kill them. I’ve got to get her back before they come home.

Yes, he said.

They’re coming home the first of the month.

Spade’s eyes brightened. Then we’ve two weeks, he said.

I didn’t know what she had done until her letter came. I was frantic. Her lips trembled. Her hands mashed the dark handbag in her lap. I was too afraid she had done something like this to go to the police, and the fear that something had happened to her kept urging me to go. There wasn’t anyone I could go to for advice. I didn’t know what to do. What could I do?

Nothing, of course, Spade said, but then her letter came?

Yes, and I sent her a telegram asking her to come home. I sent it to General Delivery here. That was the only address she gave me. I waited a whole week, but no answer came, not another word from her. And Mama and Papa’s return was drawing nearer and nearer. So I came to San Francisco to get her. I wrote her I was coming. I shouldn’t have done that, should I?

Maybe not. It’s not always easy to know what to do. You haven’t found her?

No, I haven’t. I wrote her that I would go to the St. Mark, and I begged her to come and let me talk to her even if she didn’t intend to go home with me. But she didn’t come. I waited three days, and she didn’t come, didn’t even send me a message of any sort.

Spade nodded his blond satan’s head, frowned sympathetically, and tightened his lips together.

It was horrible, Miss Wonderly said, trying to smile. I couldn’t sit there like that—waiting—not knowing what had happened to her, what might be happening to her. She stopped trying to smile. She shuddered. The only address I had was General Delivery. I wrote her another letter, and yesterday afternoon I went to the Post Office. I stayed there until after dark, but I didn’t see her. I went there again this morning, and still didn’t see Corinne, but I saw Floyd Thursby.

Spade nodded again. His frown went away. In its place came a look of sharp attentiveness.

He wouldn’t tell me where Corinne was, she went on, hopelessly. He wouldn’t tell me anything, except that she was well and happy. But how can I believe that? That is what he would tell me anyhow, isn’t it?

Sure, Spade agreed. But it might be true.

I hope it is. I do hope it is, she exclaimed. But I can’t go back home like this, without having seen her, without even having talked to her on the phone. He wouldn’t take me to her. He said she didn’t want to see me. I can’t believe that. He promised to tell her he had seen me, and to bring her to see me—if she would come—this evening at the hotel. He said he knew she wouldn’t. He promised to come himself if she wouldn’t. He—

She broke off with a startled hand to her mouth as the door opened.

The man who had opened the door came in a step, said, Oh, excuse me! hastily took his brown hat from his head, and backed out.

It’s all right, Miles, Spade told him. Come in. Miss Wonderly, this is Mr. Archer, my partner.

Miles Archer came into the office again, shutting the door behind him, ducking his head and smiling at Miss Wonderly, making a vaguely polite gesture with the hat in his hand. He was of medium height, solidly built, wide in the shoulders, thick in the neck, with a jovial heavy-jawed red face and some grey in his close-trimmed hair. He was apparently as many years past forty as Spade was past thirty.

Spade said: Miss Wonderly’s sister ran away from New York with a fellow named Floyd Thursby. They’re here. Miss Wonderly has seen Thursby and has a date with him tonight. Maybe he’ll bring the sister with him. The chances are he won’t. Miss Wonderly wants us to find the sister and get her away from him and back home. He looked at Miss Wonderly. Right?

Yes, she said indistinctly. The embarrassment that had gradually been driven away by Spade’s ingratiating smiles and nods and assurances was pinkening her face again. She looked at the bag in her lap and picked nervously at it with a gloved finger.

Spade winked at his partner.

Miles Archer came forward to stand at a corner of the desk. While the girl looked at her bag he looked at her. His little brown eyes ran their bold appraising gaze from her lowered face to her feet and up to her face again. Then he looked at Spade and made a silent whistling mouth of appreciation.

Spade lifted two fingers from the arm of his chair in a brief warning gesture and said:

We shouldn’t have any trouble with it. It’s simply a matter of having a man at the hotel this evening to shadow him away when he leaves, and shadow him until he leads us to your sister. If she comes with him, and you persuade her to return with you, so much the better. Otherwise—if she doesn’t want to leave him after we’ve found her—well, we’ll find a way of managing that.

Archer said: Yeh. His voice was heavy, coarse.

Miss Wonderly looked up at Spade, quickly, puckering her forehead between her eyebrows.

Oh, but you must be careful! Her voice shook a little, and her lips shaped the words with nervous jerkiness. I’m deathly afraid of him, of what he might do. She’s so young and his bringing her here from New York is such a serious— Mightn’t he—mightn’t he do—something to her?

Spade smiled and patted the arms of his chair.

Just leave that to us, he said. We’ll know how to handle him.

But mightn’t he? she insisted.

There’s always a chance. Spade nodded judicially. But you can trust us to take care of that.

I do trust you, she said earnestly, but I want you to know that he’s a dangerous man. I honestly don’t think he’d stop at anything. I don’t believe he’d hesitate to—to kill Corinne if he thought it would save him. Mightn’t he do that?

You didn’t threaten him, did you?

I told him that all I wanted was to get her home before Mama and Papa came so they’d never know what she had done. I promised him I’d never say a word to them about it if he helped me, but if he didn’t Papa would certainly see that he was punished. I—I don’t suppose he believed me, altogether.

Can he cover up by marrying her? Archer asked.

The girl blushed and replied in a confused voice: He has a wife and three children in England. Corinne wrote me that, to explain why she had gone off with him.

They usually do, Spade said, though not always, in England. He leaned forward to reach for pencil and pad of paper. What does he look like?

Oh, he’s thirty-five years old, perhaps, and as tall as you, and either naturally dark or quite sunburned. His hair is dark too, and he has thick eyebrows. He talks in a rather loud, blustery way and has a nervous, irritable manner. He gives the impression of being—of violence.

Spade, scribbling on the pad, asked without looking up: What color eyes?

They’re blue-grey and watery, though not in a weak way. And—oh, yes—he has a marked cleft in his chin.

Thin, medium, or heavy build?

Quite athletic. He’s broad-shouldered and carries himself erect, has what could be called a decidedly military carriage. He was wearing a light grey suit and a grey hat when I saw him this morning.

What does he do for a living? Spade asked as he laid down his pencil.

I don’t know, she said. I haven’t the slightest idea.

What time is he coming to see you?

After eight o’clock.

All right, Miss Wonderly, we’ll have a man there. It’ll help if—

Mr. Spade, could either you or Mr. Archer? She made an appealing gesture with both hands. "Could either