For many people when you mention The Maltese Falcon, they think of the film with Humphrey Bogart. To a greater extent the characters of Joel Cairo played by Peter Lorre and Kasper Gutman portrayed by Sydney Greenstreet have become even more iconic characters than the film or even the novel. Lodged in the public consciousness for decades and spoofed hundreds of times over in ever media imaginable.
But, before any of this, there was the book upon which it was based. This is the classic textbook case of a hard drinking, womanizing private detective that knows what he wants and how to get it. A rather large man according to the description in the book, Sam Spade is the private eye that would be copied forever.
The plot is simple. When Sam and his partner Milton Archer are hired to follow a man, Milton gets killed. This sends Sam on a chase to find out how killed him. Along the way a femme fatale is introduced and she adds the extra burden of an object called The Maltese Falcon.
Here's where it got interesting for me. I have always been fascinated with The Knights Templar. Way before The DaVinci Code or any of the rest nonsense dealing with the Templars. So, when the artifact known as The Maltese Falcon is tied into The Knights Hospitaller I was astonished! Here was this little paperback detective novel and Hammett is including an ancient order of knights into the mix. This made the book much more interesting to me than the movie. I felt the Falcon's origins were more detailed in the novel and it made for fascinating reading.
In the end, Hammett is a genius. He, from the title alone, gets you concerned with one thing while Sam Spade has an agenda that, to the reader, falls by the wayside in such a way that at the conclusion of the novel you kind of go, "Ohhhhhhh!" Very well done.
It is amazing to me that a character such as Sam Spade only appeared in three short stories and one novel. He seems so well suited for the continuing serial of novels like so many of his imitators.
In the end The Maltese Falcon is a fascinating, fast read and a must for any true fan of the hard boiled detective genre.
13 comments:
Um...it wasn't "a little paperback detective novel." It was a novel by a writer already seen as the prophet of a new school of crime-fiction writing, published by Alfred Knopf when that publisher was becoming one of the "prestige" houses in the industry. Hammett was hardly the only genius to publish in the pulp magazines to reach for "hidden" history for interesting flavors in his work, albeit he was one of the best and most important...by me and others with better credentials, still the most important and one of the best of all the hardboiled cf writers, much better than such disciples as Raymond Chandler (however many people migh prefer Chandler's more fanciful, and more purple, prose).
Of course, there were no paperbacks to speak of when THE MALTESE FALCON was published...and pulps were pulp-fiction magazines (because they were printed on cheap pulpwood paper), and paperbacks were not pulps even when they reprinted pulp fiction (or were published on nearly as bad paper), but try telling that to today's "hipsters"...
Also, there were two films of THE MALTESE FALCON before the Huston/Bogart/Lorre/Greenstreet/Huston (Sr.) film...if ever there has been an argument for remakes, it was that third, and only good, adaptation.
I love me some Hammett. I just finished reading the collection entitled "The Continental Op". Great book, great stories, great writer. Have two more Hammett books on my shelf, saving them to enjoy over time!
Milton Archer? It was Miles Archer. Jeez.
Like Todd Mason said, it wasn't a paperback, as they didn't exist then, and this was the third time the book was filmed. A silent one, which I haven't seen, and one with Bette Davis, called Satan Met A Lady, which was not very good, and took a very different approach.
One of they key things about the Huston / Bogart movie is that the dialog pretty much comes verbatim from the novel; except for the physical appearance of Space, who looks nothing like Bogart, it's pretty much spot on.
This book from Vince Emery: http://www.emerybooks.com/discovering/discovering.htm looks very interesting; I saw it at a bookstore in San Francisco the other day but didn't get it; wish I had.
Actually, all three of the MALTESE FALCON films were "talkies" and all were initially known as THE MALTESE FALCON...it's just the good one encouraged the earlier versions to be relabeled DANGEROUS FEMALE and SATAN MET A LADY (though I might be wrong about the second version being renamed for rerelease, as IMDb seems unaware of that...as PSteve notes, it's not much like the novel, though Ricardo Cortez does look a bit more like Spade in the book).
The worst inevitable thing about the good film, given when it was filmed, was how it had to soft-pedal Spade and Brigid O'Shaughnessy's relations...the worst avoidable thing was the casting of Mary Astor, both bad and unattractive in the role (she freaks out rather well, but not much else).
I've been meaning to get around to Joe Gores's controversial prequel, SPADE AND ARCHER, but haven't yet.
Nitpicking aside, Hammett is indeed a prince. If you want Nights of Templar action, I recommend "Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting" by Raoul Ruiz. Not for all tastes maybe, but you very well might love it...
When ever you see the phrase "of course" on the internet, you can be sure somebody is feeding you a line of crap.
With all apologies to Todd, there were paperback as early as the late 1800s. On my self I have a 1911 "yellowback," essentially a paperback original though the term "paperback" was not then in circulation. The idea that paperbacks did not exist when "Maltese" was published is a quirk of industry jargon - the word "paperback" wasn't been applied to things we'd call paperback - and not an accurate statement of the state of publishing at the time.
'When ever you see the phrase "of course" on the internet, you can be sure somebody is feeding you a line of crap.'
Even more likely when someone can't be bothered to sign their name. OK, I'll rephrase: the mass-market paperbacks that arose with Penguin Books were all but non-existent in the US as this time, just as the "yellowbacks," which essentially no one called "paperbacks" at the time, flourished in the UK and were essentially irrelevant to anything brought up in the conversation beforehand, But thanks for playing rudely.
There were, Of Course, paperbound volumes of various sorts available in the States, but the Pocket Books, Dell, et al., books to which the poster referred didn't exist as a phenomenon at the time
of the book publication of THE MALTESE FALCON.
WOW! I thought it might be a good idea to cover some of the older paperbacks in my collection and you people turn it into some sort of pissing match!?! I mistakenly call someone Milton instead of Miles and get called to the mat on it?
Nice, gentlemen, real nice. I had considered a review of a book I juts read on Bollywood, but now think I might just reconsider it.
Carry on with your senseless abuse gentlemen.
Hope I didn't mispell anything.
Haha--welcome to the internet, Douglas! Anything you say can and will be used against you . . . The edge on some remarks may have been a bit uncalled-for; on the other hand, the best way not to get called out on simple errors is simply not to make them. I'd recommend not taking it personally, but also making sure to dot all i's, etc., in future posts. ;-)
Mason,
I apologize for the unnecessary rudeness. It was uncalled for.
That's cool, CRwm.
Douglas Waltz, as Curt notes, if you can't stand to be called on your errors, and I don't think any real vitriol was expended on you (PSteve seemed mildly disgusted by a pretty blatant error, even if on a small point, but only very mildly), it'd help if you didn't make them...paricularly really obvious ones. Unintentional condescension to Hammett and his place in literature doesn't make it not condescension.
Todd,
Read the review again. The term that you quote 'little paperback detective novel' is anything but condescending. Sure, I should have caught my ONE mistake, but let it alone already! Catch the part where I called him a genius? Sheesh!THere! I have dotted all my i's.
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