The Maltese Falcon (Criticism)

Criticism

David Kelly

Kelly is an instructor of literature and creative writing at two colleges in Illinois. In this essay, Kelly traces the facts that can be deduced about Sam Spade's true personality from his interactions with characters who are not involved in the Maltese falcon caper.

In The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett has produced a detective novel format that is so compelling that it has been done and redone over and over. It is a pattern that any moviegoer or television watcher is familiar with by now: The detective, Sam Spade, finds himself pulled into a web of intrigue surrounding a mysterious, valuable object that brings three murders to his doorstep. Readers follow the story because they want to know who committed the killings and where the valuable black bird is. Keeping them interested is the work that a mystery story is supposed to do. What elevates this book from being a good read to being literature, though, is the interest that Hammett shows in Sam Spade's personality and the way that he provokes readers to wonder about it. In the end, the mystery of the man turns out to be more compelling than any questions about who did what, with what, and how.

Who is Sam Spade? At the end of The Maltese Falcon, readers find out that he is not the person that he has pretended to be all along. He proves to be a man driven by a sense of honor, which he has kept hidden throughout, a man who has known the answer to who killed his partner, Miles Archer, but who has kept on pursuing clues anyway, allowing himself to be seduced by Archer's killer, but not so far taken in by love that he is willing to let the woman he loves escape justice. He is a man with an agenda so deeply buried under his placid demeanor that it is very likely that he himself is not aware of it.

In addition to Spade's probable lack of self-awareness, Hammett makes his personality even more difficult to understand with the way that he tells this story. The third-person narrative voice is distant, never allowing access to what Spade really thinks. Readers never enter into his mind. Although Spade's job is to observe the other characters and surmise from their behaviors what they are thinking, he applies no such scrutiny to his own actions. Without access to his thoughts, readers find themselves, at the end of the book, knowing the least about the character that they thought they knew the best.

Deception is a tool in the detective's arsenal. Without access to his thoughts, readers can be deceived just as much as the characters that Spade is trying to fool. For instance, when Spade walks out of the fat man's suite at the end of chapter 11, shouting and threatening, readers have no way of knowing that he has not actually lost his cool until the next chapter when he sighs in relief that his posturing has gone so well. He shows similar temper with Lieutenant Dundy and District Attorney Bryan, using the pretense of emotion to leverage the situation. Over the course of the novel, he hides from Brigid O'Shaughnessy what might be the most important fact of all: that he knows, and probably has known from the moment he surveyed the crime scene, that she and only she could have killed Miles Archer.

Of course, this detective story would hardly be worth following through to the end if readers knew early on that Spade had identified O'Shaughnessy as the murderer of his partner and that all of her whispery pleas for his devotion and trust were wasted in the air. It is good for the story to have Spade withhold his knowledge. In the context of the story, though, he never adequately answers why it was better to hold this knowledge back than to tell it to the police and thereby wash his hands of the whole affair. He says that it is his duty to turn in the killer of his partner, and that is what Spade eventually does, but Hammett does not make clear whether that is Spade's intention all along or something that he settles on at the last minute. Spade's ambivalence is understandable — he is, after all, a man in love — but the fact that even he might not know his own intentions combines with Hammett's narrative distance to make Spade the darkest mystery in the book.

The best way to separate Spade's true self from the various bluffs that he goes through to track down the Maltese falcon is to look at how he is with characters who are not even involved with the affair of the black bird. There are few people in the book who do not relate to the search for the falcon, which makes them exceptional when they do appear.

In order of least importance, the first of these characters would be the theater manager who hires Spade in a quick, one-paragraph scene in chapter 16. Spade is in the thick of his search for the falcon, and, in fact, comes into possession of the object of everyone's murderous interests later in that same chapter. But he takes time to listen to the man and accept a retainer from him. This small touch is seldom noticed. The man is so insignificant to the story that Hammett does not even bother to describe him, beyond referring to him as "swart." Still, his significance to understanding Spade's character is great. In taking the man's retainer, Spade makes it clear that, this deeply into the case, with the police pressuring him with jail and the fat man offering him unimaginable riches, he does not expect his life to change much. It might even be unconscious, but Spade behaves as if he sees neither wealth nor jail in his immediate future. This affirms his behavior at the end, when he tells O'Shaughnessy that he would still have turned her in if the falcon had been real, and he had collected his ten thousand dollars.

A more significant indicator of Spade's true psychological state is the story that he tells O'Shaughnessy in chapter 7 about the man named Flitcraft, who, having been nearly hit by a falling girder, abandoned his wife and infant child, traveling the world for a few years before settling down to almost the exact same situation that he left. The story is mostly notable because of its irrelevance to what is going on in Spade's life at the time that he chooses to tell it: He is falling in love and on the verge of finding out about the mystery of a lifetime. It takes a strong man to rein himself in and put the events surrounding him into perspective. Literary critics can debate whether the moral of the story is fatalism (that a man is going to be what his destiny dictates, despite moments of awareness) or freedom (that Flitcraft, shaken by the awareness of death, realized that his former life had been just fine). The important thing is that Spade focuses on this story when he feels the falcon intrigue drawing him in. "I don't think he even knew he had settled back naturally into the same groove he had jumped out of in Tacoma," Spade explains to O'Shaughnessy, who is barely listening and certainly not ascribing any importance to this weird little tale. "But that's the part of it I always liked." As with the episode of the swart man, it seems that, beyond wealth or love, what Spade expects of himself is consistency.

And that is why, in the end, he resigns himself to accepting Iva Archer as a part of his life. The wife of his murdered partner, Iva appears to be involved in the falcon case in some way, but she really is not. She is an independent entity, a constant factor that was in Spade's life before the case started and one that will be there when it is over. When Spade finds out that Iva was not home on the night Miles was shot, he has her story checked out in a roundabout way, having her tell her alibi to his lawyer, who in turn, unethically, tells it to Spade. He still does not seem convinced, but expresses satisfaction that the police will believe it. But Spade's own skepticism of Iva's story is suspicious: If he is not convinced that Iva was where she said she was when Miles was killed, then why is he so certain of Brigid O'Shaughnessy's guilt? Or, conversely, if Spade knows that O'Shaughnessy killed his partner, then why does he show such interest in Iva's whereabouts? Throughout the story, Iva jealously stakes out Spade's apartment and his office, and he tries his best to avoid her. Apparently, though, he is curious about what she does when she is not around to bother him. The man of conviction loses the money and the girl — this is the price of having convictions — but he ends up in the arms of a woman that he claims to detest. This might just be bad luck, but it could also be the fate that Spade, consciously or unconsciously, wants. He might realize that, whatever he does to escape, he, like Flitcraft, will end up with Iva or someone like her.

If Hammett had given more direct access to Spade's thoughts, the story would have been less interesting, and the lead character would certainly have been less compelling. Sam Spade seems to be a complex, interesting man trying to hold onto a simple, uninteresting life, even as he stands in the middle of a hurricane of love and intrigue. Readers do not know what he is thinking; Spade himself might not even know, in any depth, what motivates him. The important thing is that he is so well realized in what he says and does that readers can recognize his fate and accept that it is right for him.

Source: David Kelly, Critical Essay on The Maltese Falcon, in Novels for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

What Do I Read Next?

• Fans of this book will see an entirely different kind of detective in debonair Nick Charles, the hero of Hammett's next and last novel, The Thin Man (1934).
• While Sam Spade is a rugged individualist, Hammett's previous detective character, The Continental Op, was a pudgy, nameless operative of the Continental Detective Agency. He is the protagonist of two earlier novels, Red Harvest and The Dain Curse, both published in 1929.
• Brian Lawson's novel Chasing Sam Spade (2002), published by Booklocker Press, presents a man who goes to San Francisco to investigate the murder of his father, only to become wrapped up in a web of intrigue with clues taken from Hammett's novel. The city's atmosphere plays a strong role.
• The writer who is most often associated with Hammett is Raymond Chandler, whose stories of Los Angeles detective Phillip Marlowe have a sense of hardboiled fatalism and a verbal style that approaches Hammett's skill. Of the Marlowe books, The Big Sleep (1939) is the most popular, possibly because Humphrey Bogart played Marlowe in the 1946 film.
• Many crime-novel connoisseurs consider James Ellroy to be the modern-day heir to Hammett and Chandler. Of his novels, L.A. Confidential (1997) is often singled out for its seamless storytelling and its dark vision. It tells the story of three policemen involved in a scandal-ridden case in Los Angeles in the 1950s.
• Though many literary studies have been made of Hammett's life, a more personal look at him, including family photos, was done by his daughter Jo Hammett in her book A Daughter Remembers (2001).