Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 08 Dec 2015

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

In trutht I’m not much of a fan of detective or crime fiction. What I do read tends to be American and it tends towards the hard-boiled. I quite like some of James Ellroy’s novels (especially the earlier stuff) and I think James Lee Burke is a genius – but his Robicheaux detective sequence is really existential fiction with moral purpose and the fact that it’s classifiable in genre terms is coincidental to it’s bigger aims.

If I want to read detective stories for fun, my first choice has always been Raymond Chandler. I admire the fact that his stories are often shot through with logical inconsistencies and that the characters for the most part have less than three dimensions and yet that simply doesn’t matter. These are books all about dialogue and all about the internal voice – usually that belonging to his greatest invention, Philip Marlowe. For me, Chandler most convincingly conjures-up the hard drinking, wise-cracking private dick of noir crime fiction – a man in a mac whose heart is hard but in the right place and who would be, if he really existed, a misanthrope and misogynist of spectacular proportions. The crackling dialogue of Chandler’s creations are what makes these novels such a great trip and I defy you not to laugh out loud at some of his descriptions of people and events whilst at the same time being utterly mystified by the complexities of the plot.

Several people have said to me that I’m wrong about Chandler and that he is a pale imitation of an even more masterly noir writer, Dashiell Hammett. Until now I’ve rather resisted this argument – too often in the past I’ve been told that some earlier incarnation of an author is far superior to a later, more contemporary one that I’m temporarily besotted with. In my experience, it rarely turns out to be true. So I can’t say I decided to give Hammett a go with what you’d call an open mind – I didn’t really expect to like him and I sort of wanted him to be only a pale version of Chandler.

However, I’ve got to confess I was wrong. The Maltese Falcon is a terrific read. Sam Spade, the private dick at the heart of this story doesn’t have quite the polished, almost detached eye of Marlowe but, if anything, he’s even more hard boiled. I found it quite hard to shake off the lingering impact of the movie version and the temptation to see Bogart as Spade, Greenstreet as Gutman and Lore as Cairo is quite overwhelming -  but I think it speaks well for the film that the latter two of these characters at least were superbly cast and embodied Hammett’s prose to perfection.

Where Bogart is superbly right as Marlowe he is fatally wrong as Spade. Hammett makes Spade a physically intimidating, self-assured and almost saturnine man – attractive to women but dangerous to men. Spade does not seek affirmation or friendship and has no back-story. He looks on death with a sort of fatalistic indifference and his real thoughts are unknowable. Bogart just can’t cut that.

In reality, Hammett isn’t interested in character or character development. He’s interested in plot, he’s interested in good and evil and he’s interested in deceit. But for me the real strength of this novel is its sheer physicality – Hammett notices and describes physical details at every level. How a cigarette is lit, how a drink is held, what a gun feels like in the hand, how a fleeting look crosses a face, the tone in a voice – all of these things stand in for character insights and even drive the plot along. Reading this book was a genuine physical and sensory experience – I can still see the ‘globes’ of fat on Gutman wobbling as he gets excited or hear the alarmed squeals of Joel Cairo as he’s gun-whipped or feel the duplicity of Brigid as she lies every time she opens her mouth.

Chandler certainly learned some of his trade from Hammett – that much surely can’t be denied. Perhaps one of those lessons was to make sure you’re plots are so convoluted no-one will bother checking that the time sequences work or that the action sometimes is simply inexplicable and motivation unlikely. I don’t know if everything in the plot hangs together in this book and frankly I don’t care – if you’re interested in such things then maybe this isn’t the book for you

Luckily, I don’t have to have either Chandler or Hammett because I can have them both. A rich back catalogue to explore.

 

Terry Potter

December 2015