Every dame, bad but beautiful, every two-bit street hood with larceny on his mind and every steel-eyed detective meting out two-fisted justice owes a debt to Dashiell Hammett.
Seventy-five years ago, his novel The Maltese Falcon introduced to the world a street-smart and world-weary detective named Sam Spade, and in the process changed the popular perception of what crime fiction could be.
By the time he penned The Maltese Falcon, Hammett already had established himself as a crime writer with two novels - The Red Harvest and The Dain Curse - and had dozens of pulp magazine stories under his belt. He was one of many; a fairly popular writer working in a populist form. Richard Layman, a Hammett scholar who recently delivered a speech at the Library of Congress commemorating the Falcon anniversary, said the author's literary ambitions elevated his third novel.
"You really have to put The Maltese Falcon and Sam Spade in context," he said. "The pulp writers were, for the most part, hacks, guys writing for a penny a word. They were playing to popular taste. But Hammett was inspired by Hemingway and, of all people, Henry James. Compared to what other people were doing, finding Sam Spade was like finding a diamond in a coal cellar."
Marked by his economical use of words, his use of street vernacular and a precise descriptive style that laid out scenes and events exactly as his protagonist experienced them, Hammett's writing in The Maltese Falcon was at once engaging and coolly detached.
"What Hammett brought was an exceptional ear," said Charles Ardai, the publisher at Hard Case Crime, a publishing house specializing in hard-boiled crime fiction. "He wrote dialogue better than anyone else. The drawing-room prose had died in the trenches of World War I, and Hammett delivered with a knack for writing real language, the language of the street. His books, his style, was both painful and beautiful."
Robert B. Parker has written more than 30 novels featuring the Boston detective Spenser. His latest, Cold Service, was released March 8. He said that every novelist working in crime fiction works under the shadow of two writers, Hammett and Raymond Chandler.
"The Maltese Falcon changed the way that detective fiction was written," he said. "He took murder and put it in the street, where it belongs. At his best, and The Maltese Falcon is clearly his best; he was one of a kind. There are not many books written during the 20th century better than The Maltese Falcon."
According to Mr. Ardai, truly successful detective fiction follows the Hammett example of making the characters, not the case, of primary importance. He said the mystery of the black bird in The Maltese Falcon is far less interesting than the personalities surrounding it.
"The detective, in this case Sam Spade, is a surrogate narrator," he explained. "He's perfect. After all, it's his job to walk into a room full of people he's never met and discover what the relationships are. The enterprise of a detective is very much the enterprise of an author, and in Hammett's case, they work together beautifully."
Mr. Parker said that's true of all great detective fiction. A great detective novel is always less about crime than criminals, less about detection than detectives.
"That's absolutely true," he said. "It's certainly true of Hammett. It was true of Chandler and, perhaps blushingly, of myself. The detective is the device that holds things together."
For many, The Maltese Flacon conjures images of Humphrey Bogart in a snap-brim hat with a cigarette dangling from his down-turned lips. Mr. Layman acknowledged that the film has done The Maltese Falcon a great service.
"The movie really caught the public's imagination and kept The Maltese Falcon alive," he said. "Sam Spade became part of the cultural vocabulary because of that movie. Now, is Bogart Sam Spade? No. Unequivocally no. In the first paragraph of The Maltese Falcon, there's a description of Sam Spade, and if you look at a picture of Hammett, well, it's him."
Earlier in his life, Hammett had worked as a detective with the famous Pinkerton Agency. Mr. Layman said he believes that much of the magic of Hammett's work stems from the fact that readers are reading about the writer and the man he would have liked to have been.
"Before The Maltese Falcon, Hammett had spent seven years writing formula fiction - fiction based on his experiences at Pinkerton," he said. "And The Maltese Falcon is part of that. But it's also the book where Hammett reached for the stars, tried something new and applied complex literary technique to crime fiction. It's his great success. Yes, the movie played an important role, but when the editors of The Modern Library chose the 100 most important novels written in English in the 20th century, The Maltese Falcon was there. That says something."
Reach Steven Uhles at (706) 823-3626 or steven.uhles@augustachronicle.com.
Although the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man films are most often cited as Dashiell Hammett's connection to Hollywood, his five novels have been raided time and time again by filmmakers with a yen for hard-boiled action. Here are some lost treasures.
• Satan Met a Lady (1936): The Maltese Falcon actually was adapted twice before director John Huston got his hands on it. The first film, a fairly faithful adaptation of the novel, was released in 1931. This film, however, took a very different tact, reinventing the story of crosses and double-crosses as a sort of madcap romantic comedy. Interesting in its own right, but certainly not what Hammett intended.
• Yojimbo (1961): This samurai classic by Japanese director Akira Kurosawa was clearly based on Hammett's first novel, Red Harvest. The unnamed protagonist playing two rival factions off each other in a corrupt town proved so popular with movie fans that the story was usurped again for the Clint Eastwood Western Fistful of Dollars.
• Miller's Crossing (1990): An homage to the sort of intelligent crime drama Hammett pioneered. Key plot points in this lush Coen Brothers film were lifted from both Red Harvest and The Glass Key.
• Secret Agent X-9 (1945): Although Hammett's last novel, The Thin Man, was published in 1931, he did continue writing. One of his projects was a comic strip about a secret agent. Immediately after World War II, these stories were adapted into serials starring a very young Lloyd Bridges as the patriotic superspy.
- Steven Uhles
The Augusta Chronicle ©2012 Morris Communications, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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