The Maltese Falcon

Between 3:30 and 5:00 a.m. this morning, I read the final chapters of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon. 

I'd seen the 1941 movie a couple times in the distant past, but I doubt I would ever have read the book if the Sunday New York Times travel section hadn't carried a first page article entitled "San Francisco Noir."  The article led the reader around and about the not-so-noir streets of the modern city, seeking out the locales that Hammett identified so carefully by street and address in his book.  The article was profusely illustrated -- some photographs atmospherically noir-ish, others not so much.

I learned to love San Francisco before I ever really knew it, from reading Herb Caen's books (e.g., Baghdad by the Bay) as a teenager.  Then came years of college in the Bay Area, and later a short period as a member of the working classes, living on Sutter Street near Gough.  If I weren't loyal to the Northwest Corner today, I'd be living in "The City."  Assuming I could  afford it.

The Maltese Falcon, published in 1929, dealt (as did Caen's later newspaper columns to some extent) with an earlier San Francisco -- darker, more mysterious, and definitely non-techie in a world where "Silicon Valley" was meaningless.  (Wasn't sand made of silicon?  Did the phrase mean a "sandy valley"?)

The story -- a detective story, for those incomprehensively unfamiliar with even the plot of  the movie -- is complex, entertaining, and unnecessary to describe here.  What fascinates me is the language of the novel, the descriptions of 1920s San Francisco, and the atmosphere of foggy darkness, both physical and moral, that the author constructs.

Hammett tells the novel from the point of view of Sam Spade, the detective, but he tells it from an observer's vantage point.  In other words, we learn every word spoken by Spade, as well as his most minute gestures.  But we learn nothing of what goes on inside his head aside from what we learn or can infer from those objectively described words and deeds.  Spade responds almost instantly to new events with clever improvisations.  Have these responses been simmering in his brain over a period of time, or are they truly spontaneous?  We have no way of knowing. 

Literature classes recognize the concept of the "unreliable narrator."  Here, the narrator appears totally reliable.  But he is reporting the assertions of Sam Spade, whose words are almost always intended to deceive and who -- for us as well as for his antagonists -- is thus totally unreliable.

Herb Caen first showed me San Francisco as a city of mystery.  I remember especially his tales of  Chinatown -- the narrow streets, the only half-assimilated Chinese residents, the sounds and smells of a port city, a little Singapore or Hong Kong.  I was disappointed when I first visited Chinatown as a teenager  to discover that -- so far as I could observe -- it was merely a small tourist area selling souvenir t-shirts and faux Chinese works of art. 

Hammett deals with an earlier era, an era to which, I like to believe, Caen was hearkening back -- an era when reality still approximated the exotic image.  A town of seedy detective agencies, borderline-corrupt cops, dark alleys, complicit hotel detectives.  An active port city with ships arriving almost daily from Seattle, San Pedro, New York, Hong Kong and Singapore; a port city that attracted active smuggling, and whose connections with the rest of the world were close commercially but distant in time.

One phrase from the novel itself haunts me with nostalgia:

After a leisurely breakfast at the Palace, during which he read both morning papers, ....

San Francisco today has one embarrassingly poor daily newspaper.  Imagine a time when it had two papers in the morning alone.  Spade's favorite paper was the Call.  That fact excites my own recollections of days when the city had, besides the morning Examiner and the evening Chonicle, a third, albeit second-rate, newspaper, the Call-Bulletin -- an obvious product of a merger that itself later merged into the Examiner, now itself defunct as print journalism.

And then there is the matter of noir, a term describing literature that emphasizes "tough, cynical characters and bleak settings."  Hammett's novel is an early example of the genre.  Spade is a tough dude, displaying few signs of emotion that the dispassionate narrator can report.  As the book begins, he is involved in an affair with his partner's wife, and shows shockingly little distress when the partner is dispatched during the first chapters.  He beds women simply to keep them happy and under his control.  He lies to virtually everyone as a matter of policy.  He scorns the cops.  He uses his fists without hesitation.  He is blandly homophobic, perhaps merely reflecting his times.  He violates his client's confidences, and induces attorneys and medical workers to violate their own.  He has no moral code, seemingly, except survival and the making of money.

And yet ... we regard him at the end as a somehow decent fellow at heart.

The bleak settings entertain me, perhaps, more than the cynical characters.  As beautiful and gentrified -- as comfortable, both physically and psychologically -- as San Francisco is today, something in me longs for the mysterious and dangerous city of my teenage imaginings.  The Maltese Falcon gives me that city, by chapter and verse, street name and building description.  It's all there to be reconstructed in our minds, at our leisure, in our own time.

Finally, a warning.  Once you've seen the movie, however long ago, you can't read Hammett's description of Spade without picturing Humphrey Bogart -- or of Joe Cairo without seeing Peter Lorre.  And similarly with the characters played by Mary Astor and Sydney Greenstreet.  Hammett was fortunate to have a movie that interpreted his novel so faithfully and well.  For us today, the book is a supplement to the movie, as well as the movie's being a supplement to the book.  A synergy between the two produces an enriched experience.

Thanks to the NY Times for leading me to the book -- even though I was forced  to turn on the lights at 3:30 a.m.to finish it off, to see the story to the ending I already knew and expected..