<A fete pectoris erst ay pen Gast Silane sleereticetet eter pretees nepeetreltelied pete 3 Te eietate ssttseas teeter te reer tat atest : faa i Hite THE MALTESE FALCON The Maltese Falcon was first published in the USA by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., in 1930. This edition published by arrangement with the Orion Publishing Group Ltd, London, and Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Copyright © 1929, 1930 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright renewed 1956, 1957 by Dashiell Hammett All rights reserved Illustrations © David Eccles 2000 Introduction © Sara Paretsky 2000 Printed on Inveresk Wove paper at Butler & Tanner Ltd, Frome, and bound by them in cloth printed with a design by the artist. The slipcase is also printed with a design by the artist. Oo CON NAN BW N NH FS SF SF Ft HR OR Oe ORS ey ere Keer ap fence @A ase) ey Sy fe) Contents Introduction 9 Author’s Introduction 21 Spade & Archer 25 Death in the Fog 33 Three Women 46 The Black Bird 54 The Levantine 67 The Undersized Shadow 74 Ginthe Air 83 Horse Feathers 95 Brigid 103 The Belvedere Divan 111 The FatMan 122 Merry-Go-Round 133 The Emperor’s Gift 143 La Paloma 152 Every Crackpot 161 The Third Murder 172 Saturday Night 182 The Fall-Guy 193 The Russian’s Hand 208 If They HangYou 227 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation https://archive.org/details/maltesefalcon0O000dash Illustrations “Ever seen this before?’ fp. 37 ‘Be generous, Mr. Spade’ 57 Brigid O’Shaughnessy quickly picked up the pistol 91 ‘Oh, you frightened me!’ 113 ... tossed his glass at the table 131 ... her eyelids fluttered 153 “We’ve got the damned thing, angel’ 180 The boy Wilmer came out of the kitchen behind them 192 “Take them off 217 “You won’t do that forme?’ 234 ‘ + el etal nel | | ‘aan bi!ate uae = Gee eal ae 4 7 te be * 4 ( iy is), 1) is ' wre =. >, : i 7 an ur —_ > th 7 Introduction ‘After reading The Maltese Falcon, I went mooning about in a daze of love such as I had not known for any character in literature since I encountered Sir Launcelot,’ Dorothy Parker wrote in the New Yorker in 1931, adding that she had read the book thirty or forty times in the two years since its publication. The cynical journalist wasn’t the only woman felled by Spade—or his creator: dozens went to bed with Dashiell Hammett when he moved from San Francisco to Los An- geles to join the throng trying to make money in Holly- wood. Lillian Hellman even left her husband in Los Angeles to follow Hammett to New York in 1931. Sam Spade made Hammett famous and for a short time rich. The man who had been unable to feed his family a few years before started getting two thousand dollars a week from Paramount to come up with original story lines. Ham- mett threw the money away on his idea of the high life— lavish parties that cost as much as ten thousand dollars, long weekends of drinking with starlets and writers in California —and some of it on settling a claim of forcible rape by one young actress. Everyone who reads Hammett seems to read their own needs into his work: where Dorothy Parker found Sir Launcelot, Senator Joe McCarthy and the House Un- American Activities Committee saw Communism. Hammett spent six months in a federal prison in 1951 when he refused to testify to Congress about the Civil Rights Congress, an organization on whose board he sat which provided bail to Communists. A few years after leaving prison, Hammett was back in front of Congress, this time before Joe McCarthy’s commit- tee. The Senator believed Hammett could only have named 9 his first novel Red Harvest because he was a Red himself. (While it’s true that in the Thirties and Forties Hammett openly supported the Communist Party, Blanche Knopf actually named Red Harvest—she thought Hammett’s origi- nal title of Poisonville would put readers off.) McCarthy even went so far as to remove copies of Hammett’s novels from all American embassies so that State Department employees wouldn’t be exposed to his Communist writings. When Hammett died in 1961, a veteran of both the First and Sec- ond World Wars as well as the McCarthy-era Blacklist, the FBI tried to stop his burial in Arlington. Other readers have seen equally unusual landscapes in Hammeit’s work. One recent critic says The Maltese Falcon 1s an elaborate allegory about American foreign policy in the decade following World War I, with the seductive sexuality of Brigid O’Shaughnessy representing the European seduc- tions that drew America into the war, and the death of Sam Spade’s partner representing the useless deaths that war brings in its wake. Modernist critics claim Hammett was making a serious critique of the automobile in his writing; neo-Marxists share Senator McCarthy’s view that the work was thoroughly Red, albeit with admiration. Hammett himself seemed to see his own face when he looked at Sam Spade. Aside from the fact that his own first name was Samuel—his mother called him by his middle name, Dashiell, to distinguish him from three other Samuels in the family—Hammett too had been a Pinkerton detective. In 1907, when he was thirteen, Hammett had to leave school to help support his family, but until he joined Pinker- tons in 1915, he didn’t stay at any job for more than a few months. When America entered the First World War, he joined the army as an ambulance driver, and in 1918 he contracted the flu in the terrible epidemic that was sweeping through army camps. His lungs were damaged so severely that for years he often didn’t have the strength to get out of IO bed. He lived on a very meager disability check; his post-war Pinkerton stint only totaled four or five months altogether, when he moved to the San Francisco area in search of a cure for his tubercular lungs. Although he exaggerated his role—and even his pres- ence—in some of the agency’s high-profile cases, he did have a first-hand knowledge of crime and criminals that other noir writers didn’t possess. In a 1934 introduction to The Maltese Falcon (included in this edition—see p. 21), Hammett wrote: Spade had no original . . . he is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been and what quite a few in their cockier moments thought they approached. For your private detec- tive does not ... want to be an erudite solver of riddles in the Sherlock Holmes manner; he wants to be a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent by- stander or client. Somehow, in putting his private fantasy of himself onto paper, Hammett created a landscape into which each reader, from Dorothy Parker to Joe McCarthy and beyond, could project their own image. So I feel my own idiosyncratic reading of The Maltese Falcon fits into a tradition of highly personal reactions to the novel. When I read The Maltese Falcon, I see neither Communists nor automobiles, but a world of dangerous female sexuality which Hammett found so terrifying that he needed to destroy it. There are three major women in the book: Iva Archer, a thirty-something blonde of ripe sexual charms, married to Sam’s partner Miles but having an affair with Sam; Effie Perine who is Sam’s secretary; and Brigid O’Shaughnessy, the client who sets the wheels of the story in motion. Effie, a boyish and guileless young woman, opens the story by ushering in Brigid, who is soft, stylish and appears IGE touchingly shy and vulnerable. Effie knows Sam will want to see Brigid because ‘she’s a knockout’. From the start, then, we know that Sam is a sexual being, and it becomes clear pretty soon that Brigid is as well. Brigid gives Sam an assumed name and an assumed story about a sister who’s gotten involved with a dangerous gang- ster. From that moment on we’re involved in a deception of her making which only Sam can see through and cut through. She kills his partner, gets Sam to do her dirty work in looking for the Maltese falcon so that she can double- cross her accomplices and then at the end tries to seduce Sam so that she can get off the hook. Sam ‘sends her over’ anyway, but only after an emotional struggle which causes the sweat to pour down his face. Brigid O’Shaughnessy is part of a traditional way of describing women in Western literature, starting with Eve, who ruins Paradise for Adam, and moving on to such con- temporary characters as Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction. O’Shaughnessy is the first significant modern temptress, the first to appear after the First World War when women could vote, cut off their hair, cast off the twelve pounds of heavy clothes they wore in Victorian times and move freely in soci- ety. Like Eve, Brigid O’Shaughnessy uses her body to try to make the hero do bad things, but unlike Adam, Sam is too strong for the temptress. As a foil to Brigid O’Shaughnessy is Sam’s secretary, Effie Perine. Sam never calls her Effie, though: she is ‘sweetheart’, ‘darling’, ‘sister’, and especially ‘angel’. And Effie is an angel. In contrast to Brigid’s sultry sensuality, Effie’s ‘eyes were brown and playful in a shiny boyish face’. The fact that she is ‘boyish’ in her looks means that she is not a sexual—and therefore predatory—female. Sam can trust her, but her boyishness also makes her naive. She believes in Brigid: she tells Sam that despite the two phony identities the client has used, ‘I’m for her. I don’t care if she has all the names in the phone book. That girl is all right and you know it.’ I2 At the end of the book she cannot accept the fact that Sam sent Brigid over. Women work on intuition, as Sam tells her off and on throughout the novel, but a man has to deal in justice. “So much for your woman’s intuition, [Sam said.] [Effie’s] voice was queer as the expression on her face. ‘You did that, Sam, to her?’ He nodded. “Your Sam’s a detective.’ He looked sharply at her. He put his arm around her waist, his hand on her hip. ‘She did kill Miles, angel,’ he said gently, ‘offhand, like that.’ He snapped the fingers of his other hand. She escaped from his arm as if it had hurt her. ‘Don’t, please, don’t touch me,’ she said brokenly. ‘I know—I know you’re right. Yow’re right. But don’t touch me now—not now,’ Still, Hammett recognizes that Sam is not an innocent himself: he’s been sleeping with Iva Archer, who is a blowzier, less sophisticated sexual animal than Brigid O’Shaughnessy. Right after the scene with Effie, Iva arrives. Effie returns to Sam’s office to tell him that Iva is waiting. Spade, looking down at his desk, nodded almost imperceptibly. “Yes,” he said, and shivered. ‘Well, send her in.’ The novel ends on this somber note, with Sam having to face the disagreeable consequences of his actions. When Hammett sent Blanche Knopf The Maltese Falcon, both she and Harry Block, the editor assigned to Hammett’s work, wanted him to tone down the novel’s sexuality. They feared that not only the sex scenes between Spade and Brigid, but also the overt homosexual references to Joel Cairo’s life would offend readers. Hammett insisted that those passages remain; indeed, they help give the story its essential character. The Maltese Falcon is an intensely physical novel, and not 3 solely, or even chiefly, because of its sexuality. In contrast to some of Hammett’s earlier work, especially Red Harvest, there’s not a lot of violent action. When she first read Red Harvest, Blanche Knopf wrote Hammett that ‘there are so many killings on every page the reader’s interest slackens’. Even with the editing Hammett did for her, Red Harvest drips mayhem. In The Maltese Falcon, there are a couple of offstage mur- ders, one scene where Sam is drugged and kicked in the head, and a fight between Brigid O’Shaughnessy and Joel Cairo, but none of these scenes has the kind of graphic, numbing violence of Red Harvest, let alone of much 1990s crime fiction. The Maltese Falcon’s physicality lies rather in the intensity of the characters’ struggles with their emotions, and the vividness with which Hammett brings their person- alities to the page through their bodies. The book opens with a description of Spade’s long bony jaw, his yellow-grey eyes, his v-shaped nostrils. In every encounter that Sam has, whether with Brigid or ‘the fat man’ or the police, we see his body acting and reacting: his eyes hold ‘an almost exaggerated amount of candor’ when talking to the police, then they become ‘dull, almost dead’. When the lieutenant hits him ‘his thick sloping shoulders’ writhe under his coat. The effort not to hit back puts deep creases between his brows: His nostrils moved in and out with his breathing ... Red rage came suddenly into his face and he began to talk in a harsh gut- tural voice. Holding his maddened face in his hands, glaring at the floor, he cursed Dundy for five minutes without break . . . The final scene with Brigid goes on for pages as Sam’s eyes become bloodshot, his voice turns to a croak, and sweat pours from his body with the intensity of his struggle. Again and again Brigid tries to persuade him of her love for him, his for her, and why he should let her go; finally: 14 Spade pulled his hand out of hers. He no longer either smiled or grimaced. His wet yellow face was set hard and deeply lined. His eyes burned madly. He said, ‘Listen. This isn’t a damned bit of good. You’ll never understand me, but I’ll try once more and then we'll give it up.’ Of course, Brigid can’t understand, partly because she’s the murderer, and partly because, unlike Sam who is both body and mind, she exists only in the body. When the cops show up a few minutes later to arrest Brigid, he pushes her forward into their arms, then discusses Gutman, Wilmer and Joel Cairo for some minutes without any further mention of the woman. There’s no description of her as she leaves, no word of Sam looking at her or thinking about her. Whether Spade and Brigid represent Hammett’s own views of men and women is a question for psychological biographers to grapple with. When he became famous he did leave his wife Jose—to whom he dedicated The Maltese Falcon—and their two daughters with no more of a backward glance than Spade gives Brigid. In fact, after 1940 he didn’t see his daughters for over a decade. While he left each daugh- ter a share in his estate, he didn’t help support them during their growing up. Hammett’s own problematic relations with women in- cluded the uncontested rape charge brought by the actress Elise de Vianne, but as it was a civil charge, Hammett paid damages without undergoing criminal prosecution. While Hammett and Lillian Hellman had a relationship that lasted until his death, it was interrupted not just by the war, but by Hammett’s financial and alcohol problems. Hammett and Hellman were estranged for five or six years after the war. He did begin working with Hellman on some of her own writing in the early Fifties, but they never lived together again. Perhaps, as he described Spade in his 1934 introduc- tion to The Maltese Falcon, he was a ‘hard and shifty fel- low ... able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact 15 with, whether criminal, innocent by-stander or client’. Hammett’s work influenced every crime writer who came after him, from Chandler on. Even Chandler’s famous essay, ‘The Simple Art of Murder’, the one that explains that Ham- mett took murder out of the drawing room and put it back in the alleys where it belonged, and includes the celebrated phrase, ‘ But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid’, derives from book reviews Hammett wrote in the Twenties and the Continental Op stories themselves. When he created the Continental Op—about whom he wrote twenty-six short stories and four novellas, as well as Red Harvest—Hammett was trying to do two things. The first, frankly, was to make a living, and to do so in a way that would show his relatives back in Baltimore that he had amounted to something. He had two small daughters and a wife, and was too ill to work, but he took a vocational training course in typing and writing and began to do both ad copy and short stories. He sold his first fiction to a poorly- paying magazine run by Mencken, another Baltimore man, chiefly so that his family back east would see that he had become a literary figure. Hammett was a self-taught writer who was able to analyze his own shortcomings, as well as to respond to criticism from editors of the magazines where he was sending his work. He improved rapidly, cutting florid curlicues from his style, ex- perimenting with different forms and different genres before he settled exclusively on crime fiction. His health also im- proved. From 1923 to 1925, he was writing stories at the rate of two or three a month and reviewing books for several weekly magazines, including the Saturday Review. Even with this kind of output, he couldn’t make enough of a living at his writing, so in 1926 he left the Continental Op to go into advertising. After only a few months of making good money, his health broke down completely (a client found him col- lapsed in a pool of blood from his tubercular lung). As he 16