Skip to main content

Top mysteries challenge review: The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

This is the second Hammett novel I read for the top mysteries challenge, which leaves two.

Besides reading the book I watched the movie, which is the most faithful book to film adaptation I have seen.

Year of publication: 1930
Genre: Hardboiled detective story
Type of mystery: Theft, murder
Type of investigator: Private detective
Setting & time: San Francisco, USA, contemporary to writing

Story:
A woman approaches private detective Sam Spade and his partner, Archer, with an apparently simple request: to tail someone. But Archer is killed on the job and Spade is approached by two more people and asked to find a valuable statuette, the Maltese Falcon. The woman turns out to be after the same thing. What follows is a merry-go-round of ruthless lies, intrigue and murder.

Discussion and review:
Sam Spade is one of the most famous detectives in the history of detective fiction, because he was a perfect prototype of the tough guy detective who used brawn as much as brain to solve his cases, took no shit from anyone and lived by a threadbare code of honour that didn’t stop him from lying and double-crossing to get what he was after. His predecessors, such as Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey and Hercule Poirot, had been gentlemen who played fair and used their minds. While Spade was not the first tough guy detective, he was the one in which everything came together to make a really memorable character. Of course, his portrayal by Humphrey Bogart in the 1941 film adaptation helped to anchor his fame as well, even though Bogart actually portrayed him as rather more sensitive and likeable than Hammett meant him to be. In the book, he is described in terms of being devilish, not just in appearance but in demeanor as well, and while you can't help rooting for him, it's more because he's the most honest of the characters rather than being in any way endearing.

If Spade is a prototype, then Bridget O'Shaughnessy is an archetype – a perfect femme fatale: beautiful, sexy, self-assured, charming and utterly ruthless. The rest of the main characters are all realistic and clearly drawn.

The narrative is spare and streamlined and quick-paced. The dialogue is realistic, and the story is character driven but still full of action. The falcon statuette is a perfect MacGuffin and one gets the feeling that the story is not so much a story as a chapter in the statuette’s long history, and that it will go on causing death and mayhem for a long time to come.

Rating: A perfectly balanced hard-boiled detective story with memorable characters and great twists. 5 stars.

Books left in challenge: 114
Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
Glad you liked it. I adore Hammett- npt sure which is my favourite, but I think the Dain Curse.
February 08, 2009 12:27 pm
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book 7: Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński (reading notes)

-This reads like fiction - prose more beautiful than one has come to expect from non-fiction and many of the chapters are structured like fiction stories. There is little continuity between most of the chapters, although some of the narratives or stories spread over more than one chapter. This is therefore more a collection of short narratives than a cohesive entirety. You could pick it up and read the chapters at random and still get a good sense of what is going on. -Here is an author who is not trying to find himself, recover from a broken heart, set a record, visit 30 countries in 3 weeks or build a perfectly enviable home in a perfectly enviable location, which is a rarity within travel literature, but of course Kapuściński was in Africa to work, and not to travel for spiritual, mental or entertainment purposes (he was the Polish Press Agency's Africa correspondent for nearly 30 years). -I have no way of knowing how well Kapuściński knew Africa - I have never been there...
Post a Comment
Read more

Bibliophile discusses Van Dine’s rules for writing detective stories

Writers have been putting down advice for wannabe writers for centuries, about everything from how to captivate readers to how to build a story and write believable characters to getting published. The mystery genre has had its fair share, and one of the best known advisory essays is mystery writer’s S.S. Van Dine’s 1928 piece “Twenty rules for writing detective stories.” I mentioned in one of my reviews that I might write about these rules. Well, I finally gave myself the time to do it. First comes the rule (condensed), then what I think about it. Here are the Rules as Van Dine wrote them . (Incidentally, check out the rest of this excellent mystery reader’s resource: Gaslight ) The rules are meant to apply to whodunnit amateur detective fiction, but the main ones can be applied to police and P.I. fiction as well. I will discuss them mostly in this context, but will also mention genres where the rules don’t apply and authors who have successfully and unsuccessfully broken the rules. 1...
9 comments
Read more

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove...
Post a Comment
Read more