The Maltese Falcon (1930)
Dashiell Hammett’s renowned novel sees its inscrutable private detective protagonist seeking to impose some sort of order on a chaotic world.
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This post is part of the ‘Rewound’ series of analyses of objects or episodes from cultural and political history.
Spoiler alert: This analysis of the novel The Maltese Falcon and its themes reveals plot details for the purpose of enhancing that analysis.
Content warning: Murder; Homophobia; Sexual assault.
In San Francisco, Sam Spade runs a private detective agency with his partner, Miles Archer, assisted by their dutiful secretary Effie Perrine. Spade dislikes Archer, and has secretly been conducting an affair with his wife, Iva. One day, a beautiful young woman by the name of Miss Wonderley arrives in their office, and asks them to investigate a man named Floyd Thursby, who she claims has run off with her younger sister. Archer is shot dead in the process of tailing Thursby, who is found dead later the same night. Spade is subsequently visited by Lieutenant Dundy, with whom Spade shares a deep mutual antipathy, and Sergeant Tom Polhouse, whom he is on much friendlier terms with. He is also the unwelcome and regretting object of Iva’s renewed attentions.
Spade visits Miss Wonderley, who reveals her real name to be Brigid O’Shaughnessy, and that her original story about Thursby and her sister was an invention; Thursby was a business associate of hers whom she had travelled over to San Francisco from Hong Kong, but then become wary of, and is fearful that his murder means she too is at risk. Spade is frustrated by her recalcitrance with information, but agrees to work for her, encouraged by Effie’s own instinctive liking for Brigid. He is then visited, and held up, at his office by the effeminate ‘Levantine’ Joel Cairo, who informs Spade that he is searching for a valuable statuette that he believes is in Brigid’s possession, and which he offers to pay Spade to help him reattain. Spade also subsequently finds himself being tailed across town by a mysterious young man.
Caught between his growing frustration with Brigid’s lack of transparency, and his growing sexual attraction towards her, Spade holds a meeting with her and Cairo, at which Brigid implies that a certain ‘G’ was responsible for Thursby’s killing. The meeting culminates in Brigid striking Cairo, just as Dundy and Polhouse have arrived to interrogate Spade further about the details of Archer’s and Thursby’s deaths. Spade manages to fend off the police, though not without goading Dundy into striking him; when they and Cairo have left, he and Brigid make love for the first time.
The following day, Spade confronts the young man tailing him, and also encounters Cairo, before asking Effie to put Brigid up with her and her mother for the time being to help keep her safe. He then receives a call at his office from the ‘G’ mentioned by Brigid, Sidney Gutman, whom he goes to visit – being let in by Wilmer, the young man who had been tailing him. The garrulous and outwardly charming Gutman tries to strike a deal with Spade to acquire the statuette, but his refusal to provide Spade with more details about it prompts the detective to leave angrily, warning Gutman that he will have to talk to him sooner or later. He returns to his office to learn from Effie that Brigid did not come to stay with her as instructed.
Spade is subsequently invited to again visit Gutman, who explains that the statuette was made in the sixteenth century from gold and jewels by the wealthy Order of Knights of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem, as tribute to the King of Spain for granting them Malta as their fiefdom. However, the statuette was stolen by pirates and subsequently made its way around Europe, at some point being coated in black enamel to conceal its true value. It was rediscovered in 1911 by Greek antiques dealer Charilaos Konstantinides, from whom Gutman later extracted the truth about the falcon, but who was then murdered when the statuette was stolen from his shop in Constantinople. Gutman learned that the falcon was now in the hands of a Russian general, Kedimov, and sent two agents – Brigid and Cairo – to get hold of it, only for Brigid to subsequently disappear with the statuette.
Gutman again begins bartering with Spade for his assistance in retrieving the falcon, but the detective realises he has been drugged, and stumbles to the floor, receiving a kick to the head from Wilmer as he lays there. After awakening from the assault, Spade uncovers that Brigid had been awaiting the arrival of a boat from Hong Kong, La Paloma, which has gone up in flames shortly after arriving in San Francisco. Spade is also summoned to visit the District Attorney, who irritates him with his wild theories as to the reasons for Archer’s and Thursby’s murders. Back at his office, La Paloma’s captain, Jacobi, arrives and passes him a package, which turns out to be the falcon, before expiring from a series of shots through the chest he had received on the way there. Just then Effie receives a call from Brigid, who is at Gutman’s hotel, the Alexandria, and sounds like she is in trouble.
Spade deposits the statuette for safety and arrives at the Alexandria, where he finds Gutman’s daughter, Rhea, who has apparently been drugged. In her stupor, she provides him with an address in Burlingame where he can find Brigid, but when he travels there, it proves to be a false lead. He returns to his home in San Francisco to find Brigid waiting there for him, but upon their entering his apartment, Gutman, Cairo, and Wilmer are also there awaiting them, after having failed to locate the falcon themselves. Gutman offers to buy the falcon for an initial payment of $10,000, which Spade agrees to, but states that they will need a fall guy to take the rap for the murders, persuading Gutman and Cairo to hand the police Wilmer (despite Gutman’s stated fatherly fondness for the young gunman, and Cairo’s own attraction to him).
Spade sends for Effie Perrine, who brings them the falcon. However, when Gutman carves off some of the enamel, it turns out to be lead inside. Gutman and Cairo reckon that Kedimov has duped them, and they agree to return to Constantinople to seek out the real falcon there. In the commotion, it turns out that Wilmer has escaped. Spade insists on retaining a thousand dollars from the original $10,000 Gutman had presented him with, to cover his trouble and expenses. Once they have left, he calls the police and sends them after Gutman and Cairo.
Spade then coerces Brigid into revealing the truth about how she had played him and the other men against each other in obtaining and keeping the falcon, including that it was she rather than Thursby who shot Archer. Despite her pleading with him that they are in love, which Spade acknowledges, he hands her over to Polhouse and Dundy, along with the forged statuette and the thousand-dollar bill, which he claims Gutman tried to bribe him with. They inform him that they have also arrested Cairo, but that Wilmer had killed Gutman before they got there. The following day, Spade returns to the office, to find Effie cold towards him for his treatment of Brigid. Iva arrives, and Spade glumly tells Effie to send her in.
A perilous moral and legal order
The 1920s San Francisco of The Maltese Falcon is one in which truth and meaning are frequently obscure. The narrative sticks persistently to Spade: we are not privy to events and encounters between other characters when he is not present, though occasional gaps mean he is sometimes privy to events we are not. But that narrative is also in the third person, in contrast to the stories and novels centred on author Dashiell Hammett’s principal literary creation until that point, the nameless Continental Op, who narrates his own adventures. There is no available interiority to Spade or any other character: we are never directly informed what they are thinking or feeling, save in adverbial form, when Hammett describes how they speak, act, or look.
This fragmentation of meaning is related to a mixed economy of detection, law, and enforcement. Spade, as a private detective, operates on behalf of private clients, and himself: it is in this capacity that he seeks to discern what has happened and determine what will, to use the threat and actuality of force. He maintains individual relationships with other professionals in the same or related fields, such as his partner Miles Archer, or Luke who works as the house detective for The Belvedere hotel at which Cairo is staying, or lawyer Sid Wise, collaboration rooted in business partnership, mutual interest, and provider-client exchange respectively, reliant on strategic discretion and divulgence.
There is also the presence of public law, of the agents of the state whose actions are rather geared towards the identification and punishment of criminals. Spade maintains the same types of transactional, sometimes friendly, sometimes adversarial relationships with them as he does with private professionals, and this individual level is indeed how we encounter police officers Dundy and Polhaus, contemptuous of and frustratedly sympathetic towards Spade respectively, or the ambitious and conceited District Attorney Bryan. And yet they also possess a superior, collective authority that Spade is compelled to acknowledge and negotiate, and ultimately pay fealty to.
There are also multiple external threats to Spade and his world, located in the American West but inextricably linked, as a port city, to the wider world. This commences with the identification of Thursby’s gun, which kills Miles, as a Webley, from England, and continues with the arrivals of characters and objects from Hong Kong and Constantinople. Outsiderdom is often associated with the implication of same-sex desire, in contrast to the masculine, philandering Spade: with the effeminate and almost explicitly gay Joel Cairo – to whom we are introduced with Effie Perrine’s observation that “This guy is queer” – or the New Yorker Wilmer, whose sexuality Spade frequently makes mocking insinuations about, but whose combination of that with violent threat unnerves him.1
Narrative and authority
In the context of this fragmented, perilous moral and legal order, truth is inherently subjective. Spade seems to grasp this more acutely than other characters. He is less concerned with the actual veracity of what he says or what others say, as if that could ever be meaningfully independently verified; rather, it is the capacity for any account of events to persuade others that they are true when it matters. Hearing second-hand from his lawyer Iva Archer’s alibi for the night of her husband’s death, Spade responds: “I think that’s an alright spread. It seems to click with most of the known facts. It ought to hold.”2 He is on occasion explicitly willing to lie to Brigid; equally, he routinely expresses his own disbelief of her claims, but usually without moral judgement.
Narrative, and the ability to weave one effectively, is an integral source of power for Spade, as is having access to information obscure to others with which to furnish it, and being able to discredit the narratives of others. After Spade learns from Cairo about the existence of the falcon, and Brigid dallies in telling him what she knows, he asserts:
But I don’t see what you’ve got to gain by covering up now. It’s coming out bit by bit anyhow. There’s a lot of it I don’t know, but there’s some of it I do, and some more that I can guess at, and, give me another day like this, I’ll soon be knowing things about it that you don’t know.3
Equally, he seems to lose his temper when Gutman refuses initially to reveal what he knows about the falcon, warning him: “I told that punk of yours that you’d have to talk to me before you got through. I’ll tell you now that you’ll do your talking today or you are through.”4 His ability to force others to tell him what they know, to overlay and adjust their accounts, is the source of his authority, as at the end when he extracts Brigid’s account from her, but corrects her claim that it was Thursby who killed Archer, rather than her.
Yet there are also limits to Spade’s narrative authority. He fiercely resents being incorporated into the speculative narratives of others, which would fix him as a perpetrator, as with Dundy’s allegations that he may have been behind Thursby’s or Archer’s deaths. He is equally scornful of DA Bryan’s theories and insinuations as to the reasons behind the murders, fiercely resisting the DA’s efforts to make him reveal details about the identity of his client and the reasons for their engaging him. Yet ultimately, despite his frustration at ‘being called things by every crackpot on the city payroll’, it is also there that the final power to determine what and is not true lies, however unconvincing or fabricated that truth might appear to him.5 As he explains exasperatedly to Gutman about the need for a fall-guy to take the rap for the murders, regardless of what actually happened:
At one time or another I’ve had to tell everybody from the Supreme Court down to go to hell, and I’ve got away with it. I got away with it because I never let myself forget that a day of reckoning was coming. I never forget that when the day of reckoning comes I want to be all set to march into headquarters pushing a victim in front of me, saying : ‘Here, you chumps, is your criminal.’ As long as I can do that I can put my thumb to my nose and wriggle my fingers at all the laws in the book.6
The meanings of money
In the context of private practice, in the absence of reliable truth, at the tail-end of an era of laissez-faire economic policy overseen by successive Republican presidents, money serves as an arbiter of which narratives might monetarily persuade, as to whom might be determined guilty or innocent. When Brigid reveals in her second meeting with Spade that the original explanation she had provided him and Archer with for requiring their services was a false one, the detective is neither surprised nor condemnatory:
“Oh, that,” Spade said lightly. “We didn’t exactly believe your story.”
“Then — ?” Perplexity was added to the misery and fright in her eyes.
“We believed your two hundred dollars.”
“You mean — ?” She seemed to not know what he meant.
“I mean that you paid us more than if you’d been telling the truth,” he explained blandly, “and enough more to make it all right.”7
This transactional approach to honesty and loyalty continues to govern Spade’s conduct. As he encounters firstly Cairo and then Gutman, each offers him potentially larger sums for his services in attaining the falcon, and the question of whether he is actually in the employ or acting as representative of Brigid O’Shaughnessy, or the others, or himself, is repeatedly brought to the fore. Yet those two men are equally unreliable potential employers: Cairo holds Spade up at gunpoint after initially offering him money to help retrieve the falcon, while Gutman drugs him – both believing they could potentially cut him out entirely.
Given this association of money with dishonesty, the unreliability of payment within transactional relationships ungoverned by morals, which might serve as metaphor for American capitalism on the eve of the Wall Street crash, the falcon itself promises something different. Made from intrinsically valuable gold and jewels, it seemingly embodies Old World wealth, physically tangible and forged from hierarchies of nobility and monarchy, in contrast with the apparently less tangible, more abstract New World currency of paper money and IOUs. Yet the very existence of the falcon motivates the pattern of double-crossing, and ultimately the statuette turns out to be a forgery, the fortune Gutman insists its possession guarantees, the future profits on its sale he seeks to entice Spade with, all prove illusory.
Spade is less openly enthused by the prospect of riches and yet money seems a more reliable motivator for his continued involvement in the affair, along with a detective’s natural curiosity for solving the puzzle of intertwined culprits he is presented with, than any legal, moral, or maybe even romantic imperative. Yet the final chapters render it clearer to the reader that monetary value is itself standing in for something else. After Gutman supplies him with a $10,000 down payment for the falcon, Spade seeks to retrospectively haggle over this amount, asserting “I ought to have twenty,” sceptical as he is of the promise of further future payments; however, when Gutman insists that is all he can provide at that moment, he accepts this without rancour.8
Then, when Gutman falsely claims that $1,000 has disappeared from the envelope, which Brigid had been minding, Spade orders her to disrobe in the bathroom to prove she did not take it, an act of violation that she unsuccessfully warns him will “be killing something” between them.9 However, he makes little ado over returning the envelope of money to Gutman after the falcon proves to be a fake, and even the $1,000 he had demanded as a token payment – perhaps symbolically significantly the same amount he had searched Brigid for – he turns over unprompted to the police as evidence after deciding to turn in Brigid. Money, we might conclude, matters to Spade only as a signifier of his own value as a man and professional, a marker of his superior wits.
The search for a code to live by
In the first half of the novel, Spade tells Brigid the story of a case he once worked on, in which a real estate agent from Tacoma, named Charles Flitcraft, had suddenly vanished several years previously, and Spade was employed by the man’s wife to investigate a reported sighting in Spokane. It was Flitcraft, now renamed Charles Pierce, remarried, and running a lucrative car business. It turned out that he had abandoned his existing, well-ordered life after nearly being hit by a falling beam as he walked past a construction site, his narrow survival of a chance accident opening his eyes to the complete randomness of the world around him. Yet in time Flitcraft simply drifted back towards a familiar routine, a similar line of business, a marriage to a woman not dissimilar to his first wife.
I don’t think he even knew he had settled back naturally into the same groove he had jumped out of in Tacoma. But that’s the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.10
The story is illustrative of Spade’s acceptance of the inherently arbitrary and chaotic nature of life, but also his belief in man’s – and it is very much man’s, given the seeming inability of both Mrs Flitcraft and Brigid to fully grasp the moral of the tale – capacity to find or impose a degree of order within it.
At the end, with his own liberty and perhaps life at risk, and Brigid pleading with him not to hand her to the police if he truly loves her, Spade tries to lay out his reasons for doing just that in a kind of balance sheet. He had to do something about the murder of his partner, regardless of what he thought of him. Letting people get away with killing detectives was bad for business for all detectives. As a detective it was his rationale to catch criminals. He could not be sure he would not be arrested, perhaps sentenced to death for murder, if he did not give her to the police as the culprit instead. He could not be sure even if they both got away with it that she would not turn him into the police, nor her kill him because of what he had on her. He did not like even the possibility that she had played him. He concludes:
All those on one side. Maybe some of them are unimportant. I won’t argue about that. But look at the number of them. Now on the other side we’ve got what? All we’ve got is the fact that maybe you love me and maybe I love you.11
When Brigid asks him if it would have made a difference if the falcon had been real and he’d received his payout, he protests “Don’t be too sure I’m as crooked as I’m supposed to be”, but concedes, “Well, a lot of money would have been at least one more item on the other side of the scales.”12 This hedging of bets between and weighing up of different possible codes to live by, professional, moral, survivalist, chivalric, and economic, comprise a desperate grasp for autonomy and authority amid the possible meaningless of all of them. It pales in response to Brigid’s insistence that only one thing matters, whether he truly loves her, when he indeed does and he resents how it undermines his sense of control. “I won’t play sap for you,” he defies her; he will not fill the shoes of lesser, now dead men.13
Yet his foresaking of Brigid, and his evasion of the law, pointedly does not fully restore his control, does not revert his situation to a prior setting with which he is at ease. He is firstly shaken by Effie’s moral disapproval of his decision, regardless of his own rationalisation of it in terms he thinks will resonate with her, such as on account of Brigid killing Archer. The novel concludes with the coming to pass of his own version of the Flitcraft parable, in the return of Iva, marking his inability to overcome his circumstances and avoid his fate, because ultimately those are vaster than him and yet also the aggregated, unforeseen consequences of his own actions. He cannot escape the ramifications of his lustful womanising and ruthless betrayals; he would not play sap for Brigid, but cannot extricate himself from an earlier doomed romance.
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Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930), p. 52.
Ibid, p. 139.
Ibid, p. 105.
Ibid., p. 132.
Ibid, p. 181.
Ibid., p. 216.
Ibid., p. 40.
Ibid, p. 244.
Ibid, p. 240.
Ibid, p. 78:
Ibid, p. 263.
Ibid, p. 264.
Ibid, p. 265.