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Review of The Maltese Falcon

I am writing this after at least my third reading of The Maltese Falcon. Some critics say the book is Hammett’s best; it’s undoubtedly his best-known and most popular, but I prefer Hammett’s next novel, The Glass Key. TMF sports flamboyant characters and an exciting plot that’s nearly a conspiracy theory. The Glass Key contains more realistic views of corruption and human frailty, which is more to my taste.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed TMF and recommend it. The book is about Samuel Spade, private detective. Raymond Chandler modeled Philip Marlowe on Spade, but Spade has a far different role. Marlowe is clearly an errant underdog knight in Los Angeles. Spade may be a knight, but he’s not an underdog. He declares that San Francisco is his town, and, at points, he’s the town fixer who pulls strings to guide political outcomes. Note also that Spade has a partner, Miles Archer. Marlowe never had a partner and never will. The closest Marlowe had to a partner was his stumbling buddy, Terry Lennox, in the Long Goodbye.

Hammett’s style rings oddly in my ear. Hammett was widely read, but he dropped out of school in his early teens to help support his family. He claimed to have developed his authorial skills writing reports for the Pinkertons. His word choice is dated. His sentences often feel to me like he was pushing himself into a more elevated style than was natural to him. For example, “The boy raised his eyes to Spade’s mouth and spoke in a strained voice of someone in physical pain…” is awkward and abstract for pulp magazine readers. Chandler, on the other hand, writes with the self-assuredness of a well-trained Oxfordian, which he was. Nevertheless, both have an ear for the best in language. Compare the near iambic pentameter a few paragraphs later in TMF: “’Come on,’ he [Spade] said. ‘This will put you in solid with your boss.’”

I divide the book into three parts. The key to this division is the “Flitcraft episode” in which Spade tells Bridgid the story of a man from Tacoma who leads an ordinary moderately prosperous life with a wife who enjoys new salad recipes. One day, a heavy beam drops from a construction site and lands next to Flitcraft, barely missing him, and leaving him with a scratch from a flying concrete chip that becomes a permanent scar. Flitcraft immediately vacates his ordinary life. His wife and children are well provided for and he disappears into a life of wandering. After a few years, Flitcraft turns up in Spokane, leading an ordinary and moderately prosperous existence with a wife who looks nothing like his first wife, but enjoys new salad recipes.  The three parts of TMF correspond to Flitcraft’s Tacoma, wandering, and Spokane lives. The pursuit of the Maltese falcon is Spade’s wandering. That phase ends when the pursuers of the falcon exit and the final chapters are Spade’s return from the life interrupted by the falcon. This structure is like a fairy tale in which much of the action is in a dream that intertwines with the waking world.

I leave the book with a question: has Spade’s adventure in fairy land transformed his life and character? Or has Spade’s walk-about with the falcon only revealed what was previously hidden or latent? In Chapter 20, Spade says to Bridgid “Don’t be too sure I’m as crooked as I’m supposed to be.”

Has Hammett told us that Spade has not changed, but we have?

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Chicken Catching Night

We lived differently in the 1950s on Waschke Road. Neighbors and relatives relied on each other when a job needed more hands. Haying, thrashing, digging potatoes, hog butchering, and chicken catching were the community events that entertained kids before we began to see the wider world on television.

Chicken catching night came shortly after the first killing frost. In Whatcom County, that’s about now, mid-October. School had started by then. Kids were needed to help, so chicken catching night was usually the first Friday after a hard frost, which withered the squash and pumpkin vines in the vegetable garden and brightened the stage for chicken catching with their orange and yellow bounty.

In those days, my grandpa ordered cartons of baby chicks by mail in the spring. Grandpa set out the chicks under a metal hood heated with light bulbs and suspended by a block and tackle from the collar tie rafters in our brooder house. As spring turned to summer, Grandpa raised the hood gradually as the growing chicks began to explore the brooder house. Summer wore on and the baby chicks grew into hardy pullets, that ranged over a wider and wider area, eventually running loose all over the farm yard, grazing on grass, weeds, and bugs. By September, they roosted in the orchard at night and only went into the brooder house for water and wheat that Grandpa set out for them.

Towards fall, Grandpa would call Wallace Poultry in Bellingham. Today, city folks get coffee and bagels, something we had never heard of, at a shop called The Bagelry, which occupies the old Wallace Poultry store. Decades ago, instead of fancy coffee, Wallace sent out trucks to pick up the old hens from our chicken house. If a kid was lucky, the truck didn’t arrive until after school and the kid got to join the squawking mayhem of tossing the old birds into wire crates that the trucker loaded on his flatbed. We kids speculated on exactly what happened to those scrawny and scrappy old birds. Needless to say, we only sold to Wallace, never bought their poultry.

When the old hens were gone, my dad and grandpa would thoroughly clean the chicken house and spray it down with Carbolineum to kill mites and parasites in preparation for chicken catching night. Some years Grandpa would brighten up the coop walls with a coat of white wash, another job to entertain a kid if Grandpa didn’t finish before he got home from school.

Chicken catching night was a big event. Relatives and neighbors carrying flashlights came to help capture a couple hundred sleeping pullets. Anything in the dark with flashlights was fun for the kids and squawking chickens only added to the excitement. The men would shine their flashlights into the trees, reach up and catch the pullets by the legs. The kids would grab the legs the men lowered down and carry the noisy struggling birds to the chicken house feed room where Grandpa had a wooden barrel waiting. We’d drop the chickens in the barrel. Grandpa pulled them out one by one, looked them over, set aside the culls, then forced a worming pill down their throats and let them loose in the chicken coop. The chicks in the spring were all supposed to be hens, but a few roosters made it through and had to be set aside. Grandpa also didn’t like to feed runts and the occasional one-legged hen who wouldn’t lay eggs anyway.

When all the pullets were in the chicken house and wormed, it was late and we were all tired. My mother and grandmother would have coffee and dessert, usually red Gravenstein apple pie in October, ready for everyone. Even the kids got milk with a little coffee. Tired folks in those days did not fret over drinking coffee at night.

Sleep always came easy after chicken catching night on Waschke Road.