My friend Bill sent me a link to a Huffpost on the meme frenzy following posting of P01135809’s mug shot in Atlanta. Here’s another collection. Most of the memes are amusing, even side-splitting, but none of them notices the Sam Spade-Maltese Falcon connection, which happens to delight me.
P01135809’s mug shot is a study in Vs, like Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade of the Maltese Falcon:
“Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down—from high flat temples—in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan.”
I imagine P01135809 working on his pose in front of a mirror, modeling himself on Sam Spade. P01135809’s pale brown hair is flounced into a v and the v of his forehead lines, brows, and eyes meet at the point of another v that comes up from twin creases aimed toward the bridge of his nose. His lipless mouth and round chin underline the v’s pointing to his leering eyes.
P01135809 does not look ” rather pleasantly like a blond satan,” He has the “this ain’t nice” leer of someone who thinks he may have hatched a hemorrhoid or realized that his partner was killed by the bimbo with whom he thought he was falling in love.
I consider The Maltese Falcon to be a masterwork, but I also see it as close to the light touch of Hammett’s most popularly successful work, The Thin Man, not the detective stories he wrote previously. I don’t see Sam Spade as the swashbuckling and justice-seeking hero he is often made out to be.
The pursuit of the falcon is massive joke, a cavalcade of characters, portrayed comically in the 1941 John Huston movie by the geniuses of Mary Astor, Sidney Greenstreet, and Peter Lore. The global wild goose chase draws Spade in, only to dump him when the bird is revealed to be a fraud. In the end, Spade loses the falcon and sacrifices the femme fatale he may have loved only to avenge his dismal two-timing partner, Miles Archer, whom he didn’t much like.
Nice choice of models, P01135809.