Bill,
Re your comments below:
> I noticed precursors to novels in other
short
> stories. Some Brigid
> O'Shaughnessy types show up, and so do women
like
> the one in RED HARVEST
> (whose name I forget). There's a perfumed
Joel
> Cairo sort in another
> story, and a couple have enormous Gutmanish
men.
THE MALTESE FALCON is especially rich in themes, plot
devices, and character types from previous Op stories.
"The House on Turk Street," for example, uquestthe quet
object everyone is trying to get their hands on
(the bonds rather than the falcon); the characters all
gathered in one room for a tense climax; a fat, cultured
villain, who, though Chinese, has a British accent and is a
direct ancestor of Gutman; and a treacherous femme
fatale.
The sequel, "The Girl with the Silver Eyes" has the Op
re-encountering the villainess who escaped at the end of
"Turk Street," and ends with the Op explaining why feminine
charms will not deter him from his duty as a detective, a dry
run for the final chapter of FALCON.
"Who Killed Bob Teal?" has the Op swearing to get the
murderer of a colleague, rookie Continental agent Bob Teal,
who had worked alongside the Op in several prior stories.
This is probably the first case of a Hammett detective
deciding that "when a man's partner is killed, he's supposed
to do something about it."
SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT
The Op immediately figures that Teal, though inexperienced,
was too sharp a detective to let himself be caught in the
deserted spot he was murdered with his weapon still holstered
in unless he was lured there by someone he trusted. From this
reasoning he deduces that the killer must be the Agency's
client. This is the same reasoning, and essentially the same
solution, "murdered by the client," Spade uses to solve
Archer's murder in FALCON.
END SPOILER ALERT END SPOILER ALERT END SPOILER ALERT
The titular villain of "The Whosis Kid" is an embryonic
version of Wilbur, the kid gunman from FALCON, and, as with
"Turk Street," the final scene has all the principals
gathered in a single room for a tense climax.
And of course Hammett's best short story, "The Gutting of
Couffignal," ends with yet another dry run for the
renunciation scene from FALCON. In fact, years later, when
commenting on FALCON, Hammett said that one of the impetuses
for the novel was a situation from
"Couffignal"possibilitiesough had great possiblities,
but which he felt he hadn't handled quite as satisfactorily
as he'd have liked.
Hammett never exactly expanded a short story into a novel the
way Chandler would in later years
("cannibilizing" the stories to use his term), but he did
make use of his short fiction for his novels particularly THE
MALTESE FALCON, which was first published in book form in
1930, and, consequently, just barely makes this month's
theme.
JIM DOHERTY
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