(Most of what follows comes from an unpublished essay I once
tried shlepping around. Can the Noir Manifesto and the
Murdrous Ape get hitched?)
Hammett relaxed the detective genre. He invested more on
personal relationships and less on details of murder and
investigation. Much of his power and originality came from
his concentration on characterization instead of fantastic
ingenuity.
Edgar Allan Poe invented the modern detective story in his
"Murders in the Rue Morgue", when he created Auguste Dupin, a
professional detective who uses deductive reasoning to solve
a hideous crime. Inside a locked upstairs room, a mother and
a daughter have been brutally murdered, their throats slit,
and one of them has been stuffed feet first up a Parisian
chimney.
As Ross Macdonald, one of Hammett's most famous and literate
heirs, explains it in his "On Crime Writing," Poe "devised
(the detective story) as a means of exorcising or controlling
guilt and horror." Dupin reasons only a murderous ape could
have scaled the building, killed so barbarously and then
stuffed the dead girl up the chimney. Therefore, the killer
must be a murderous ape. Macdonald goes on to say that
"Dupin's reason masters the
(murderous) ape and explains the inexplicable -- but not
without leaving a residue of horror. The nightmare can't
quite be explained away, and persists in the teeth of reason.
An unstable balance between reason and more primitive
qualities is characteristic of the detective story. For both
writer and reader it is an imaginative arena where such
conflicts can be worked out safely, under artistic
controls."
There it was laid out like a fresh autopsy: Good versus evil.
Reason doing battle with horror. The Super-ego versus the Id.
The rational detective up against the murderous ape in an
urban inferno. Yet there is more here, too, than Macdonald
suggests. Many critics and readers understand that the
conventions of popular fictions offer an apparent escape from
both the author's and the reader's lives. But in a deeper
sense they can also offer a writer a mask for autobiography,
a fencer's mask to deflect the cold steel of reality as he
struggles with his own Falstaffian shadows.
The Maltese Falcon is not at center a whodunnit, but a novel
about people - - about one man, Sam Spade, especially --
caught up in a world of crime. It offers a peculiar point of
view to accompany this vision, the detached-viewpoint story,
where we never get into the head of any character. We are
simply floating, invisible observors, and the narrator has
disappeared.
We see and hear the events as they take place, as if we are
present, but invisible in the room. This is not quite "the
camera's eye." That's where the reader is allowed to see and
hear only what a camera sees and a microphone hears. In The
Maltese Falcon there are comments and interpretations. We
become invisible observers in the room.
In The Maltese Falcon, murder is still represented as a game
of Good versus Evil (although most of the violence is
off-stage). The gamester here is the Ace of Spades, Sam
himself. The ambiguity of his character is central to the
story. In this world where all is corrupt, where all can be
corrupted, Sam Spade knows the score. "Most things in San
Francisco can be bought, or taken."
And when Miles Archer, his partner, is killed, Sam Spade
pushes himself squarely into the center arena and the
struggle for the Black Bird. He wheedles and cajoles and
threatens and lies and taunts and bluffs to find out who
killed Miles Archer.
Hammett's misdirection is marvelous. Archer's death very
quickly becomes a subplot. Finding the Black Bird becomes the
main plot. And yet once the Bird is found, Archer's death is
resolved.
For many people, the particular horror of The Maltese Falcon
is that Sam Spade is such a ready partner to theft and
murder. Reading him, we are never sure that Sam Spade is
honest. The ambiguity of his character is such that even Iva
says: "Oh, Sam did you kill him?"
(and then the punchline, the happy ending...)
It is still the story of purging of monsters. The hero still
does battle with the murderous ape in the urban
inferno.
Frederick Zackel
the boogie man lies waiting for his moment...
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