The Maltese Falcon

Rating:
Summary: A Mystery Landmark
Review: Thanks to the fact that I can't watch the image of Humphrey Bogart for more than thirty seconds before anti-peristaltic forces start taking over my digestive system, I knew of the Maltese Falcon, but did not know its story line.

Based on its literary acclaim and its high score on mystery officionados' "best of all time list", I spent a couple of hours with Sam Spade in the dark and dangerous dungeons of his imaginary existence. While I considered the plot development decidedly average, the atmosphere Hammett's prose sets and the uncertain world in which our "hero" and fellow cast try to make their moves helped define the genre.

Looking at the origin of the detective/mystery novel Poe and Conan Doyle stand out as the pillars on which the majority of the genre was built. While Conan Doyle set the stage for all puzzle solvers, Poe mined the deeper and darker territories of the human (sub)conscious.

Hammett's work strikes me as a defining link between Poe and the modern mystery novel. Sam Spade is a modern day Beowulf, following his own compass and code of honor in an atmosphere that was set in Poe's "Cask of Amontillado". He likes money, he likes booze, would be a good candidate for a "Sam-quits" anti-smoking campaign and last but not least can't keep his eyes or hands of the opposite sex.

Hammett surrounds Spade with a cast of characters who could be considered clichés to the modern reader, but are in fact archetypes that by now have populated millions of mystery volumes.

To me the plot was of limited consequence, yet Hammett's style and prose generate an endless series of sharp black and white photographs in a fast paced existentialist drama. Like Jorge Luis Borges, who acknowledged his depth to Poe's work, Hammett was instrumental in carving out a genre of his own that may miss the former's intellectual appeal, but is still more effective than the entire world of "classical literature" in keeping mankind reading.