Is That You Satan?

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

Last month for le podcast Kathryn and I read The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. As we discovered on le podcast when attempting to delve in, mystery novels are not the easiest to review. Unless you’re willing to give it all away, which we are not. Please don’t talk to me about the IAHITINMY debacle of midsummer. Of course, even if I were willing to give up the goods on certain books (say some magnificent work of lit fic where the plot is kind of secondary anyway), it would be completely self-defeating to do so with a mystery novel. I review so that you might read! Why would you read if you know what happens?

Well, actually now that I think about it, there are lots of reasons to read novels aside from plot. I could see myself rereading this one one day, and I do think Hammett’s prose stands on its own as worthy of being read. But still getting something out of a reread is different from reading a mystery novel for the first time already knowing how it ends.

Enough! I’m obviously stalling.

The Maltese Falcon is the story of how San Francisco private detective Sam Spade gets himself embroiled in a double murder slash the hunt for an extremely valuable, golden-gemstone-encrusted, mysterious (questionably real) historical artifact that—you guessed it—is from Malta and is shaped like a falcon.

It all begins when Ms. Wonderly shows up in Spade’s office asking him to track down her wayward sister who has apparently run off with a questionable man. Spade puts his partner, Archer, on the job. He’s going to follow the questionable man and hopefully find the wayward sister. However, when both Archer and the questionable man end up shot dead by the end of the night, it’s a reckoning for Ms. Wonderly.

Spade, who didn’t believe her story in the first place, gets her to admit her real name—Brigid O’Shaughnessy—but not much else. She’s a sneaky one this Brigid. She wants Spade’s protection but doesn’t want to trust him with the big, bird-related truth.

Enter Joel Cairo, a peculiar gentleman who shows up in Spade’s office asking after this strange bird. Strategically acting like he knows more than he does, while also asserting that he knows nothing at all, Spade gets most of the story out of Cairo. After Cairo tries to search his office at gunpoint and gets himself knocked out instead, that is. And it’s off to the races from there.

And it is the topsy-turvy adventure of it all that drives the story along and keeps the reader enthralled, but if I’m being honest, for me it was more about how Sam would react to what was happening than it was about what was happening. Because as the reader, you just can’t be sure. While Spade is the one we follow throughout the novel, and it’s essentially told from his perspective, we don’t get the inner monologue. We aren’t privy to the connections and conclusions that he’s drawing, and that makes him a morally ambiguous character.

But wait a minute, how ambiguous is it really? As we discussed on le pod, Dashiell Hammett makes a concerted effort in the early pages of the novel to make sure you as the reader know that Sam is…well, evil. He is compared to Satan twice in the first chapter, and once again ~50 pages later. He looks “rather pleasantly like a blond satan” and he has a “satan’s head” and a “satan’s face.”

Of course, one does not accidentally refer to one’s protagonist as satanic three different times, twice in rapid succession, without meaning something by it.

In flipping through my copy while writing this, I stumbled upon a brief introduction from James Ellroy that I hadn’t noticed the first go around. At the end of it, he refers to Sam Spade as Hammett’s first—in fact, hard-boiled detective writing’s first—“tragic hero.” And that’s when some of my wheeling thoughts clicked together. Because one other figure, sometimes framed as a tragic hero as well, comes to mind in mulling all this over: Satan himself in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Could the satanic comparisons early on serve superficially to alert the reader to Sam’s imperfect character while also tracking with a deeper link to Milton’s characterization of Satan?

In reading Paradise Lost as a tragedy, Satan’s flaw (sin) is excessive pride. The same could be said of Sam. He certainly thinks that he knows best, that he is the only one who can put all the pieces together. He does not want help. More than that, he values his own skin above anyone else’s.

In both texts, after the initial pronunciation of evil is made—in Paradise Lost, Satan is banished from heaven for leading a rebellion against God, in The Maltese Falcon Spade hasn’t really done anything yet, but we’ve been told that he's satanic—after we know these things, both Milton and Hammett go on to portray their characters as cunning, charming, interesting ‘people.’ For Milton, this serves to emphasize the dangers of temptation that exist all around us, the wolves in sheep’s clothing. Satan is not actually a sympathetic character. He’s not the bad boy you’re rooting for.

So what does that theoretically mean for Spade? Am I really saying that he’s pure evil? Probably not, and the comparison is definitely not one to one. Spade is a rough guy in a rough world. Paradise is, of course, long lost here. Buuuut…his charm is the vigilante code of it all. He does present as the morally ambiguous bad boy who seems to live by a strict set of morals all the same. It appeals, but it’s dangerous! If you could just figure out what the key to the code is. If the morals are good? Better than they seem at least? Hmmm…

I fear I can’t say much more, and certainly can’t say what I think I’ve decided I think about it all, without tainting the minds of my readers before they become Hammett’s readers. You will have to decide for yourself, then come back to chat with me.

---

Having read this over I feel like I’m kind of sucking all the fun out of a really fun novel by comparing it with PARADISE LOST lol. Even though IMO Paradise Lost is fun. I do want to be clear that I don’t think this novel is some kind of morality play or Christian allegory. It’s just that he said satan THREE times and so this framing that intrigued me on a figurative level. It’s one of the elements of the novel that I’ve continued to mull over AFTER having enjoyed the plot and the intrigue and the fantastic characters (Spade included!). Okay, love you, bye!

---