I’ve now read The Maltese Falcon – and oh boy. But, following on from a few posts on last week’s Reading Group thread, I’m going to try not to say much more than that, for fear of generating spoilers.

But I don’t think there’s any danger in observing how full-formed the book seems, in both style and substance. Or in noting that it isn’t at all surprising to learn that Dashiell Hammett’s New York Times obituary declared him “the dean of the ‘hard-boiled’ school of detective fiction”. In that case, The Maltese Falcon must be his masterclass. It’s a wonderful example of the form.

Or at least, I think it is a wonderful example. It’s difficult to judge today how exceptional Hammett must have seemed when the novel was published in 1930, because it’s one of the only examples from the school that is still in wide circulation. But there are plenty of other comparison points.

The Maltese Falcon most closely reminded me – and this is a serious compliment – of Ernest Hemingway’s short story from 1927, The Killers:

Here’s Hemingway:

What do you do here nights?” Al asked. “They eat the dinner,” his friend said. “They come here and they eat the big dinner.” “That’s right,” George said. “So you think that’s right?” Al asked George. “Sure.” “You’re a pretty bright boy, aren’t you?” “Sure,” said George. “Well you’re not,” said the other man. “Is he Al?” “He’s dumb,” said Al. He turned to Nick. “What’s your name?” “Adams.” “Another bright boy,” Al said. “Ain’t he a bright boy, Max?” “The town’s full of bright boys,” Max said.

Here’s Hammett:

Who’s Thursby?” Dundy demanded. “I told Tom what I knew about him.” “You told Tom damned little.” “I knew damned little.” “Why were you tailing him?” “I wasn’t. Miles was--for the swell reason that we had a client who was paying good United States money to have him tailed.” “Who’s the client?” Placidity came back to Spade’s face and voice. He said reprovingly: “You know I can’t tell you that until I’ve talked it over with the client.” “You’ll tell it to me or you’ll tell it in court,” Dundy said hotly. “This is murder and don’t you forget it.” “Maybe. And here’s something for you to not forget, sweetheart. I’ll tell it or not as I damned please. It’s a long while since I burst out crying because policemen didn’t like me.”

Hemingway is even snappier than Hammett, but they have similar Tommy-gun rhythms, aggressive repetitions and hard consonants. The two stories also share a cold morality, a bleak view of a cruel world and guns. Of course, there are guns.

Elsewhere, there’s plenty more good evidence that Hammett wasn’t operating in a vacuum. You can, for instance, trace his influences back through Arthur Raffles, Sherlock Holmes and on to Dupin in The Murders in the Rue Morgue. (Fans of the telling detail will be pleased to be reminded that the all-important boat in The Murders in the Rue Morgue is Maltese.)

Yet as well as borrowing from the literary world around him, Dashiell Hammett brought something new and crucial to the genre, namely: Dashiell Hammett. Literary theorists who want to separate the author from the novel must have an especially hard time with a man who once said: “All my characters were based on people I’ve known personally, or known about.” And a man about whom Raymond Chandler said: “I doubt that Hammett had any deliberate artistic aims whatever; he was trying to make a living by writing something he had first-hand information about. He made some of it up; all writers do; but it had a basis in fact; it was made up out of real things.”

I’m not so certain about Hammett’s lack of artistic aims. The great tragedy is that after producing five novels in five wonderfully productive years between 1929 and 1934 he suffered crippling writer’s block.

He famously joked to an English reporter that he didn’t write any more because: “I am concentrating on my health. I am learning to be a hypochondriac.” He also noted, in partial contradiction of Chandler: “I stopped writing because I found I was repeating myself. It is the beginning of the end when you discover you have style.”

But the sad truth is that it wasn’t really a question of style. In Dashiell Hammett, A Life, his biographer Diane Johnson explained: “He tried tricks on himself: a new typewriter, writing in longhand, beginning with letters, hoping that once the words began to come, he would slide into work on their slick. A drink of whisky before working, no drink of whisky until after a decent day’s work, a walk, getting right out of bed in the morning, or promptly at six in the evening. No strategy sufficed.’’ She also suggested that his alcoholism took on crippling proportions because of his despair. Hammett once wrote to his publisher Alfred Knopf, on the subject of a new novel that never appeared: “I’m drowning my shame.”

That doesn’t sound to me like a man without artistic intentions. No matter – Chandler’s essay is still superb, and I don’t want to argue with him about Hammett basing his fiction on reality. Not least because that reality is so fascinating.

Before he turned to writing (and a brief stint as an ad-man), Hammett was a member of the famous Pinkerton’s detective agency. Like Sam Spade, he spent long nights in the cold fog of San Francisco following leads (although unlike the muscular Spade, Hammett was whip thin, thought to be tubercular and suffered horribly). And like Sam Spade, he saw a pretty dark side of humanity. Some time towards the end of the first world war, for instance, he was sent with other Pinkertons to infiltrate the ranks of striking copper miners in Montana. He also claimed to have turned down an offer of $5,000 to kill Frank Little, a union organiser. Not that it made much difference – Little was lynched soon afterwards and his body was found with a note on it reading, “First and Last Warning.” He also investigated the famous – and horrible – case of Fatty Arbuckle and Virginia Rappe. Hammett came to believe that the rotund comedian was being framed for rape and murder by a District Attorney.

Small wonder that he started to worry about who guarded the guards – and small wonder that he wrote about a world so murky, so venal and so frightening. A world that retains the power to chill, a hundred years later, with the sharp definition of a first-hand witness account.

To say more at this stage would probably involve breaking that initial promise about spoilers, so I’ll close. Let me just hand over one more time to that wonderful essay from Raymond Chandler (with a quick hat-tip to Reading Group regular, theorbys, who first brought it to my attention):

He wrote at first (and almost to the end) for people with a sharp, aggressive attitude to life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street... Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish. He put these people down on paper as they are, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes.”

It sounds like one hell of a formula. It’s a shame Hammett himself wasn’t able to use it more often.