Study Guide to The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645420774
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Manuali di studio
• Subtopic: Guide di studio

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, who is considered one of the best detective-story writers in America.As an author of action-detective novels, Hammett wrote legendary characters which were eventually turned into movie, radio, and TV drama figures. Moreover, his work explored complex themes such as logic prevailing over crime and the place of order in human life. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Hammett's classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&AsThe Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including
essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO DASHIELL HAMMETT

LIFE, WORKS, AND REPUTATION OF DASHIELL HAMMETT (1894 - 1961)

The 1930 spring list of publisher Alfred A. Knopf included an action-detective novel. The Maltese Falcon, written by ex - “private eye” Dashiell Hammett. The year before, Knopf had published Hammett’s first two novels, Red Harvest and The Dain Curse, and both were enjoying moderate success. Indeed, since 1923 Hammett had been known as one of the best detective-story writers in America. But now The Maltese Falcon launched him on two decades of fame and wealth as a “serious” (art) novelist whose characters became legendary figures in movie, radio, and TV drama as well as in printed literature.

Then, in the Fifties, broadcasters cut all ties with him, publishers let his books go out of print, his royalties were seized by the Federal government, and he was imprisoned for his leftist activities. Leaving jail mortally ill with lung trouble (exacerbated by his voluntary military service in World Wars I and II), he spent his final decade in near poverty, barely able to breathe. Somewhat enheartened by a strong renascence of his popularity in the late Fifties, he died in 1961. Today his reputation stands secure as one of the three major writers - the others are Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway - who have done most to establish a genuine American prose style.

EARLY YEARS

Samuel Dashiell Hammett was born on May 27, 1894, on a failing farm in St. Mary’s County, Maryland. Dashiell’s father, Richard Hammett, was a heavy drinker, gambler, and womanizer, who held several successive jobs a year, and moved his family (Dashiell had a brother and sister), to Philadelphia and then to Baltimore. There Dashiell began his lifetime habit of reading voluminously, and this was probably a factor in his admission in 1908, to the prestigious Baltimore Polytechnic Institute. But just before his sixteenth birthday he had to drop out and go to work because his father’s health failed. Dashiell held a series of jobs he hated: messenger, day laborer, machine operator. Finally, in 1915 he was rescued by an ad he read offering a job as “an operative” with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency.

HAMMETT AS “OP”

The Pinkerton Agency was founded by organizing genius Alan Pinkerton in 1850. Pinkerton’s “ops” spied on the Confederates during the Civil War and solved many railroad robberies. By the time Hammett became an op, the Agency was specializing also in strike-breaking and union busting, and it was during these years that Hammett became aware of what he would later call “the class struggle.” A second important influence during those years was the doctrine of James Wright, the Pinkerton administrator who trained Hammett. Wright was that kind of moralist who believes it’s moral to use immoral methods against the immoral. An op could lie, cheat, blackmail, perjure himself, falsify the evidence, or intimidate and manipulate people, so long as he did it all to punish the suspect. In all these noble pursuits he must remain objective-he must neither hate nor love criminal nor client lest emotions interfere with his judgment and his ability to act decisively. This became part of the “code” of Hammett’s private detectives, including Sam Spade, the protagonist of The Maltese Falcon.

[N.B. It was the Pinkerton private-detective agency’s stationery that gave birth to the phrase “private eye.” Their letterhead featured an all-seeing eye.]

WORLD WAR I SERVICE

Hammett interrupted his years of “tailing” missing persons and errant wives to enlist in the World War I U.S. Army. He became a sergeant in the Motor Ambulance Corps, and in administering to soldiers returning home during the catastrophic influenza epidemic of 1918, he caught the flu, and, his resistance weakened, became tubercular. Down to 140 pounds from his Pinkerton 160, he was awarded a $50.00 per month pension and discharged. After a period of convalescence, he went West and worked as a Pinkerton agent in Washington, Montana, and California.

MARRIAGE

Back in hospitals as a “lunger,” he spent his weekend passes with a nurse named Jose Nolan. They married, settled down in San Francisco, and had two girls. Hammett, when well, worked part-time for Pinkerton: Jose described two days when he sat home in a daze after a “suspect he was tailing” led him into an alley and beat him with a brick. Confined to bed with TB about 20 hours a day, he decided to become a free-lance advertising writer. He had the good luck to be hired by Albert Samuels whose jewelry stores needed a copywriter and who became a kind of surrogate father for Dashiell. He bought an Underwood portable and began selling not only ad copy, but also short pieces to H. L. Mencken’s “aristocrat among magazines,” Smart Set, which paid him one cent a word. It was a natural next step for him to submit to the other Mencken “mag,” Black Mask.

THE “CONTINENTAL OP”

Black Mask published detective and crime fiction by such stars as Erle Stanley Gardner and Carroll John Daly. Hammett saw in the new “hardboiled” fiction by Daly something he could improve upon: Hammett’s great advantage was that he was one writer who had lived detective work; he had scars from head to shins inflicted by criminals. On October 1, 1923, Black Mask published Hammett’s first “Continental Op” story: Pinkerton’s National had become the Continental Agency, and James Wright, enhanced by Hammett, became the anonymous “Op.” Soon Black Mask was giving Hammett top-billing with Gardner and Daly. The Op tells of his own experiences, in the first person (“I”), in twenty-six stories and novellas. We shall have occasion to look back on some of these early works in our “Textual Analysis” of The Maltese Falcon.

RED HARVEST

From November 1927 to February 1928 Black Mask ran four installments of a Hammett story that he then prepared for publication as a novel in book form. Red Harvest is based on his experience as a Pinkerton agent in mining towns. The mine owners have imported large numbers of Pinkerton gunmen to bust the Unions. But when the mercenary gunmen have destroyed the unions, they take over the town itself. When the Op arrives he proceeds to use the same technique that Sam Spade will use in Falcon-he plays one gangster against another until he has cleaned up the town. There is another important precedent in Red Harvest: His bloody work has dehumanized the Op. This, as William Marling has pointed out, “is environmental determinism: the hero understandably loses his morality in a murderous millieu.”

THE DAIN CURSE

From November 1928 to February 1929, Black Mask serialized the early version of the novel The Dain Curse which Hammett also revised for publication by Knopf. It is the first novelized treatment in our literature of the religious cults in California. One of its distinctions is a running debate between Fitzstephan, a novelist, and the Op about what is real, what is fiction. This too helps pave the way for our “Textual Analysis” of Falcon. The Dain Curse was and still is criticized for its complex plot in which ten people are killed, two by the Op himself. One consequence of this adverse criticism is that Hammett decided that in The Maltese Falcon he would reduce the amount of bloodshed and have the four killings occur offstage.

MOVE TO NEW YORK

Late in 1929 Hammett borrowed $500 from Samuels and sent Jose and the girls to live in Los Angeles - where he hoped someday to get movie work - and he went to live in New York. When he ran out of funds, the young writer Nathanael West, night manager of a hotel, let Hammett register under a pseudonym (so he could not be traced if he had to leave without paying). There “Mr. T. Victrola Blueberry” worked on Falcon, read proofs for a West novel, and spent many a carousing night with West’s friend William Faulkner.

THE MALTESE FALCON

From September 1929 to January 1930, Black Mask ran monthly installments of the story that Hammett then revised for publication in book form as The Maltese Falcon. The main character, Sam Spade, is a tougher, grimmer, more “on-the-run” private eye than the Continental Op would ever want to be. Although this novel is less of a social expose than is Red Harvest, it still portrays San Francisco as so corrupt that readers today have to be informed that Hammett actually understated his case. Herb Caen, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, has recalled that in those days “The Hall of Justice was dirty and reeked of evil. The criminal lawyers ... used every shyster trick. The City Hall, the D.A., and the cops ran the town as though they owned it, and they did .... San Francisco was a Sam Spade city.” (Quoted in William F. Nolan’s Dashiell Hammett.) Counselor-at-law Sid Wise and District Attorney Bryan, characters in Falcon, give us some idea of what Caen (and Hammett) knew about Frisco in the Twenties, but actually Hammett goes easy on “the cops” and uses none of the other lurid aspects of the city that Caen describes (the rampant prostitution, public gambling, “rolling” of customers in the bars, for example).

CRITICAL RECEPTION

What Hammett and his editors had been waiting for was recognition that he was a literary novelist first, a mystery writer incidentally. And now Gilbert Seldes, a leading critic, wrote that “The Maltese Falcon ... is a novel and it is also a mystery story - the combination is so rare that probably not half a dozen good examples exist between The Moonstone [1868 classic by Wilkie Collins] and the present one.... The publishers quote someone as saying that ... Hammett has done for the mystery story what Dumas did for the historical romance. I consider that a ... justifiable ... comparison.”

THE GLASS KEY

Hammett’s fourth novel appeared serially in Black Mask even while Falcon was still being reviewed, from March to June 1930; Knopf issued The Glass Key in book form in 1931. Here Hammett returns on a big-scale to his theme of political corruption but adds the theme of male friendship.

MOVES TO HOLLYWOOD

In 1930 Warner Brothers released a vaguely recognizable film version of Red Harvest called Roadhouse Nights, and in 1931 David O. Selznick signed on Hammett as a screenwriter for Paramount. He moved to the movie colony. His first original film story, “After School,” which he wrote in one weekend, became the basis for City Streets, starring Gary Cooper and Sylvia Sidney. For Universal, Hammett worked on Ladies’ Man, which starred William Powell as S. S. Van Dine’s detective, Philo Vance, and then wrote, expressly for Powell, an original Sam Spade story, “On the Make,” released later as Mister Dynamite. And RKO produced a film version of Hammett’s short story “Woman in the Dark.”

With huge sums of money rolling in, Hammett hired a chauffeur, entertained starlets and writers lavishly, flew back and forth from L.A. to New York, and won a reputation at the studios as one of the writers (like Faulkner) most likely to show up drunk, if at all. Coming out of a five-day drinking spree, Hammett met Lillian Hellman, a 24-year-old book reviewer and manuscript reader. They became friends and lovers, off and on, for the rest of his life. He helped her learn to write; he critiqued and edited her plays, occasionally writing a scene himself to show her how; she became one of the leading playwrights of the century.

THE THIN MAN

Perhaps her biggest writing lesson came in watching him compose his fifth novel, The Thin Man. “Life changed,” she said. “The parties were over ... I had never seen anybody work that way; the care for every word, the pride in the neatness of the typed page itself, the refusal for ... two weeks to go out even for a walk for fear something would be lost.”

The Thin Man (1934) is quite unlike the earlier Hammett works. The hero is Nick Charles, a retired detective lured by his wife Nora into tackling one more case. In the Charleses, Hammett created one of the most loving married couples in American literature. This was Lillian teaching Dashiell how to write about women, about a trusting and tender relationship. “The thin man” is an inventor whom we never meet: He disappears before the book opens.

WORLD WAR II SERVICE

Forty-seven years old when Pearl Harbor was bombed, World War I veteran Dashiell Hammett tried to enlist again but was rejected because of his tuberculosis, his rotten teeth (all that smoking and drinking!), and his age. So he paid for his own dental work to meet Army standards, and when he applied again he somehow convinced the examiners that his lungs were better.

POLITICAL ACTIVISM

From his days as a Pinkerton, Hammett had been keenly aware of the struggle between workers and owners. Some critics see Red Harvest as a Marxist work, and Steven Marcus, in a famous essay published in the Partisan Review and used as an introduction to the Vintage book The Continental Op (1974), sees The Maltese Falcon as an allegory of the history of capitalism.

Hellman says that Hammett had many reservations about the Communist Party and never advocated “violent overthrow of the government.” If he did join the CP late in the Thirties maybe as Marcus thinks, it was during the Party’s “Popular Front” days when it welcomed anyone willing to fight fascism and Nazism: The irony is that no other American party was willing before Pearl Harbor, and so an antifascist like Hammett might well have joined the American left for that reason. In 1937, he was active, e.g., in raising funds for the Spanish Republic, then in a death struggle with the rebellious General Franco, who was supported by Hitler and Mussolini. A poll at the time showed that only two major American writers did not support the Spanish Republic.

POLITICAL CRISIS

After his discharge from the Army, Hammett taught creative writing at the Jefferson School of Social Science. Headed by Dr. Howard Selsam, who had lost his professorship at Brooklyn College because of his open Communist activities, the Jef...