Maltese Falcon - Trendsetter in noir fiction

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (1930) is one of the most gripping mystery novels I have read. Samuel Spade is the tough private detective who is hired merely to shadow someone for some obscure reason. He asks his buddy Miles Archer to do the shadowing. The man who is tailing and the man being tailed, both get killed. Soon Spade is suspected of murder. He, in any case, was not eye to eye with the coppers; now he is also on the wrong side of the gangsters.

The objective of Spade’s inquiry/search no longer seems clear. He seems to have three objectives: one, to provide protection to his client (the femme fatale Brigid O’Shaughnessy); two, to find a black statue of a bird (the Maltese Falcon); three, to catch the killers of three murdered men (none of whom was a plain man).

It is revealed slowly, somewhere close to the middle of the book that the thugs are trying to get hold of the Maltese Falcon (a statuette of a bird made out of solid gold and encrusted with jewels worth millions of dollars) that had gone missing since the 16th century. Throughout its history the bird had passed through many counties in Europe and through many owners – royals, buccaneers, adventurers, high ranking military officers and the kind – who had often been killed and robbed of the priceless thing.

But was such a priceless object d'art really in existence?

As the book progresses, every one of the main characters turns out to be involved in the murders. Spade is pushed to a corner by the gangsters, who, in any case, are out to kill each other and Spade, but are united only to share the spoils of the Maltese Falcon. But Spade comes out of their clutches. He is a man of high morals and principles, unflinching in the face of temptations except that he is drawn to every woman in the novel, though never seriously involved.

This novel stands out as the first hard-boiled detective fiction where the private eye is a tough guy fighting crime in the streets with his brains and brawns, as opposed to earlier private eyes like Sherlock Holmes who were intelligent consultant-detectives, where the criminals would voluntarily break down before them. The Maltese Falcon became a trendsetter for the noir genre with flaws in the detective’s character who is a practical down-to-earth person and the villains are hard-core professional criminals who would stop at nothing. Perhaps this trend gave birth to the famous spy named James Bond.

Characterization is so vivid in this novel that one cannot help visualizing them like in a movie and remembering them for a long time. This book can be taken as a study guide in characterization. Every character, small or big, is peculiar, strong and different, their traits emphasized time and again throughout the story. Take the opening paragraph of the book that sketches out the protagonist: Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting V under the more flexible V of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, V. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The V motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down--from high flat temples--in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond Satan. He said to Effie Perine: "Yes, sweetheart?"

The book was made into a movie of the same name in 1941, starring Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade.