Dashiell Hammett

It is an accepted fact that Dashiell Hammett helped invent what is referred to as hardboiled mystery fiction (Pierpont 66f). In laconic and knowing prose, hardboiled fiction presents a cynical worldview, a picture of human behavior that resonates with sordidly plausible violence, and a pattern of events that--in the tradition of adventure stories--encourages reader interest in outcomes. In significant part what holds readers in suspense is the figure of the detective who is at the center of the mystery. In The Maltese Falcon, that hero is Sam Spade, partner with Miles Archer in their detective firm, Spade & Archer. When Archer goes out on a case for one Miss Wonderly, never to return because he and the man he was following are both shot, Spade gets into the case to get to the bottom of what Miss Wonderly really wanted and who she really is (not Miss Wonderly, for a start; she quickly reveals that her real name is Brigid O'Shaughnessy). Whatever else is true about MF, it is also true that its hero engages in something like a noble quest of vengeance and expiation as he gets deeper into BO's case. How that feature of Spade's character is spun out, as well as other salient features of character, is the subject of this research.

MF offers no extensive early biography of Sam Spade; the reader is free to infer how and why he became a private detective in San Francisco. Even so, by way of telling details and the character's mode of expression, the reader begins to suspect that Spad

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social institutions and the social convention they enforce borders on contempt, not least because the institutional representatives continually betray their position of trust. The persistence with which the police dog Spade for murders they are pretty sure he did not commit is one example of that, a persistence morally complicated, from Spade's point of view, by their concealment of their real agenda and attempt to deceive Spade into tripping himself up. "You oughtn't try to pin more than one murder at a time on me," he tells Dundy. "I could've butchered Miles to get his wife, and then Thursby so I could hang Miles's killing on him. That's a hell of a swell system. . . . How long am I supposed to keep that up?" (341). In such observations is contained a sharp critique of the bureaucratic logic that stifles so much of human experience, and it is a core feature of Spade's character. The critique is amplified when Spade is called into the D.A.'s office and once again grilled about Thursby. The D.A.'s hidden agenda is the potential glory of nailing the killer of a fellow who worked for the Chicago mob. By Spade's lights he goes too far when threatening to trample Spade's constitutional self-incrimination protections. Spade's respons

Category: Literature - D