The Black Mask

In the middle of the Thirties there was an outbreak of fox terriers all over England and America – and still, over eighty years later, people of a certain age, after pulling the ears of one of our dogs, tend to say, ‘Oh, but he’s exactly like – what was the name? – ah, yes – Asta.’

Asta was the only begetter of the terrier pandemic provoked by a 1934 film in which he (his name was actually Skippy) appeared with William Powell and Myrna Loy. The Thin Man was based on a novel by Dashiell Hammett – in which Asta is actually a female Schnauzer belonging to retired detective Nick Charles and his wife Nora. Powell and Loy were perfectly cast, and if Skippy was never remotely Schnauzerish, he started such a rage for fox terriers that they were wildly over- and in-bred, and eventually got so snappy and went so far out of fashion that the breed never really recovered until Crackwyn Cockspur became supreme champion of Crufts in 1962. We called his daughter Crackles; but I suppose I’m getting away from my subject. The Thin Man was Hammett’s last book, and rather different from his others – it’s both thriller and sly sexual farce, the dialogue full of the slick one-liners which instantly became the markers for smart Hollywood dialogue right up to and including All about Eve. It’s a fine book – but it doesn’t compare with The Maltese Falcon. This is a detective story, but not about a particular murder – though it starts with one, the result of a treasure hunt. The eponymous falcon is an immeasurably precious relic originally given by the Knights of Malta to the King of Spain. Covered in black paint, it has knocked about for a century and more, unrecognized for what it is. But now Casper Gutman, the ‘fat man’, is on its trail, and Hammett’s detective, Sam Spade, is drawn into a violent tussle between thieves determined to get their hands on it. The book bears no resemblance to any European example of its genre. It was written (as most of Hammett’s were) as a serial, and moves with all the speed that that implies; the plot is complex, violent, but not really the point. It’s the characters that count. Sam Spade, the novel’s professional detective, is memorable even without one’s recollection of Humphrey Bogart’s marvellous film characterization. He is very different to any detective in a British crime novel: he doesn’t collate clues, reason out the progress of a crime and hence the solution. ‘The problem with putting two and two together’, he says, ‘is that sometimes you get four, and sometimes you get twenty-two.’ So he deals with one state of affairs, then with the next, as they arise, depending simply on a train of events to lead him to a conclusion. He only intervenes to move things along, which he does by occasionally ‘heaving a wild and unpredictable monkey wrench into the machinery’. He’s neither an admirable nor even a barely likeable character. He uses terse, spare language – the Falcon opens with the murder of Spade’s partner, and we learn of it in a single laconic line of dialogue as he answers the telephone: ‘Hello . . . Yes, speaking . . . Dead? . . . Yes . . . Fifteen minutes. Thanks.’ He didn’t like his partner, and was having an affair with his wife, but he has his own code of honour, and goes after the murderers not self-consciously (as a Hemingway hero would) but because it’s just what you do. His emotions are so deep beneath the surface that he scarcely recognizes them himself; and when he does recognize them he is deeply suspicious of them. He and the ‘heroine’ of the book (and she is as unforgettable as Spade) ‘maybe love each other’. Spade had no original, as Hammett said: ‘He is a dream man in the sense that he is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been and what quite a few of them in their cockier moments thought they approached.’ But the villains are another matter – their behaviour and language, which make the Falcon and Hammett’s other detective stories completely credible, were the result of his fourteen years as a professional detective with the famous Pinkerton Agency. He knew how criminals actually talked and behaved, and they sprawl and slink, duck and dive through his pages as no fictional criminals had previously done. His pantheon of miscreants in this and his other books contain unforgettable characters – the ‘fat man’, Gutman, and perhaps even more memorable, his partner:

Mr Joel Cairo was a small-boned dark man of medium height. His hair was black and smooth and very glossy. His features were Levantine. A square-cut ruby, its sides paralleled by four baguette diamonds, gleamed against the deep green of his cravat. His black coat, cut tight to narrow shoulders, flared a little over slightly plump hips. His trousers fitted his legs more snugly than was the current fashion. The uppers of his patent-leather shoes were hidden by fawn spats. He held a black derby hat in a chamois-gloved hand and came towards Spade with short, mincing, bobbing steps. The fragrance of chypre came with him.

Hammett wastes few words, and when he needs to be careful of the censor (the book came out in 1930) his prose is slyly elegant: he deals with the effeminacy of Cairo and his relationship with his psychopathic boyfriend perfectly frankly – there’s no doubt what is going on – but the language is so perfectly judged that only the most prurient reader could find a way of being offended. Hammett himself was all his life an extreme left-winger (probably a lifelong member of the Communist Party, though he never admitted it). There is no record of anyone disliking him – apart from Senator McCarthy, who sent him to prison for defying his notorious enquiry. There, as he cleaned the lavatories, his warders called him ‘Sir’. He had a long struggle with alcoholism, but overcame it, only returning to taking one drink a day as he was dying, with the love of his life, the writer Lillian Hellman, at his side, sharing the dry martinis. Hammett’s other books – four novels and a number of short stories – are all remarkable (some critics regard his first, Red Harvest, as his most outstanding); but it’s The Maltese Falcon that sticks in the mind and asks to be read, reread and maybe even re-reread. Sam Spade remains totally individual – he only appears in the Falcon and a couple of stories, but when one thinks of an American detective, it’s Spade, all the way. He said things and did things that no detective had done before, and few have done so memorably since. His relaxed, almost contemptuous attitude to the police, with whom his relationship is distinctly uneasy, was as new in its time as his equally unperturbed but rather more polite attitude to the criminals he defeated. His contemporaries were always clearly going to win but it is never certain with Sam Spade until the final paragraph – and then there is still an account to be settled. It’s not being condescending to call the book ‘literary’: its appearance on a number of lists of ‘the best novels of the twentieth century’ isn’t in any way patronizing, much less absurd. Ross Macdonald, the only later writer who can seriously be compared with Hammett, said that ‘as a novelist of realistic intrigue, Hammett was unsurpassed in his own or any time . . . We all came out from under Hammett’s black mask.’ As for his readers – well, Hammett’s five novels have never been out of print, and the prospect is not so much remote as unthinkable. Read The Maltese Falcon.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 45 © Derek Parker 2015