Hes a right bastard, is that Sam Spade, but great company, all the nsame.Not that Dashiell Hammett ever tells us what his characters are thinking. He certainly lets us know what they are doing and saying but all the rest is noirish guesswork on our part, and that always takes us to some dark places. Perhaps this is one of the reasons this story has been around us for so long. You are talking lifetimes and yet this book remains a classic, considered by many to be the best of its kind, or certainly among the best.
Like so many good things it starts off as one thing and so after the bodies begin to fall it turns into something else. From a straight forward enough search for a missing person it morphs into a quest for lost templar treasure. The story is so steeped in tropes you might consider Dashiell Hammett the most shameless of plagarists, until you consider it was this book which gave birth to many of those familiar rifts., as we know and understand them.
Sam Spade may not be an entirely bad man but is certainly not an entirely good one. Who better then to send on a search for something which attracts bad people the way rotten meat attracts flies. As compelling a central character Sam Spade is, The Maltese Falcon throws up some right humdingres. Most famouslythe bow tie wearing sardonically grinning Mr Cairo, immortalised in the movie adaption of this book by Peter Lorre. It has been years since I last saw the film with Hunphrey Bogart as Sam Spade but reading this original book shows me the respect its adaptors had for the original material. Powerful characters in labrynthine situations with blistering word play by Dashiell Hammett. Not just in the form of cheeky wordplay by the characters but in its lyrical turns of phrase; " Spade put the cigarette in his mouth, set it on fireand laughed smoke out."I mean, how cool is that?
