Dashiel Hammett

Six Thoughts Upon Reading The Maltese Falcon

PETERMBALL Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption , , , , ,

I started reading The Maltese Falcon yesterday, which is one of those books I’ve been meaning to read forever without getting around to it. I lay the blame entirely on the film, which is awesome and fulfilling in a way that the other big hardboiled-to-noir adaptation* never really manages, and thus makes it easier to excuse the act of reading in favour of another round of Bogart playing Sam Spade.

In any case, after starting to read I had some thoughts. Six of them, to be exact:

1) The more I read hardboiled fiction the more I’m aware of the way it infiltrates our culture, seeping in through other media when we’re not looking. It’s a genre that lends itself to the intertextual, to endless moments of “so that’s where that came from” as you go back and find primary sources. I knew the tropes of noir film long before I came across it’s classic stories, largely because I’d inherited the narrative beats through cartoons that riffed on them, and because they’d been deployment in films like Bladerunner and the early fiction of William Gibson.

2) Noir is a genre of spiritual exhaustion, a kind of precursor to the sense emotionally bankrupt doom that started seeping into the big L literature I was reading in my undergraduate days. Its heroes exist in liminal space – not quite on the straight-and-narrow, not quite down among the criminals – but they’re guided by a kind of self-developed morality and nobility that exists beneath the layer of cynicism (See Sam Spades’ closing monologue in The Maltese Falcon, or the recurring motif of chess and knighthood in Raymond Chandler’s fiction). It’s a desperate morality, sure; tattered and unreliable, but it’s there.

3) Given the two points above, someone has presumably written a book or thesis on postmodernism and the hardboiled detective story. If that’s true, I wish to read it. Also, apropos of nothing, I want someone to write a paper on the influences of Dashiel Hammett’s Sam Spade on the Sparhawk character in David Edding’s Elenium books.

4) Hardboiled fiction written in the third person is weird.

5) The Maltese Falcon may be a classic of the genre, but I’ll throw my weight behind The Thin Man as the best hardboiled story Hammett wrote over the course of his life. Despite my affection for the endless pragmatism of Spade and his emotional engagement with the world, there’s something utterly charming about having two primarily characters who are already married, enjoy one-another’s company, and verbally spar over the course of the book.

6) One of these days I really need to find an Angry Nerd Book Club where I can go be angry, nerdy, and have these types of conversations with other people. I miss talking about books with other people, I think, especially in environments where others understand why people who say “why can’t you just enjoy it instead of picking holes” should be stoned to death with remaindered copies of the Da Vinci Code.

*that’d be The Big Sleep incidentally, which is awesome right up until a point about halfway through, after which it’s just a mess.

________________________________________________
Current Writing Metrics
Consecutive Days Writing (500+ words): 3
New Short Stories Sent Into the Wild: 10/30
Rejections in 2010: 21/100
Claw Word Count (Finish Date: 15th November)
 <– A slightly false metric for the last twenty-four hours, since I’ve hit the point where I can port in scenes from the discarded draft fo the story.

5 Books

PETERMBALL Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption , , , , , , , , , , ,

If you were to ask me for book recomendations right now – and yes, I know you aren’t, but lets just say you were – you’d probably get a list that runs something like this:

The Thin Man, Dashiel Hammett: Screw The Maltese Falcon – if you’re only going to read one hardboiled detective story by Hammett then you really should start with this one. I picked it up on the back of watching Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist when it was mentioned that the title characters in the film were based on the relationship between Hammett’s Nick and Nora Charles in the film version of this book, and it’s not hard to see why they were taken with the couple. Nick and Nora Charles are fricken’ awesome – their banter, their affection for one another, their goddamn chemistry as a literary couple – and it’s refreshing to see a hardboiled investigator who is actually happy much of the time.

The Jane Austen Book Club, Karen Joy Fowler: I keep talking to people who haven’t read this, even if they’re fans of Fowler’s other work. Apparently there’s some combination of the cover art and the movie that was made that warns people off, thinking it’ll be a very different book than it actually is. And I keep telling people “no, no, you’re wrong. It’s fricken’ awesome!” and occasionally they’ll listen to me and actually read the book and get in contact and say “yes, actually, you’re right, it is kind of awesome.” From the communal narrator to the unabashed love of books (both Austen and SF) that permeates the narrative, it’s just good.

Blush: Faces of Shame, Elspeth Probyn: There are very few books in the world that make me miss working in universities, but this is one of them. Essentially a long essay examining the role shame and embarrassment plays in contemporary culture, complete with a series of eloquent and personal arguments for the many ways they can be recontextualizes as positive things. Utterly fascinating.

The Conversations: Walter Murch and The Art of Editing Film, Michael Ondaatje:Just what it says on the tin – this is essentially the transcripts of several conversations Ondaatje (who wrote The English Patient, among other things) had with Murch (who edited a bunch of films, Apocalypse Now among them). I have this working theory that there is nothing better than getting two smart, passionate people together and letting them talk about the stuff that interests them, regardless of whether it how interesting it seems on the surface. Despite its title, this ranges across a variety of editorial approaches (including poetry and fiction) that makes it one of those books all writers should read. I keep coming back to it, again and again.

The Chains That You Refuse, Elizabeth Bear: One of the first books I picked up ’cause I saw it mentioned on livejournal, which then lead me to a series of novels that were similarly cool. But this, Bear’s short story collection, remains my favorite thing that she’s done – it’s wide-ranging in terms of genres, voices and approaches, setting seeds for the seemingly disparate approaches  she’s touched upon in longer works since, and there are several stories that are worth the price of entry on their own (including Two Dreams on Trains, And the Deep Blue Sea, One Eyed Jack and the Suicide King, This Tragic Glass).