The Tough Guys

Abstract

The Maltese Falcon (1930) is only superficially a detective thriller. Ross MacDonald has called it ‘a fable of modern man in quest for love and money’.¹ To Hammett as he wrote, it must have unfolded as a parable of what it took to succeed in the corrupt modern city. Caspar Gutman, like the Chinaman in Brecht’s contemporary In the, Jungles of the Cities, embodies the knowledge Sam Spade must gain and the twisted romanticism he must conquer in order to progress to honourable manhood. Spade fails with Gutman in the centre of the book; later he comes back to win against him. In this the novel is also about the necessity of the Parsifalian ‘second chance’. Like Steinbeck and Chandler, Hammett took inspiration from medieval romance, and Spade is the seminal representation of the ‘knight’ required by California’s ‘mean streets’. Like von Eschenbach’s Parzival, The Maltese Falcon is a Bildungsroman in which the young hero is stymied by his aggressive self-expression and incomplete understanding of his limitations. That it is a Grail story is obvious, the Grail being the ambiguous prize of the falcon, with its elaborate history stretching back to the Crusades and mingling with the legends of the Hospitaliers and Templars which inspired Romantics from Scott to Wagner and Flaubert.