Book Review: The Maltese Falcon

I didn’t love it. I expected to. Everyone raves about this as a quintessential noir mystery by Dashiell Hammet. I liked it. A lot.

But I didn’t love it. Is it me?

I know, I know. Just now getting around to reading this classic mystery? Yes, I did, finally. It’s been in my queue for a long time. So I moved it up and opened it up. Having never seen the movie, there was no interference on that front, but I just didn’t get engrossed. This post is more reaction than book review.

Hammett’s 1929 novel holds up as a mystery, though the style is so different from today’s style of writing as to seem foreign in places. And certainly the iconic Sam Spade’s way of treating women and his tough-guy talk do hearken to an earlier time. I would guess the screen writers found this an easy book to translate to the screen.

I haven’t seen the movie, but the dialogue played like a movie script in my head. Honestly, it was so like movies of the 30s and 40s eras. I could see and hear Bogie saying the lines. The book truly sounded like a movie.

This classic mystery story from the Golden Age of mysteries in America suffers by comparison to Raymond Chandler who has smoother prose. Hammett can be, well,  clumsy.

Dialect was handled well with appropriate touches, and wasn’t heavy-handed. The language patterns and vocabulary were very reflective of a certain societal strata of the era. However, one character comes from “the Levant” (north of Arabia, south of Turkey—Jordan, Israel, et al.). Hammett used the word Levantine to describe this recurring character. Again and again. Every time he was in a scene. I get it. He’s Middle Eastern. No editor today would allow that to fly.

The twists and turns were numerous and sometimes confusing. I like a mystery I can think along with to solve. Not a chance with this one. Sam Spade knows stuff or intuits stuff that we don’t have insight on. The mystery itself, a stolen statue, was not so compelling, though the two deaths did elevate the stakes.

The three women in the story were very different. One literary critique I read suggested that Iva, Effie, and Brigid were aspects of a single woman. They were cardboard-y in their stereotypic depictions. Brigid was the most complex of the three, but that could have been because of all the lies she told. Who IS this woman, really?

The book is not strong on motivations for actions for any character. Things happen. People do stuff. But the why is left hanging most of the time.

Sam Spade is an example of a flat character arc. We know who he is from the beginning and he doesn’t change/grow as a result of being involved in this series of events. And that’s fine because it is typical of the noir genre.

Would I read it again knowing all this now? Yep. You gotta read the stuff others reference. Sorta like taking your medicine. How about you? Did you think The Maltese Falcon was one of the greatest stories ever? Why?

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Facebook: Sharon Arthur Moore says Sam Spade is an American icon in The Maltese Falcon, a fine book, but not a great one. http://bit.ly/2n2kWrF

Twitter: @Good2Tweat says Sam Spade is an American icon in The Maltese Falcon, a fine book, but not a great one. http://bit.ly/2n2kWrF