John Cole: Well, good evening, everybody,
and welcome to a special mystery evening at the Library of Congress.
I'm John Cole.
I'm the Director of the Library's Center For the Book,
which for 27 years has promoted books and reading and literacy
in libraries, and one of the ways that we do it most effectively is
through presentations here at the Library of Congress
on special occasions such as this.
We also do have a network of Centers for the Book;
in each state there's a state Center for the Book.
And another one of our major activities is the National Book
Festival, which the Center for the Book serves as kind
of the program coordinator.
So, we have a real arsenal of reading promotion
and book promotion activities.
Tonight, of course, we're gathered for a 75th anniversary
of a special writer and a special book.
And before I introduce tonight's speaker,
I would like to call on George Taroni
[ spelled phonetically ]
of the Library of Congress's copyright office,
who will have a word or two to say
about the two items you see on my immediate right.
George? Let's give George a hand, he's prepared this.
[ applause ]   George Taroni: Thank you.
I'm happy to bring with me here an original reprint edition,
early reprint, which we have on permanent display
in the copyright office,
and I'm told that our rare book division has an actual,
first, first edition as well.
And this is one of the statues that was used in the film,
and Warner Brothers loaned this at first and then gave it
to the Library of Congress on the condition
that it be permanently displayed.
It was one of six replicas made, plaster replicas made to use
in the film, along with the lead statue.
It cost $683 to produce these six replicas.
Two of them made their way into the property warehouse
of Warner Brothers, four seemed to disappear from sight,
and this is one of those two.
The reason that the copyright office has this on display
in the first place is that we have some items that show some
of the important landmark copyright cases,
and there was a particular case where Dashiell Hammett conveyed
to Warner Brothers certain exclusive rights
to the detective story, Maltese Falcon.
And later, when he used the character Sam Spade in some
of his other stories, Warner Brothers sued him
and claimed copyright infringement.
And there was a decision at that point about whether
or not this exclusive right extended to the use
of individual characters and their names.
And Judge Albert Lee Stevens decided that it was not protected.
He said that "it is conceivable
that the character really constitutes the story being told,
but if the character is only the chess man in the game
of telling the story, he is not within the area
of protection afforded by copyright and is only a vehicle
for the story being told."
And that set the precedent for many later cases about whether names
and characters are protected by copyright,
so that's why we have that on display.
And you're welcome to come to the fourth floor in this building
at any time to see some of the other items we have on display
that chart the history of copyright cases in the United States.
Thank you.   [ applause ]
John Cole: We're very fortunate, very fortunate tonight
to have Rick Layman with us.
He really is an expert and an authority on Hammett.
Rick has written six books, he told me tonight.
I have the names of three of them here that I know
about that I have been looking
at as I have been thinking about this program.
Another important point is that Rick is the Vice President
of Bruccoli Clark, Layman/Manly, Inc., which is a wonderful publisher
of literary reference books that's been underway
down in South Carolina since 1976.
And he told me tonight that I know that many of you know The Dictionary
of Literary Biography, which is produced.
Volume No.   308 is currently in production.
So this company has -- through Rick and through his partners --
have made a wonderful contribution to American literary history.
One of his specialties, as I said, is Hammett.
And the three books that I listed
in the press release are Dashiell Hammett: A Bibliography, 1979;
Shadow Man: The Life of Dashiell Hammett, 1981; and most recently,
and I don't have it in front of me but we could have it on display,
is a beautifully bulky, excuse me,
documentary volume titled Dashiell Hammett's Maltese Falcon:
A Documentary Volume, which was published in 2003.
What I would like to do now is to turn the evening over to Rick.
I should say that he also is the guest editor of a new issue
of Clues: A Journal of Detection, which is devoted to Hammett.
And if everyone stays all the way through the talk and gets
to the reception, you will be able to obtain a gratis copy,
thanks to the publisher, of this issue
and we probably can get Rick to sign it as well.
Right now let me introduce Rick Layman.
[ applause ]
Rick Layman: I should say, first of all, that it's clear that the judge
in the copyright decision wasn't an English major.
He would have done better than calling Sam Spade just a vehicle.
I should begin with thanks.   First of all, thanks to John Cole
and the National Center for the Book.
What a wonderful organization this is, and how grateful all of us ought
to be for the things that they do, and how grateful I am personally
for John hosting this evening.   Second, Noreen Wald, who -- hello.
Female Speaker: Hi, Rick.
Rick Layman: Who is president, is it, of the Southeastern Division
of the Mystery Writers of America.   Female Speaker:
[ Unintelligible ]   Rick Layman: I'm sorry?
Female Speaker: Mid-Atlantic.
Rick Layman: Mid-Atlantic, excuse me.
And whose energy I heard about before I witnessed it.
Thank you.
To Beth Foxwell, the editor of Clues and Heldref Publications,
who publish Clues who have done a wonderful job with not just Clues
but the other journals that they publish.
I am particularly proud of The Maltese Falcon edition.
And to Senator Dianne Feinstein and Ryan Hunt who is here,
I suppose, representing her.
Senator Feinstein has been a constant friend
as we were organizing this 75th anniversary
over the past year and a half.
It's a little late to say Happy Valentine's Day,
but nonetheless, Happy Valentine's Day.
It is -- the nation's capital is an altogether appropriate place
to begin celebrating Hammett's most famous work.
You know, Hammett was born about 60 miles southeast of here
in southern Maryland in 1894.
He contracted Spanish influenza that affected the course of his life
at Camp Mead about 25 miles north in 1918.
And a veteran of two world wars,
he was buried at Arlington National Cemetery in 1961.
Those are reasons enough.
But then there is the Library of Congress.
A serious researcher is inevitably drawn here.
In the manuscript reading room you can examine the Pinkerton's National
Detective Service archives, the existing files of the agency
where Hammett worked as an operative before he began writing fiction
and where he gathered his material.
In that archive there are financial ledgers, work schedules
and case files, not including Hammett's, I'm sorry to say,
that provide the best documentation available of how the business
of the agency was conducted.
There's also a statement of general operating policies dated 1 June 1921
that was found in the flood building in San Francisco
where that city's Pinkerton's office was located.
In June 1921 Hammett worked in the flood building as a Pinkerton.
The -- among other matters,
the document describes the agency's interest
in apprehending jewel thieves who were subjects
of at least two cases Hammett was involved in in San Francisco,
and of course, the theft of a jeweled falcon is the plot of his --
the plot situation of his most famous novel.
In the rare books and special collections department here there
are other Hammett treasures.   75 years ago -- excuse me.
There are other Hammett treasures.
75 years ago The Maltese Falcon was published by Alfred A. Knopf.
The novel had first appeared in five monthly installments
in Black Mask magazine between September 1929 and January 1930.
Black Mask, a popular cult magazine that promised western, detective
and adventure stories, was sold for 20 cents,
was printed on highly acidic paper that oxidizes over time.
Today it is difficult to find any copy of Black Mask, and when you do,
the pages are brittle and most often tend to chip off in your hand,
if you're allowed to turn the pages at all.
Only two complete runs of Black Mask from its first issue in 1920
to its last in 1956 are known to exist.
One in private hands is rumored to be for sale now.
Word is that it can be had for somewhere in six figures.
The other is in this great library.
Only seven other libraries report even partial holdings to OCLC,
and those holdings, with the exception of UCLA, are scant.
The five issues of Black Mask
that include the serialized Maltese Falcon are on sale
by a rare book dealer now for $12,500.
He'll be in San Francisco at the book fair this weekend
if you wish to take him up on it.   [ laughter ]
Those issues of Black Mask are not simply collector's items.
Hammett submitted The Maltese Falcon to Alfred A. Knopf,
who had published his first two books, both in 1929,
with the admonition to go easy on the copy editing.
He knew what he was doing, he said.
Hammett wanted to get his third book right.
It was a departure work for him, his attempt to break away
from the formulas of pulp fiction and to create a work
with serious literary value.
There are over 2,000 variants between the Black Mask text
of The Maltese Falcon and the Knopf text.
And those are the only two authorial texts.
The majority of the variants can be attributed to copy editing,
despite Hammett's plea, but there are also many substantive changes
that sharpen the prose and show Hammett in the process
of editing himself and making himself the kind of writer
that he wanted to turn into.
You can do that comparison between the Black Mask text
and The Maltese Falcon text in this building.
Moreover, The Maltese Falcon is best understood in context;
a serious scholar needs to know not only how Hammett edited his book
for publication but what the competition was.
What else was published in those issues of Black Mask
that serialized the novel,
and how editor Joseph Shaw presented the serialization?
The answer to the first question is that Horace McCoy,
who wrote They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, Erle Stanley Gardner
and Raul Whitfield, none of whom had yet attempted his first novel,
appeared in those issues along with a handful
of writers whose reputations did not outlast them.
And in each issue, there's at least one
and usually three complete novelettes offered,
indicating the new editor Joseph Shaw's emphasis on longer works.
The answer to the second question is equally interesting to me.
That is, that Hammett got the entire front cover
of the September 1929 Black Mask,
indicating how important Shaw thought it was.
And in his teaser note for the conclusion,
Shaw wrote that he had read the novel installment
by installment just as other readers had
and that "in all my experience I have never read a story as intense,
as gripping, as powerful as this last installment.
It is a magnificent piece of writing."
The Black Mask is as valuable to scholars as it is to collectors.
And of course, the rare first edition
of the novel and dust jacket is here.
It looks just like that, by the way, if you don't open it up.
Alfred A. Knopf initially sold the book for $2.
Over the next year the price was raised to $2.50, then lowered again.
In 1930 and 1931, Knopf sold 10,086 copies, which was a respectable sale
at the beginning of the Great Depression
but a disappointment to Mr. Knopf.
By contrast, Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, which was published
by Scribners in September 1929, had sold over 79,000 copies
by the time The Maltese Falcon appeared.
Mr. Knopf said that the poor sales were due to the title.
He said people didn't know how to pronounce the word falcon
and would be embarrassed to go to a clerk and ask for it.
He might be gratified to know that a copy
in fine first printing dust jacket is worth something
in the neighborhood of $65,000 today,
and a dealer in California has offered one for twice that amount.
I was told a couple of weeks ago that he sold it.
A fine copy and dust jacket of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying,
by comparison, also published in 1930 and in probably
about the same number of copies, can be had for $15,000.
A first issue of A Farewell to Arms, all 79,000 of them,
can cost a little less, maybe $12,000, perhaps $15,000.
Book collectors and rare book dealers are a rare breed.
They operate under rules that don't always have much to do
with the literary content of a book.
They do, however, tend to reflect the cultural impact
of a publication.
A major reason for the high prices of The Maltese Falcon,
which brings far higher prices than any of Hammett's other novels,
is that his third novel has burrowed its way into our cultural awareness.
Stop someone on the street and ask if he or she is familiar
with The Maltese Falcon, and more often
than not you'll trigger a spark of recognition.
You're going to find yourself talking
about Humphrey Bogart before the conversation proceeds very far.
But the point is that The Maltese Falcon is clearly an element
in our cultural vocabulary, even if its definition is vague.
In his new Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, E.D. Hirsch attempts
to provide a guide to what he regards
as common knowledge among educated people.
In the section on literature, this is all literature
in English, he includes 102 writers.   Hammett is among -- and four
of those writers are detective fiction writers.
Hammett is among them.
The other three detective fiction writers are, you can probably guess,
Authur Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler and Edgar Allan Poe.
Professor Hirsch identifies Hammett then as the author
of finely crafted detective fiction who wrote The Maltese Falcon,
which was made into a movie starring Humphrey Bogart.
That's what you're supposed to remember.
In fact, the movie was the basis for two novels
in the 1930s before the classic in 1941.
The first Maltese Falcon was well received upon its release in 1931,
directed by Roy Del Ruth
and starring Ricardo Cortez and BeBe Daniels.
The movie was judged by The New York Times reviewer
to be a faithful rendition of the original.
He was right.   Ricardo Cortez is no Sam Spade,
but BeBe Daniels is a very convincing Brigid.
I thought I fell in love one time seeing that movie.
The movie is an interesting example of pre code Hollywood --
a pre code Hollywood production.
It shows a far sexier relationship between Brigid and Spade
and between Spade and Iva Archer
than the censors would allow in the later versions.
Five years later Hal Wallace, who was the executive producer
at Warner Brothers, wrote a memo to his new production chief,
Harry Joe Brown, suggesting that he read Hammett's novel
because Wallace thought they could make another screenplay out of it.
By then Hammett had become a celebrity in Hollywood,
largely due to the success of his novel, The Thin Man,
which was published in 1934, and the very successful movie adaptation
that was released that same year starring William Powell
and Myrna Loy.
MGM also hired Hammett to a screenwriting contract
to write original stories for other Thin Mans, and the second
of the Thin Man movies was released in 1936 and proved
to be successful as well.
So what Wallace wanted was to get Warner's piece of the Hammett action
with a new Maltese Falcon movie.
The result was a thoroughly silly movie released in 1936
that starred Bette Davis and Warren William called Satan Met a Lady.
They attempted to turn The Maltese Falcon into a light comedy
after the manner of The Thin Man.
The New York Times called it a farrago of nonsense,
and again, they were right.
Then in 1941 came John Huston, who had the dialogue
from Hammett's novel typed and called it his first screenplay.
George Raft was the studio's first choice for Sam Spade.
Olivia de Havilland, followed by Loretta Young, Rita Hayworth
and Geraldine Fitzgerald were the top candidates for Brigid.
Mary Astor won the part maybe
because her off stage behavior seemed in keeping
with Brigid's promiscuous character.
She had just emerged from a very seamy divorce case
in which a particularly licentious diary was made public.
The movie was nominated when it was --
after it was released for three Academy Awards.
It was nominated for best picture, along with Citizen Kane
and Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes, interestingly,
all of which lost out to How Green Was My Valley.
Sydney Greenstreet, who played Gutman,
was nominated for best supporting actor.
He and Walter Brennan in Sergeant York lost out to Donald Crisp again
in How Green Was My Valley.
And John Huston was nominated for best screenplay.
He and Lillian Hellman lost to Sidney Buckman
for Here Comes Mr. Jordan.
Nonetheless, the success of the 1941 movie propelled The Maltese Falcon
into the heart of American culture.
During the '40s, the reprint company, Grossett and Dunlap,
this is one of them, sold about 25,000 copies of the book.
The modern library sold 27,000 copies during the decade.
A group called Readers League
of America during World War I gave away 41,000 copies free
through the American Red Cross.
In 1944, Pocketbooks published the novel, which sold 650,000 copies
in the first three years of publication.
And in 1946, King Features Syndicate published a comic book version
of The Maltese Falcon that sold 300,000 copies.
From 1946 to '51, first CBS then NBC broadcast a very popular weekly
radio serial called "The Adventures of Sam Spade"
with Howard Duff as Spade's voice.
The show was sponsored by Wild Root Cream Oil Hair Tonic,
and they ran a widely distributed series of newspaper comic strips
in which Sam -- the Sam Spade character in the space
of eight frames solved a weekly mystery,
each of which involved stolen hair cream.
[ laughter ]   In 1951 a full
[ unintelligible ]
looking Humphrey Bogart look-alike posed
as Spade for a Gordon's Gin ad.
The early rock and roll band, The Coasters, sang about Spade
in their hit song "Searchin" in 1957
about the determined hunt for a lover.
In 1969 Rowen and Martin who developed "Laugh-In",
the popular television series, made a movie called The Maltese Bippy
that has absolutely nothing to do
with The Maltese Falcon, aside from its title.
And in 1975 George Segal, with Lillian Hellman's blessing,
made a movie called Sam Spade Jr., a forgettable comedy
in which Segal portrayed Sam Spade's son,
playing off Huston's masterpiece.
There's a piece of anti spam software, a designer handbag,
a computer game, a professional wrestler all named Sam Spade.
In Hamilton, Montana, you'll find a landscaper named Sam's Spade.
[ laughter ]
Hammett, his most famous work and his characters have taken
on a meaning all of their own in America,
among people who don't even know there is a book called The Maltese
Falcon, and still there is the book.
As Sam Spade says to Gutman, "Let's talk about the black bird."
But first, may I have a glass of -- a sip of water.
The Maltese Falcon is the most successful early hard-boiled
detective novel, that violent subgenera characterized
by a down-and-out detective who is nihilistic,
hard drinking and a loner.
The typical hard-boiled hero struggles to maintain his integrity
within a corrupt society.
And because it's the right thing to do, he comes to the aid
of helpless crime victims.
He is a combination of toughness, he is usually enduring a beating
or two during the course of the hard-boiled novel,
skillful violence and street smarts.
He's a victim of circumstance, too uncompromising to be successful.
His environment is the rough streets of America,
where he makes his way among desperate ruthless greedy crooks
because he is tougher than they are.
The hard-boiled protagonist is typically what is called a code
hero; that is, in absence of reliable, moral guidance
from traditional social institutions, he follows rules
of his own making that are most often result oriented.
Traditional hard-boiled detective fiction,
particularly of Hammett's era,
is politically ultraconservative, even primitive.
The end justifies the means.
Due process means that crooks get what's coming to them without regard
for law enforcement or the niceties of judicial proceedings.
Every man for himself is the rule.
The Maltese Falcon is undeniably a hard-boiled novel
and arguably the most distinguished example, yet it hardly adheres
to the hard-boiled formula.   Sam Spade is far from down and out.
He maintains an office in the high rent district.
And he is known, and grudgingly, for his success.
He dresses well and he lives well.
It is safe to assume that Spade knows the seedy parts
of San Francisco, but for the most part he stays
out of them in The Maltese Falcon.
He drinks in the best bars, eats in Tony
[ spelled phonetically ]
restaurants and meets his clients and antagonists
in the most expensive hotels and apartments.
Nihilism isn't his cup of tea.
He is a pragmatist in the classical sense, a man sophisticated
to understand and philosophize about the nature of his job.
He sees his job as a search for truth, and once the truth
of a matter is established, he knows
to apply a very simple set of principles.
Spade does not isolate himself socially nor does he flout the law,
except when he has to.
On the contrary, his code has at its root an obligation
to the basic laws of society.
A primary theme of the novel is that the privilege of living
in a place carries with it an obligation,
a tribute of the sort paid with the original Maltese Falcon
by the Hospitallers of Saint John or sin gin
[ spelled phonetically ]
, to Charles V of Spain in the 16th century.
Charles V allowed the Hospitallers the use of the islands off the coast
of Italy for their good works and he asked rent of one falcon annually.
Spade pays rent as well to the powers
of San Francisco four centuries later by handing over a gang
of crooks to the authorities.
And while Spade is playing tough in a fight, he would rather avoid one,
recognizing that it is more effective
to out-think the bad guys than to out-shoot them.
There are four murders in The Maltese Falcon.
As I said, I might mention that that's down from 35
in the original version of Red Harvest.
But they are all committed off stage.
The only violent scenes in the novel are when Cairo --
Spade disarms Cairo in his office,
and that ends with the tough guy having a gun turned on him
by an affected homosexual, when Spade disarms Wilmer,
a scene that is more comic than violent, when Wilmer kicks Spade
in the head after Spade is drugged, and when Captain Jacobi,
shot off stage, dies in Spade's office.
The other scenes involving the threat
of violence are anything but graphic.
So what makes The Maltese Falcon hard-boiled?
Well, the tough-minded character of Sam Spade is one answer.
A nonjudgmental narrative voice is another.
A sprinkling of realistically portrayed street tough characters is
yet another.
And there is the femme fatale who skillfully uses dangerous weapons,
the most dangerous weapon her sex appeal.
The Maltese Falcon is a novel that adopted modern values,
social realism described with painstaking accuracy,
a pragmatic attitude toward life and a depiction of morality
without reference to social institutions.
The Maltese Falcon was a marked departure
from the pulp fiction in the Black Mask.
It had a far closer relationship with the works of Frank Norris,
Theodore Dreiser, Jack London and Hemingway.
For Hammett, The Maltese Falcon was a brand new way
of presenting characters, plot situations and the themes
that he had been experimenting
with since he had begun writing seven years earlier.
The Maltese Falcon was Hammett's attempt to break out of the mold
of hard-boiled pulp fiction that he had attempted to form
and that he has used and sometimes misused amply during his
apprenticeship as a short story writer.
Black Mask magazine, from the beginning --
I'm sorry, Hammett had a condescending attitude toward the
pulps and toward the Black Mask stories from the beginning of his --
the time he began publishing there.
In August 1924, less than two years after his first published story,
he had two stories that were rejected by Black Mask.
Hammett wrote a disingenuous letter to Black Mask editor then,
Phil Cody, whom Hammett despised.
He -- Hammett wrote, "If I stick to the stuff that I want to write" --
there should be violin music in the background here --
"the stuff I enjoy writing I can make a go of it, but when I try
to grind out a yarn because I think there's a market for it, I flop.
Whenever from now on I get hold of a story that fits my sleuth,
I shall put him to work, but I'm through trying
to run him on a schedule."
He was kidding himself or Cody at least, of course.
In the six months before that letter,
Hammett had published six stories in Black Mask.
And in the six months after -- in the six months afterwards,
he published seven stories in the pulps, including Black Mask
and four other of the pulps.
And while he wrote some of his very best stories for Black Mask,
he also -- during the next two years he also wrote some of his worst.
His contempt for Cody increased and he finally broke with the magazine
in a dispute about payment.
He referred to his early Black Mask stories in a letter to his --
home to his wife as junk.
So how did Hammett come to conclusion
that he could turn the material he referred to as junk into literature?
The answer to this question involves speculation
that should make any respectable biographer uneasy.
We know these facts: Hammett was a high school dropout
who took a few months of what were apparently business English courses
in the early 1920s at a private school in San Francisco with help
from the U.S. Public Health Service Benefit people.
We know that Hammett was poor, nearly destitute in the 1920s.
His wife, trained as a nurse,
couldn't work after their first child was born,
which occurred seven months after their marriage.
Hammett was all but bedfast much of the time and his primary source
of income was disability payments, $45 a month, which fluctuated
as his condition was reevaluated.
He saw one means of supplementary income and that was writing.
He had pretensions for a publication in the slicks,
but his early efforts were judged slight by East Coast editors
and he was referred to the pulps.
At the beginning in the pulps he could make about $25 a month,
or per story that is to say, because he was writing about close
to one a month writing in Black Mask.
And in 1923 that was about enough
to pay the family grocery bills for one month.
Within -- for a few years he got by but then
in late 1925 his wife became pregnant again
with their second daughter.
Within months Hammett was demanding more money for his stories
and he brought his festering argument with Cody to a head.
He lost the argument and quit angrily.
He attempted to enter the business world and to earn a salary,
but that ended after six months when he collapsed
in a pool of blood at work.
His family couldn't live with him by that time because he was judged
to be tubercular and contagious.
He couldn't be around his young daughters so he had
to rent a separate apartment for his wife and children
and to feed another mouth.
It was a desperate situation for him.
He fell back on the best source of income he knew,
and with renewed motivation.
But the story is a little bit more complicated than that.
The stories are always more complicated than that.
Late in 1926 a new editor, Joseph Shaw, came to Black Mask,
having never read an issue.
He had new ideas, which included promoting star authors
and publishing longer works.
When he reviewed the work of writers from past issues
of Black Mask he decided that Hammett was one of the handful
of authors he would bet on, one of his stars.
And Hammett needed Shaw as much as Shaw needed him.
So when the invitation came for Hammett to come back
into the Black Mask fold, Hammett jumped at the opportunity,
and was paid an increased rate for his work.
He began writing stories that were twice the length
of his previous works and he began writing stories
that had structural links between them.
Shaw announced in January 1927
that after nearly a year's absence Hammett was returning
to Black Mask the next month.
The new story was The Big Knockover, followed three months later
by the sequel, $106,000 Blood Money, as close to a novel as either
of his first two, arguably.
Hammett was not only back, his enthusiasm for his work was back.
In February 1928, the month the last of his --
the last of his four-part serialized novel Poisonville was published
in Black Mask, Hammett submitted the novel to Knopf,
no doubt with Shaw's encouragement.
It was eagerly accepted for publication.
That was Red Harvest.
It was published the next year and it was published
under a three book contract.   Hammett was lucky.
Knopf had published the odd mystery since the 1920s
and had recently decided to devote more attention to the genera.
Knopf was one of the most respected of the literary publishers.
To be published by them was indeed an honor.
In Hammett, Blanche Knopf, Alfred's wife, who edited the
[ unintelligible ]
mysteries, thought that she had found an author of mystery fiction
that the firm could publish with pride.
He was their first hard-boiled author.
Red Harvest sold well and Hammett, for his part,
reacted characteristically.   He slacked off a bit.
He took advantage.
His second novel, The Dain Curse, is also his weakest novel.
It was a hastily pieced together --
pasted together piece of work of four episodes that best qualifies
as a novel by being published in book form under a single title.
He later himself called it a silly story.
When Red Harvest was accepted by Knopf,
Hammett had set himself the goal of writing,
are you ready, 5,000 words a day.
And he was still writing with the pulp story writer's mindset
at that point.
His first two novels, both serialized in four parts,
were action filled stories stitched together.
Then Hammett determined to devote himself more fully
to a profession as a novelist.
He was again emboldened by the encouragement from Shaw,
who was remarkable chiefly for his coach-like ability
to inspire writers to their best, and he was certainly driven
by the necessity to provide for his family.
Some force encouraged Hammett to become more ambitious.
Maybe it was that his health was improving late in '27,
maybe it was Shaw's support, maybe it was the influence of one
of his several lovers, at least one of whom was also a writer.
Certainly wide reading and his interest
in literary criticism had a cumulative effect.
In the mid 1920s he wrote an unpublished review
of Upton Sinclair's Maminard   [ spelled phonetically ]
, with a reference to Keats' "Ode on Melancholy."
He wrote a review for the forum of Joseph Hergesheimer's Balisand,
and Hergesheimer was, of course, the darling boy of H.L. Mencken
at the time, the man that Mencken was sure would endure for the ages.
Then in 1927 Hammett became the very hard-to-please book reviewer mystery
fiction for the Saturday Review of Literature.
You might have called it the Yale review of literature
since it was edited by a Yale professor and many
of the reviews were written by Yale facility.
And here's Hammett, sophomore dropout,
sophomore high school dropout, as the book reviewer.
But he held his own.
It was clear by the tenor of his comments
that he felt that he could do better.
Of S.S. Van Dine's Philo Vance, Hammett wrote,
"His conversational manner is that of a high school girl --
is that of a high school girl who has been studying the foreign words
and phrases in the back of a dictionary."
He says of a collection of J.S. Fletcher stories,
"There's no special reason for anyone's reading any of these."
[ laughter ]
He ended a one review, one review column
of now forgotten novels saying, "There isn't a credible character
in any of these three books."
Of Carolyn Wells, the grand lady of, of the genera, he wrote,
"The author of All at Sea has written something
in the neighborhood of a couple of dozen detective stories,
all conscientiously in accordance with the formula adopted
by the International Detective Story Writer's Convention
at Geneva in 1904."   [ laughter ]
"One should expect that by now she would have learned
to do the trick expertly.   She hasn't."
The hard evidence that survives
of Hammett's ambition is this letter to Blanche Knopf.
It was written a month after the last installment
of Red Harvest appeared in Black Mask.
The date is 20 March 1928.
"I have another book-like detective story tentatively entitled The Dain
Curse underway using the same detective I used in this book,"
that is the Continental Op, "but not using him so violently.
I hope to finish that next month."
The first serial rights had been sold to Black Mask.
"Then I want to try adapting the stream
of consciousness method conveniently modified to a detective story,
carrying the reader along with the detective showing him everything
as it is found, giving him the detective's conclusions
as they are reached, letting the solution break
on both of them together.
I don't know if I made that very clear
but it's something altogether different from the method employed
in Poisonville, for instance,
where the reader goes along with the detective.
He seldom sees deeper into the detective's mind
than dialogue and action let him.
If I can manage it, I'm going to do this one without any regard
for the magazines, thou shalts and thou shalt nots.
I hope to get it done by late summer.
I'm one of the few, if there are any more, moderately literate people
who take the detective stories seriously.
I don't mean that I necessarily take my own or anyone else's seriously,
but the detective story is a form.
Some day somebody is going to make literature out of it.
Ford's Good Soldier wouldn't have needed much altering
to have been a detective story, and I'm selfish enough to have my hopes,
however slight the evident justification may be."
Though The Maltese Falcon is a long way from a stream
of consciousness novel, it is clearly the work
that Hammett was referring to in this letter.
The novel was completed in 1928, a little behind schedule
that was Hammett's habit.
And it employed what was for him a radical new, narrative form,
the restricted third person.
Hammett's first two novels and most of his short stories are
in first person narration from the point of view of a series detective.
This time he created a new detective with no apparent intention
of turning him into a series character,
and that's despite the fact that he later wrote a couple
of Sam Spade short stories for quick money.
By summer 1928, when he seems to have begun working
on The Maltese Falcon, Hammett had studied serious literature
and the qualities that separated it from ordinary writing.
He came to one conclusion, that it's hard to find a piece
of serious writing that uses a series character,
so he abandoned the Continental Op for his third novel.
With The Maltese Falcon he adapted a more sophisticated narrative voice
that suggests a most unlikely influence, Henry James,
the master of third person limited narration.
Hammett was certainly familiar with James.
He refers to The Turn of the Screw in his 1931 introduction
to the anthology Creeps By Night.
Biographer Diane Johnson reports that James Benet,
the son of poet William Rose Benet, who was also an editor
at the Saturday Review,
heard Hammett discuss James in impressive detail.
And William F. Nolan, yet another biographer, there are droves of us,
says that James Thurber claimed Hammett told him
that The Maltese Falcon was influenced
by James's The Wings of the Dove.   Now if you believe that --
[ laughter ]
-- you haven't read one of the two novels, I think.
There's no other evidence that Hammett read James's 1888 essay,
"The Art of Fiction," except that he seems
to have taken its lessons to heart.
Especially James's remarks about realism,
about character development, about the limitless subjects of fiction
and the dictum that a good writer has to be interesting.
We know that while he was contemplating The Maltese Falcon
Hammett was reading philosophy, an interest of his
for over a decade by that time.
He even tried his hand at his own philosophical essay,
which draws heavily on the 19th century American pragmatists.
He had clearly read Charles Sanders Peirce, whose name he appropriated
with only a minor change, Purse to Peirce, for the pseudonym
of Flitcraft in the famous fable that Spade tells Brigid
when he learns that she has taken on an assumed identity
for at least the second time.
Indeed, Peirce's philosophy is at the heart of The Maltese Falcon.
Peirce was a brilliant philosopher admired in his circle of friends
who included William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and John Dewey.
He was interested in problems of interpreting perception
and in systematic approaches to the phenomenon of random occurrence.
For Peirce, the universe operated according to sets of triads.
The most basic of the sets of triads involved these elements:
first there was potential, then there was action
and then there was a formulation of laws arrived
at by observing the action.   Actions are habitual.
That is, given the same set of actions and circumstances,
the results will almost always be exactly the same.
There will be random exceptions, but they're rare.
They're so rare that they can be disregarded.
The laws of science and nature and behavior are based
on observation over time of habits.   In the case of The Maltese Falcon,
Peirce's basic triad might be expressed in terms
of Brigid's first appearance, which provided --
presented a set of potentialities.   She could be good or bad.
She could be honest or duplicitous.
She could be a delightful lover or she could be a dangerous temptress.
The second element of the triad, action, revealed her habits, to lie,
to cheat, to steal and to act
without conscience, without variance.
Spade then moves to the third element of the triad,
the determination of laws based on -- that govern her behavior,
which are clearly enough discerned.   She's no good.
She's pretty, but she's no good.
But it wasn't just philosophy that interested Hammett.
He was a student of history as well.   Gutman's presentation of the history
of the falcon reveals an impressive bit of scholarship.
The references are careful and accurate and genuine.
He refers to obscure works of covering the history of the falcon.
In the 17th century, French historian Pierre Donn
[ spelled phonetically ]
. In 1781, a work by Italian historian Pallo Antonio Paoli.
In 1856, a work by another Italian, Dominique Cerutti.
A Spanish history by the Frenchman, Jay DeLaville LaRue
[ spelled phonetically ]
, and Lady Francis Verne's Memoirs of the Verne Family,
published in English in four volumes between 1892 and 1899.
It is not clear exactly how Hammett got his material.
He's not known to have read French, medieval or otherwise, or Italian.
His references must have been gleaned from a secondary source,
yet I have been unable to locate it; that is, a simple narrative
of the rental agreement between the Hospitallers and Charles V
that Hammett would have had available to him,
with all of the detail that Gutman provides.
I think there must be one, but what is clear nonetheless is
that Hammett was reading widely and carefully and thoughtfully.
All of those interests, influences and motivations coalesced late
in 1928 as Hammett started writing.
He went back to his earlier work and mined characters
and plot situations he liked.
From a 1924 story called "The Whosis Kid" --
I'm sorry, called "Who Killed Bob Teal," he took the plot situation
of a detective hired and then murdered by his client
to cover up another crime.   From a 1924 story called "The Girl
with the Silver Eyes" he took the plot situation of a detective
who falls in love with a beautiful killer and whom he must arrest.
From a 1925 story called "The Gutting of Couffignal,"
he took a passage tried first in "The Girl with the Silver Eyes"
and attempted again in which the detective tries
to explain his motivation to a dangerously attractive murderess.
From a story published in March 1925 called "The Whosis Kid,"
he took a young tough whose --
a young thug who was meaner than he looks.
From a 1926 story called "The Nails in Mr. Caterer"
[ spelled phonetically ]
, he took the stereotyped characterization of a homosexual.
From a 1927 story called "The Main Death" he took a bulbous affected
effeminate villain.
Hammett drew on real cases he had worked on as a Pinkerton in 1921.
He was assigned to the Sonoma Gold Specie case
in which thieves stole $125,000 in gold coins
and hid them aboard a ship, hoping to retrieve the booty
at the next port after San Francisco.
Hammett was one of the Pinkertons called in to investigate
and later claimed that it was he who had found the gold specie
in a ventilation pipe on -- aboard ship.
Almost certainly that was a fabrication.
The Sonoma, though, is the model for La Paloma,
the ship on which Captain Jacobi delivers the faux falcon
to San Francisco in the novel.
There are elements of other cases Hammett worked on.
The Gus Shaeffer   [ spelled phonetically ]
gem theft.   The Fatty Arbuckle rape case
that might have had some minor influence on the novel.
And that leaves Spade.   Where did he come from?
In the introduction to the Modern Library Maltese Falcon in 1934,
which was by the way the first mystery novel published
by that prestigious imprint, Hammett said, "Spade had no original.
He was a dream man in the sense
that he is what most private detectives I have worked
with would have liked to have been and what quite a few of them
in their cockier moments thought they approached."
I think Hammett was being sly.
If -- I hope you have the Xeroxes in front of you.
If you will look at your Xerox
as I read the first paragraph of The Maltese Falcon.
"Samuel Spade's jaw was long and boney, his chin a jutting V
under the more flexible V of his mouth.
His nostrils curved back to make another smaller V. His yellow,
gray eyes were horizontal.
The V motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward
from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew
down from high flat temples in a point on his forehead.
He looked rather pleasantly like a blond Satan."
Am I overreacting, making things up, or was Hammett looking into a mirror
when he wrote that paragraph?   [ laughter ]
The next question and the basic question
that one must always ask oneself when trying to explain a work
of literature is the most basic one, so what?
Well, so. I believe that The Maltese Falcon represents a coalesce
of themes and characters and structural methods
that Hammett had been mulling
over for several years before he wrote the novel.
I believe his attempt at literature was based on experience
and intellectual inquiry that is particularly impressive for a man
who had educated himself.
I believe that Hammett was consciously attempting
that most difficult of literary tasks, telling an interesting story
that illustrates enduring truths
about the complexity of the human situation.
I believe that we're talking about The Maltese Falcon today,
75 years after its first publication,
because it operates brilliantly on several levels.
There's an element of romance, even melodrama, in the relationship
of Spade and Brigid,
but the relationship demonstrates the tension between sentiment
on the one hand and rational observation on the other.
A very Persian dilemma.
The story of the falcon alludes to a common device in Gothic fiction,
the mysterious lost relic reclaimed.
Hammett may very well have been paying homage to Wilkie Collins,
whose Moonstone he had doubtless read,
and to the fantasy novelist W.P. Shield, whom he alludes to the
in "The Gutting of Couffignal."
But in this novel Hammett gives the falcon a resonating significance.
It represents the false hope of unearned wealth,
a concept that had particular significance in the year
of the stock market crash.   And the faux falcon that Spade turns
over to the police suggests the futility of that hope.
The type of rent required
in Sam Spade's day was not a symbol of fealty to authority.
It was meaningful action to thwart those who prey on others,
those malicious few whose only interest is self-interest.
The shelf life of a trade novel that does not sell
to students is a few months, typically,
unless it's by John Grisham and happens to be on the bestseller list
for a couple of years or more.
But even so, it's -- those novels won't endure unless they're taught.
To endure, that taught novel has
to be either representative or innovative.
The Maltese Falcon is both.
Hammett created a story and a set of characters that serve as archetypes.
And in the words of Raymond Chandler, "He did over
and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all.
He wrote scenes that seem never to have been written before."
As Kasper Gutman says to Joel Cairo as he was
about the make him the fall guy, "I couldn't be fonder of you
if you were my own son, but well,
if you lose a son it's possible to get another."
There's only one Maltese Falcon.   [ laughter ]
I have often asked about Hammett's reception to the novel.
In response to a fan letter from a book reviewer, Herbert Asbury,
who later wrote The Gangs of New York, Hammett wrote,
"I can't tell you how pleased I am
with your verdict on The Maltese Falcon.
It's the first thing I have ever done that was,
regardless of what faults it had, the best work I was capable
of at the time I was doing it."
He goes on to say that The Glass Key, his fourth novel,
is being held back by laziness, drunkenness and illness,
yet promises to get finished somehow by the end of next week.
That second sentence, I think, is the clue to one
of the most significant effects
of The Maltese Falcon on Hammett personally.
The novel set for him a standard that was harder to meet
than any he had worked under before
and it brought success he had not previously enjoyed,
allowing him the money, the celebrity and the freedom to succumb
to most temptations that came his way.
Many temptations came his way.   He missed damn few of them.
[ laughter ]
The Maltese Falcon changed Hammett's life.
On Valentine's Day 1930, when the book was published,
Hammett was living in New York with a writer, actress Nell Martin.
The novel, by the way, was published to Hammett's wife Josie.
He was at the top of the literary world there.
He was proclaimed better than Hemingway
by mainstream book reviewers.
He was featured as a literary celebrity
in Town and Country magazine.
Dorothy Parker exclaimed breathlessly in The New Yorker,
"I went mooning about in a daze of love for Sam Spade,
such as I had not known for any character in literature
since I encountered Sir Lancelot."   [ laughter ]
He was a favorite subject of gossip columnists on both coasts.
Movie contracts came his way.
Within a year, this is 1931-32, he was making $100,000 a year.
This is in one of the worst years of the Great Depression,
when the average American family made $800 a year.
He drank heavily.
He maintained house accounts at brothels.
He lived in hotel suites in California.
He was driven about by a chauffeur.
And within six years he suffered a total physical and mental collapse.
By the time The Maltese Falcon was published,
Hammett had mostly finished his fourth novel, The Glass Key.
He wrote another one, The Thin Man, his shortest novel
by far, and padded at that.
And then he essentially quit publishing.
He worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter before his breakdown,
and for the rest of his life he took an active interest
in the composition and production of plays by his friend
and lover, Lillian Hellman.
But the man who was among the most acclaimed writers
of his day couldn't bring himself to fulfill his contract
with Knopf for that sixth novel.
Jo Hammett insists that her father didn't quit writing,
he just quit publishing, she says.
He began at least six novels in the 25 years
after The Thin Man but none got very far.
His last aborted attempt was published after his death
by Lillian Hellman in the collection The Big Knockover.
It exists only in a fair copy typescript and I suspect
that it was heavily edited by Hellman.
It ends a little too dramatically, I think, with the sentence,
"When you're tired you ought to rest, I think,
and not try to fool your customers with colored bubbles."
There are no colored bubbles in The Maltese Falcon; it's the real thing.
Thank you.   [ applause ]
John Cole: First, let me thank Richard really for a wonderful,
wonderful presentation and sharing his knowledge of Hammett
and the whole genre with us.
It was really a wonderful performance, Richard.
Rick Layman: Thank you.   John Cole: Thank you.
[ applause ]
We have time for just a couple of questions and then we're going
to move to the next phase of our celebration.
Yes, sir. Male Speaker: I have heard that there are early Hammett stories
in obscure pulps which are lost
because the pulps were just too obscure
and nobody has copies; is that true?
Rick Layman: Not many people have copies.
I think I have a copy of all the stories.