Sam Spade -- Is His Code Our Code?

“For your private detective… wants to be a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent by-stander, or client.” — Dashiell Hammett, 1934

By 1935, after a hardscrabble apprenticeship, Dashiell Hammett was a major celebrity. The Maltese Falcon, and especially The Thin Man and the movie made from that not very good novel, placed him squarely in the literary-movie celebrity circles on both coasts. In that year, Gertrude Stein the literary lioness from Paris came to see what American culture was all about. While in Los Angeles, she asked her hostess if she could arrange a meeting with Dashiell Hammett. In conversation, she told Hammett that in the twentieth century, “The men all write about themselves . . . as women used to do in the nineteenth century.”

Stein reported later that Hammett agreed with this. “He said twentieth-century men lacked the self-confidence of men in the nineteenth century, and therefore had to exaggerate their own qualities.”

The character Sam Spade, and too many living and breathing men on into the twenty-first century have continued to do so. Unfortunately it’s not the best within themselves they exaggerate.

With this in mind, I answer those who, with varied attitudes — sneeringly, quizzically, enthusiastically — ask me: “OK Daily, you’ve pushed The Maltese Falcon at me for weeks. Now it’s time for you to come clean. Sam Spade – up or down, your kind of guy or not.”

My unvarnished view is that Hammett’s famous character not only personally rubs me the wrong way, I’d judge him a symptom of a problem in our society. And it’s all about what is being exaggerated in this famous hard-boiled, detective novel.

I feel the Sam Spade type too often serves as a model in our society. And that model is a flawed, distorted symbol of competence and manliness. Sam Spade serves as a reinforcing template for a sterile, narrowly professional, self as center, go it alone, hero. He lives by a code that is tough, personal, and cynical. And what are the qualities falling outside of this code?

Many readers are drawn to Sam Spade because he navigates the treacherous waters of a dangerous world with cool understanding and professional expertise. In the novel, this world stretches from Malta in the Mediterranean during the era of the Crusades to the contemporary alleyways of San Francisco. Across space and through time, all is a fog of danger and deviousness.

Spade strides through this fog, wise-cracking and self-assured. He always gives back more in pain and cunning than he receives. In the pursuit of the dingus, the black bird, the falcon, Sam and The Maltese Falcon’s cast of characters are driven by bloodless individualism.

Business partners die, marriages are betrayed and love is non-existent or fatally suspect. (Every love story in the novel, I count five, fails.) Lies constitute the language spoken, and the institutions created by society to keep this jungle life in check, the law and the police, are corrupt, timid, scoffed at.

As a writer of the famous Lost Generation, Hammett brings to mind Hemingway. The Maltese Falcon takes place at the end of the hollow excesses of the Roaring Twenties and on the eve of the Great Depression.

Readers of the day, especially men, were drawn to Spade and the manly, gun-slinging heroes of western and crime pulp fiction. Hammett manages to rise above the grossest of these macho heroes with Sam Spade, but the sensibility of his famous character remains the same. Spade is a loner. Spade is coolly professional. Spade trusts no one. Spade triumphs against all odds.

In the end, the novel seems to boil down to a bad joke pursuing a false reality guided by a blind code: A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. We are all surrounded by evil and threats. Stand by your rough man, Effie. Falcons are fake and so are dreams.

Because to some degree reading great literature for me is reading great literature into one’s life and being, I reject Sam Spade, Hammett’s greatest creation. I can’t accept his aloneness. I can’t abide a society and individuals that inordinately value professional coolness.

And I need to trust other human beings and dreams.

If all this sounds naive, other worldly, sentimental, mawkish, then I would argue this reaction supports my case. Without going all Dr. Phil on this, Hammett’s Spade as a model to admire and copy serves and contributes, especially among the males of the species, to the crushing out of the social and the sharing needs of human beings. An exaggeration of male qualities I can read about, but attributes unworthy of idealization or emulation.

For some lovers of Hammett and his work, I’ve just kicked Sam in the head like some punk gunsel. Maybe. But I would never confuse this author’s characters with the creator. After all, Hammett wrote and lived this credo throughout the last decades of his life:

“We will work for united actions by all peoples, all religious groups and all nationalities, to defend democracy and combat anti-Semitism and Fascism.”

[Terre Haute Tribune Star, March 15, 2008 --Go Here]