The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Dashiell Hammett · a novel in twenty chapters · Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1930 · scored on the book text of 1930, which Hammett revised from the Black Mask serial; read from knowledge, no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Detective novel as moral argument: a quest for a treasure that proves counterfeit, ended not by a deduction but by a decision
Mythos
The grail chased by the faithful of greed and found to be lead; the knight with a code and no faith; the lady surrendered to the law instead of rescued; the deceiving woman of three names
Phase
A few days in San Francisco in December, from the night of a partner’s death to the morning after the bird is opened, with the bird’s passage across four centuries told in one speech
Presentation
Fiction; twenty titled chapters in the third person, wholly external: Spade is never given a thought or a feeling, and dialogue carries most of the book
Register
A prose of surfaces, exact and cold, in which faces, hands, clothes and cigarettes are inventoried and every voice is its own, from Gutman’s delighted periods to Spade’s mockery
Scale
One detective agency, a handful of crooks, the police and a district attorney, in the hotels, offices and apartments of one city, in the length of a short novel
Governing Proposition
Sam Spade’s partner Miles Archer is killed in the second chapter, and Spade is drawn into the hunt for a jewelled bird that a fat man named Gutman has chased across continents for seventeen years, with Cairo, Wilmer and a woman of three names in the hunt beside him. The narration never once enters Spade, so that through chapter after chapter no one, the reader included, can tell whether he is honest, whether he wants the bird or whether he loves the woman. The wager of the novel is that a man known only by what he does can carry a moral argument: in a world run on greed, where everyone lies and the treasure itself turns out to be lead, the one thing left to stand on is a professional code that cannot say why it is good, held against the man’s own desire.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony”. The book opens on a face, and builds it as a draughtsman would, from a series of v’s, to “a blond satan”. The paragraph sets the method for the whole: Spade will be known by his face, his hands, his voice and his acts, and the narration, in the third person throughout, will never once report what he thinks or feels.
Spade and Miles Archer are partners in a detective agency in San Francisco, and the book’s action runs over a few days in December. In the second chapter Archer is dead. Spade did not like him, and he has been sleeping with Archer’s wife, Iva. The death is the fact on which the whole book turns, and the last chapter is its answer.
Between the two, the talk carries the book. Scene after scene is a negotiation in a hotel room, an office or an apartment, and lying is its medium. Because the reader is never inside Spade, it cannot be known whether he is honest, whether he wants what the others want, or whether he will sell any of them. The reader is placed where everyone else in the book is placed, reading a face.
Movement II
In the seventh chapter Spade tells Brigid a story that advances nothing. A man named Flitcraft walks out of his life after a beam falls near him. Years later, living elsewhere, he has rebuilt the same life he left: “he adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling”.
Brigid does not understand it. The story is the book’s law set down in miniature: men take the shock of a random universe, change their lives to fit it, and then adjust again when the randomness stops. It has a dry, metaphysical chill, and it stands against the comedy of the chase on either side of it.
It is also a warrant. At the end Spade will refuse to be a man who changes his life because a beam fell. Take the story away and the last chapter loses its ground; leave it, and the decision there is seen to have been prepared seven chapters into a book of twenty. What it meant to the man who told it, and to the woman who did not follow, is among the questions the book leaves open.
Movement III
The hunters for the bird are grotesques of a comic order. Cairo carries a gun and a perfumed handkerchief and speaks with a precise and fussy care; Wilmer deals in threats; Gutman speaks in ornate, delighted periods. Spade meets them with mockery: “The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter”. Each voice is its own, and scenes with five people in a room stay clear without a word of interior.
In the eleventh chapter Gutman tells the history of the bird. It was a jewelled tribute from the Knights of Malta to Charles V. It was lost, enamelled black, and passed from Malta through Sicily, Paris and Constantinople to a Russian general’s house, with men of Gutman’s faith in money following it across the centuries. He has chased it himself for seventeen years.
The speech is exposition, sized for the reader as much as for the drama, and it is also the making of a grail. The quest that the book is built on is set out in full by its most devoted pilgrim, and the bird is given its whole weight of blood and time so that its end can mean what it means.
Movement IV
Through the night of the eighteenth and nineteenth chapters the parties sit in Spade’s flat and bargain. Someone must be handed to the police as the fall guy for the deaths, and the bargaining over Wilmer runs on as the sun comes up. Spade’s terms are set, and they will not change when the bargaining is over Brigid.
When the bird comes, it is scraped open with a penknife, and it is lead. The treasure of seventeen years is a counterfeit, and the fat man takes the loss with a composure that turns the moment into grand comic deflation. The faithful of greed have chased a hollow thing across continents; the quest that structures the book ends in nothing.
The hollowness is what the book means. In a world where every person lies, the object everyone has lied for is itself a lie. What is left, when the bird is lead, is the question the narration has kept open from the first chapter: what Spade will do, and on what ground he will do it.
Movement V
The last chapter is the book’s height. With the police on their way, his face gone pale, Spade sets out to Brigid his reasons for giving her up: “I won’t play the sap for you”. The first is “When a man’s partner is killed he’s supposed to do something about it”, although he did not like the man and slept with his wife. The others follow, a list rather than a creed.
The decision lands with a force it could not have if his thoughts had been given. No deduction closes the case: a choice does. Spade holds a code he cannot say is good against what he wants, and he will not be the man who changes his life because a beam fell. Whether he loves her, and whether he meant to give her up from the start or decided late, the book does not say.
It ends with a cost. Effie, whose loyalty has run through the book, recoils from him. Iva is at the door, and the book ends on “Well, send her in”, a flat sentence that closes the book like a door. Whether he is the code’s hero or its victim is left to the reader, who has known him only by what he did.
Act III · The Twelve
The plot is a machine with no idle wheel, and the subtractive test finds little to take. Archer’s death in the second chapter is the fact the last chapter answers, and every scene between moves the bird, the money or the frame. The one part that looks removable is the Flitcraft story Spade tells Brigid in the seventh chapter: a man walks out of his life when a beam falls near him and, years later, has rebuilt the same life elsewhere. It advances nothing, but it is the key to the book’s law and to the end, where Spade will not be a man who changes his life because a beam fell; without it the ending loses its warrant. Charged: Gutman’s history of the bird is exposition sized for the reader as much as for the drama, the inventory of clothes and furniture is partly habit, and a few middle chapters, the shuffling of Cairo and the police, would compress with little lost.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: in a world run on greed, where every person lies and the treasure itself is a counterfeit, the only morality left to a man is a professional code he holds without being able to say it is good, and he holds it against his own desire. The last chapter makes the case. Spade gives Brigid to the police, “I won’t play the sap for you”, and lists his reasons, beginning “When a man’s partner is killed he’s supposed to do something about it”, though he did not like Archer and had slept with his wife. The Flitcraft story adds a second truth, that men adjust to a random universe and then to its ceasing to be random. It holds. What keeps the axis at 8.0 is that the book discloses a stance more than a condition: the city of crooks and police is seen thinly, and the inner life is withheld by design, which limits what can be uncovered about it.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The book’s elevation is cold and rare, and the axis is indifferent to which. Its height is the last chapter: Spade, his face gone pale, setting out his reasons to the woman he may love while the police are on their way; and then the final page, Effie’s recoil from him and the return of Iva, “Well, send her in”, a flat sentence that closes the book like a door. The Flitcraft story has a dry, metaphysical chill. The bird scraped open with a penknife in Spade’s apartment, the fat man’s composure as the treasure of seventeen years turns to lead, is a grand comic deflation. Elsewhere the book is held below transport on purpose: its method is understatement, and frequency counts as well as height. One summit and two lesser rises in a deliberately level run place it below short books whose method is lyric, Jesus’ Son (8.6 here) above all.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Myth built, not evoked, and built around the object. The falcon is a grail: a jewelled tribute from the Knights of Malta to Charles V, lost, enamelled black, chased across centuries and continents by the faithful of greed, and found to be lead. The quest that structures the book ends in a counterfeit, and the hollowness of the treasure is load-bearing: it is what the book means. Spade is a knight with a code and no faith, and the book turns the romance of the knight and his lady inside out by having him surrender the lady to the law. Brigid, with her three names, built much of the archetype of the deceiving woman in American crime fiction. What holds the axis below the gate is that the figures are types more than they become myths: Gutman, Cairo and Wilmer are grotesques of a comic order, and the archetype, though sharp, is narrow.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The inheritance was twofold. The detective novel of 1930 was the clue puzzle of Christie and S. S. Van Dine, a game solved by a reasoning mind for a reader invited to compete; the pulp story of Black Mask, of which Hammett’s own Continental Op stories and Red Harvest (1929) were the best, was violent, fast and written for a magazine. The swerve lies in what Hammett carried from the second into the first and what he dropped: a detective whose honesty is unknown until the last chapter, a narration that refuses the inner life entirely, and a resolution that is a moral decision rather than a deduction. The stake was real: a hero who might be crooked, a heroine sent to hang, no consoling interior. What bounds the axis is priority: much of the turn had been made the year before in Red Harvest and in the Black Mask school, and the falcon refined and concentrated a departure more than it originated one.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. The external narration is the instrument: because the reader is never inside Spade, it cannot be told, through chapter after chapter, whether he is honest, whether he wants the bird, whether he loves Brigid, whether he will sell anyone. The reader is put where Brigid, Gutman and the police are, reading a face, and the last chapter’s decision lands with a force it could not have if his thoughts had been given. A man known only by what he does is a man whose code is the whole of him; the form is the knowledge. The dialogue-led construction, scene after scene of negotiation in hotel rooms and apartments, makes talk the book’s action and lying its medium. What holds the axis at 8.5 is the plot shape the method rides on, the inherited mystery of a death, a hunt and a disclosure, used with mastery rather than remade.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Evidence first: ninety-six years of reading, and a criticism of real size, carried on in the study of American fiction as well as in the genre’s own commentary. The questions stay open. Whether Spade loves Brigid, and how far his reasons are a performance even to himself; whether he meant from the start to give her up or decided late; what the Flitcraft story means to the man who tells it and to the woman who does not understand it; whether Spade is the code’s hero or its victim, given Effie’s recoil at the end. The prose rewards return at the level of the gesture and the line of dialogue, where the evasions are exact. What holds the axis at 8.0 is concentration: the yield gathers in one character and two chapters, the seventh and the twentieth, and the rest of the book, once its plot is known, gives back less on a third reading than on a second.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The field is the American novel of its decade, and the detective novel in English. The force: the book showed that the detective story could carry a serious moral argument, and that a prose of surfaces, the objective method it shares with Hemingway, could make a genre plot into a novel. That reorganised what the crime novel could be. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Raymond Chandler took Hammett as his founder and said so in “The Simple Art of Murder” (1944), and Philip Marlowe descends from Spade; Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer takes his surname from Spade’s partner; the private eye as a man of code in a corrupt city, through Chandler, Macdonald, Spillane and their successors, is Spade’s figure; the deceiving client passed into film noir, which John Huston’s version of 1941 helped found; and the French série noire took the American hard-boiled school as its model. What holds the axis at 8.6 is shared credit: much of the reach belongs also to Red Harvest and the Black Mask school, and what was reorganised was a genre more than the novel at large.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Ninety-six years are weighed as ninety-six years, in the band of seventy years to two centuries. The text survives whole, in the form Hammett gave it, with nothing lost and nothing in dispute beyond the minor difference between serial and book. The presence is continuous and wide: the novel is carried in the Library of America’s volume of the complete novels (1999), taught in courses on American fiction and on the genre, and translated widely. The films made from it are presence and earn at most a tenth; they are counted for no more. The surface is fixed to a moment in its slang and manners, the “gunsel”, the hotel rooms, the telephone at the bedside, but as setting rather than as a production era, and the book does not depend on it. What holds the axis at the foot of its band is that the presence, though wide, sits in the genre’s reading more than in the widest reading of the American fiction of its time.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged on Hammett’s English. The command is of dialogue and surface. The talk is exact, and each voice is its own: Gutman’s ornate, delighted periods, Cairo’s precise and fussy speech, Wilmer’s threats, Spade’s mockery, “The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter”. Scenes of five people in one room are kept clear without a word of interior. The opening portrait, “Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony”, builds him from a series of v’s to “a blond satan” and sets the method in a paragraph. The plot is tightly made, its reversals timed, its clues fair to anyone who reads faces. Charged: the inventory of clothes and gestures, the rolling of cigarettes described at length, is sometimes method and sometimes mannerism, and the prose has no range beyond its one register, so that the making is masterly in a narrow band. Below Jesus’ Son (8.8 here), whose sentences turn more finely; well above the run of its genre.
Score: 8.6 / 10
One law governs the whole: everyone acts for gain and says what serves, and the only fixed point is a code that cannot justify itself. Take the two most distant elements: the comic opera of the chase, Cairo’s gun and perfumed handkerchief, Gutman’s speeches, the bargaining in Spade’s flat over who will be handed to the police as the fall guy while the sun comes up; and the last chapter’s cold reckoning between Spade and Brigid. They obey the same law. The bargaining over Wilmer and the bargaining over Brigid are one transaction, and Spade’s terms do not change between them. The Flitcraft story, the bird’s history and the police scenes keep to it as well. Narrowness is not coherence, and what holds the axis at 8.6 is range: comedy, menace and a sharp grief are all held, but in one register and one milieu.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged as a short novel, on what it holds. The city, as its hotels, offices and streets. The law, in the police, a district attorney and a lawyer, in their corrupt or indifferent workings. Money and greed, the book’s engine. Sex and love, in Spade’s affairs with Iva and Brigid, and in Effie’s loyalty and her final recoil. Death, four times: Miles Archer, Floyd Thursby, Captain Jacobi on the stage of the book, and Gutman reported in the last chapter. History, in the bird’s passage from Malta through Sicily, Paris and Constantinople to a Russian general’s house, told by Gutman. Labour, in a small way, in the business of a detective agency. They are integrated, since greed binds them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the count and the depth: the family, the state beyond its police, the sacred and the natural order are absent, and consciousness is withheld by design. A small form, honestly small.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.0, then The Made, The Inner Law and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6, and The Living Form at 8.5. A text whole and continuously present for ninety-six years; dialogue in which every voice is its own and five people in a room stay clear without interior; one law of gain that governs the comic bargaining and the last reckoning alike; a book from which the private eye of code, Marlowe and Lew Archer descend; and an external narration that keeps the reader where the other persons stand, reading a face, until the decision.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.0, held by the count and the depth of what a short novel holds: no family, no sacred, no natural order, the state seen only as its police, and consciousness withheld by design. Next above it, The Sublime at 7.4: one summit in the last chapter and two lesser rises in a run held level on purpose. Then The Unconcealment and The Bottomless Well at 8.0: a stance disclosed more than a condition, in a city seen thinly, and a yield concentrated in one character and two chapters.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.5, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.0 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.3 falls two tenths short, The Archetypal Deep at 8.2 three and The Unconcealment at 8.0 five. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Sublime, 7.4, a tenth below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.0. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The aggregate stands below 9.0 in any case, and the novel is placed in the Canonical tier on its standing of 8.2.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, serialised in Black Mask in five parts from September 1929 to January 1930 and published in book form by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, in February 1930. It is scored as the Knopf book text of 1930, which Hammett revised from the serial: a novel in twenty titled chapters, in Hammett’s English, with no translation between. This is the text carried by the Library of America volume of the complete novels (1999) and by the Vintage Crime paperback. No text was in hand and nothing was measured on one; the principal scenes, the chapter order and some lines are known closely, and only words known with certainty are quoted, citing the chapter where it is given. John Huston’s film of 1941 is a separate work: nothing of it is scored here, and the line most often quoted from it is the film’s own and not the novel’s. Matters that could not be verified, among them the extent of Hammett’s revisions to the serial, the chapter titles, the word count, the year in which the action is set, the date Gutman gives for the tribute, the proportion of dialogue to narrative and the unbroken printing history, are not given.