Review: Return of the Maltese Falcon - Max Allan Collins

I’m starting the new year off well with an excellent novel from Max Allan Collins. I’ve been a fan of THE MALTESE FALCON since I read the novel in high school, the first thing by Dashiell Hammett I ever read, I believe. Needless to say, I was hooked. Now the original magazine version of the novel, as serialized in the iconic pulp BLACK MASK, is in public domain, and that’s what Collins has used as the starting point for his new novel RETURN OF THE MALTESE FALCON, which, as he points out, is a continuation rather than a true sequel.

And if, by some chance, you’ve never read Hammett’s novel, stop right now and read it before you read this review, and absolutely don’t tackle Collins’ novel until you’ve read the original, because they’re both, of necessity, full of spoilers. I mean it!

The action starts a week after the end of THE MALTESE FALCON, in December 1928. The dead Miles Archer’s desk has been removed from the office of Spade & Archer, and Effie Perrine, Sam Spade’s secretary, has put up a Christmas tree in its place. (Does that make this a Christmas novel? It sure does!)

A potential client pays a visit to Spade’s office. She’s Rhea Gutman, Casper Gutman’s daughter, and she wants to hire Spade to find the real Falcon. The one in Hammett’s novel was a fake, remember? Rhea is the first of four clients who give Spade a retainer to find the dingus. The others are Chicago gambler Dixie Monahan, Corrine Wonderly, the younger sister of femme fatale Brigid O’Shaughnessy, and Steward Blackwood, an official from the British Museum who claims that institution is the true owner of the Falcon.

Spade plays all these characters against each other. He has run-ins with the cops. A dead body turns up. Spade is hit on the head and knocked out, and he’s captured by a gunman who wants to kill him. This is great stuff in the classic hardboiled private eye mode, the kind of thing that Dashiell Hammett invented, along with Carroll John Daly. Stylistically, Collins’ fast-moving, straight-ahead prose isn’t quite as stripped down as Hammett’s, but it’s certainly in the same ballpark.

Being constrained to use only the elements to be found in the original novel’s pulp serialization turns out to be a good thing. Collins is able to bring on-stage characters who were only mentioned before and invent new ones who fit perfectly in that setting. The resolution of the mystery and the way the book wraps everything up are extremely satisfying.

A number of years ago, I read and loved Joe Gores’ prequel novel SPADE & ARCHER. RETURN OF THE MALTESE FALCON is even better. I’m glad Max Allen Collins wrote it, and I’m grateful to Hard Case Crime for publishing it. It’ll be out officially in e-book and hardcover editions tomorrow. For hardboiled fans, I give it my highest recommendation.

Christmas Books

I hope everyone had as good a Christmas as I did today. All four of us were together, the food was plentiful and delicious, I even got a little work done early, and there was some top-notch reading material under the tree, among other things. It was a fine Christmas, and tonight I count myself among the luckiest of fellows.

Now Available: The Digest Enthusiast, Book Three

The latest edition of THE DIGEST ENTHUSIAST is out, and as always, it's a pure pleasure to read, especially for those of us who are long-time fans of magazine fiction in all its forms. Highlights this time around are two pieces by Peter Enfantino: "The Horror of the Creeping Monsters", an in-depth look at SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION, including a synopsis and discussion of every single story in the magazine's 18 issues; and a similar treat of the even more short-lived (two issues) Western digest GUNSMOKE. I also thoroughly enjoyed Steve Carper's look at the digest appearances of Dashiell Hammett's novels and stories. All the articles and reviews are interesting, and there's fiction by Ron Fortier, Joe Wehrle Jr., and Gary Lovisi. A great package all around, and highly recommended.

Forgotten Books: Hammett: A Life at the Edge - William F. Nolan

Evan Lewis's recent posts about Dashiell Hammett and the Continental Op have put me in the mood to reread some of Hammett's work. I haven't gotten around to doing that yet, but when I ran across a copy of this 1983 biography of Hammett at Half Price Books, I didn't hesitate to pick it up. Not only am I interested in the subject, but the book is also by William F. Nolan, who's written a number of other books, both fiction and non-fiction, that I've enjoyed.

I've read quite a bit about Hammett over the years, but this is the first actual biography of him that I've read. Not surprisingly, I already knew something about many of the events Nolan covers, but there was a considerable amount of information that was new to me as well, such as a detailed look at the abandoned novel that Hammett wound up turning into THE THIN MAN. I wasn't aware of just how many times he started other novels, only to give up on them, either. And this book includes the most detailed account I've read so far about the time Hammett spent serving in the army during World War II, stationed in the Aleutian Islands.

Of course, I was most interested in all the stuff about Hammett's writing career. It's always fascinating to me to read about what an author wrote, for who, and how much he got paid for it. I love all those behind-the-scenes publishing stories. Nolan does an excellent job of striking a balance between presenting the facts and offering some critical analysis of Hammett's work without ever getting too heavy-handed about it. If anything, this book just made me want to reread the novels and stories even more, which I suppose is one thing a good biography of a writer ought to do.

I don't know how Hammett scholars regard this volume, but I never claimed to be a scholar of any kind and I thoroughly enjoyed it. If you're a Hammett fan and run across a copy like I did, it's well worth reading.

The Continental Opposite - Evan Lewis

The Continental Op is one of my all-time favorite characters and has been ever since I was in high school and discovered the paperbacks reprinting the stories that featured him. If you'd asked me, I wouldn't have been sure that anybody could do justice to the character in a pastiche.

But by golly, that's exactly what Evan Lewis has done in his story "The Continental Opposite" in the May issue of ALFRED HITCHCOCK MYSTERY MAGAZINE.

He accomplishes this by doing something very clever. The Op is an important supporting character in this story, but the protagonist and narrator is another operative for Continental in 1953, a young Korean War veteran named Peter Collins (a nod to Dashiell Hammett's early pseudonym Peter Collinson). Collins works for the agency's Portland office and suspects that his boss is crooked. The Old Man, as Collins calls him (but we all know who he really is) is a retired operative sent to get to the bottom of the matter.

This set-up leads to a fast-paced adventure involving local gangsters, political corruption, opium dens, and other good stuff. Lewis doesn't slavishly imitate Hammett but instead tells the story in his own effective, hardboiled style.

"The Continental Opposite" is the first story in a series, and I eagerly await the next one. Highly recommended.

(If your local bookstore or newsstand doesn't carry AHMM, which is entirely possible in this day and age, you can buy single e-book issues or subscribe to the e-book version on Amazon.)

One More Reason to Love the Internet, Don Herron Edition

Don Herron, expert on Robert E. Howard, Dashiell Hammett, and Charles Willeford, as well as an all-around gentleman and scholar, launches a new blog today on his website, with a post marking the 50th anniversary of Hammett's death.  Check it out.  (That's Dash in the picture, not Don, in case you didn't know.)

Spade & Archer - Joe Gores

No Forgotten Book from me this week, but I do have some comments on a book that’s a deliberate throwback to another era. Joe Gores’ SPADE & ARCHER is a prequel to Dashiell Hammett’s THE MALTESE FALCON, one of the greatest – if not the greatest – private eye novels ever written. I have to admire anyone who would even attempt such a thing, let alone an author who could pull it off successfully. Thankfully, Gores does.

He starts with what I think is a brilliant decision to structure the novel in the form of three linked novellas, harkening back to Hammett’s novels RED HARVEST and THE DAIN CURSE. SPADE & ARCHER is a little different, of course, because its component parts were written to be published together, instead being published first as separate stories in BLACK MASK. Also, the time span of SPADE & ARCHER is longer than what you usually find in novels that were actually cobbled together from pulp yarns, since the three parts take place in 1921, 1925, and 1928. The first part begins with Sam Spade in Tacoma, working for the Continental Detective Agency (that’s right, he’s a Continental Op), but it’s not long before he moves to San Francisco and opens his own one-man agency, hiring a seventeen-year-old girl named Effie Perrine as his secretary. He investigates the theft of a small fortune in gold coins from a ship that arrives in San Francisco and also locates the runaway teenage son of a wealthy banker.

Those two plotlines crop up again in the second part, set four years later, which finds Spade investigating the death of another banker that might be natural causes, might be suicide, or might be murder. Gores continues weaving together strands from the first two parts in the concluding section, in which Spade takes on a partner, an old detective acquaintance named Miles Archer who happens to be married to a woman who was in love with Spade before he went off to fight in World War I. The newly-formed Spade & Archer agency investigates the theft of a large amount of cargo from the San Francisco docks, while Spade on his own tries to track down a quarter of a million dollars in buried treasure. Gores winds up tying everything together in a complex plot worthy of the pulp era.

That faithfulness to the roots of the hardboiled PI genre is this book’s greatest achievement, as far as I’m concerned. Other than a greater amount of frankness about the fact that Spade is sleeping with Iva Archer and with some of his female clients, SPADE & ARCHER really could have been written and published in the 1920s. Some authors these days, if they were trying to write a prequel to THE MALTESE FALCON, probably would have felt compelled to coarsen the language and make the sex and violence more graphic. Not Gores. He’s content to spin a pulp yarn and does a magnificent job of it.

Some readers are opposed to the concept of pastiches in general, and I can understand that. It would be pretty hypocritical of me to feel that way, however, since I’ve always made a large part of my living writing about characters created by other people. I do believe, though, that an author writing a pastiche ought to at least try to stay faithful to the spirit of the original creation. That’s what Joe Gores has done in SPADE & ARCHER. I’m sure a lot of you have read this book already, but if you haven’t, it gets my highest recommendation. It’s a wonderful novel, and probably the best thing I’ve read so far this year. And it really, really makes me want to reread some Hammett.