A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Spade & Archer - Joe Gores

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.

(Despite my good intentions [road to Hell paved with, etc., etc.] I don't recall reading anything else by Dashiell Hammett since this post originally appeared on May 1, 2009. I have, however, read Max Allan Collins' terrific RETURN OF THE MALTESE FALCON and highly recommend it as well. SPADE & ARCHER is still available in e-book and paperback editions, and if you're a private eye fan and haven't read it yet, you should grab a copy and remedy that.)

Interface - Joe Gores

I really enjoyed Joe Gores’ novels HAMMETT, featuring the famous author as the protagonist, and SPADE AND ARCHER, his prequel to THE MALTESE FALCON. I also recall liking his early novels about private detective Dan Kearney and the agency Kearney runs. So I expected to like INTERFACE. For one thing, it was highly recommended to me by both Bill Crider and Ed Gorman. Somehow, though, I never got around to reading it in the past four decades I’ve known about it. Until now.

INTERFACE starts with a drug deal gone bad. A mysterious man named Docker kills one of the men involved in the deal and takes off with a briefcase filled with a quarter of a million dollars worth of heroin and $175,000 in cash. For the next twenty-four hours, he leads various people on a not-so-merry chase through San Francisco and its environs. Among the people involved in this pursuit are Neal Fargo, a private detective who’s no better than he has to be; a couple of crooked businessmen; a wealthy industrialist whose daughter has disappeared; a sadistic, knife-wielding chauffeur; a drug-addicted prostitute; assorted cops; and a network of lowlifes who work for the various criminals. Gores keeps things moving so fast and throws in so many different angles that this is almost a book where it would pay to keep character lists and draw diagrams.

I didn’t go to that much trouble, of course, and maybe as a result I figured there was no way Gores could tie all this up into a plot that made sense. He not only did that, but he also threw in a late twist that I didn’t see coming at all, although when I look back at everything that happened in the book, I can see that it was set up fair and square. And it's really effective, raising the book, in my opinion, from one that’s very good to one that’s excellent.

The gimmick, if you can call it that, in INTERFACE is that we never get into any of the characters’ thoughts. Gores gives us their dialogue and actions, and that’s it. Anything else, we have to interpolate ourselves. That really adds to the hardboiled tone and helps make the complicated plot work.

I don’t think INTERFACE is as good as HAMMETT and SPADE AND ARCHER, and I’m not quite sure that it lives up to its reputation as one of the best hardboiled crime novels ever written. But it is very much worth reading, and I’m glad I finally got around to doing that. There are a few other Gores stand-alones I’ve never read. I’m thinking I ought to.

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.