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.)

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.