Politics and Society in Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (original) (raw)

Before The Maltese Falcon: The Hard-boiled Hero in Dashiell Hammett's Early Stories

Although Dashiell Hammett is well-known as the creator of the hard-boiled detective hero, at the beginning of his writing career he also published a few short stories in which he criticized this fictional stereotype. This paper draws attention to those stories, from Hammett’s first, “The Barber and his Wife”, which is a surprising attack on male chauvinism, to his western and adventure stories where he explores the contradictions of the fictional hard-boiled hero. Finally, the detective in The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade, is considered in the light of the self-critical image of this stereotype as portrayed in these little known early stories. Spade emerges as a far more complex character than some interpretations would take us to believe, an ambiguous figure who should not be confused with other versions of the hard-boiled detective.

“Politics and the 1920s Writings of Dashiell Hammett”

American Studies Journal

This essay examines the relationship between politics and the early writings of hard-boiled detective author Dashiell Hammett. Although Hammett in the mid-1930s joined the American Communist Party, most of his writing (published in the 1920s) is not typically left-wing. In fact, as with other modernist writers of the 1920s, there are portions of his writings that lend themselves to distinctly conservative, even reactionary, readings. The essay examines Hammett’s experience as a Pinkerton detective and its influence on his writing; his relationship to modernism; and his later Communism. Although Hammett is not a central figure in American literature in the broad sense, examining his writings in the 1920s allows not only to better understand the political origins of hard-boiled detective writing, but also to understand the greater social changes the U.S. was undergoing at the time.

Owning It: Dashiell Hammett, Martha Ivers, and the Poisonous Noir City.

NEO: Journal for Higher Degree Research Students in the Social Sciences and Humanities, 2011

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (Lewis Milestone, 1946) emerged during a period of radical filmmaking before the McCarthyist crackdown on left-wing elements in Hollywood. This film noir melodrama exposes the murderous political, legal, and economic foundation of (the fictional) Iverstown, Pennsylvania, said to be ‘America’s Fastest Growing Industrial City.’ The power nexus is an arranged marriage between the city’s industrial heiress and an alcoholic District Attorney. Sam Masterson, a war veteran and drifter, is the unwitting catalyst for the self-destruction of this corrupt political order. This paper examines the foundational influence of Dashiell Hammett’s hardboiled urban vision on the archetypal ‘poisonous noir city’, of which Iverstown is an outstanding example. Hammett’s novel Red Harvest (1929) is set in the mining town of Personville or Poisonville (based on Butte, Montana) following the defeat of a worker revolt organised by the Industrial Workers of the World. The physical spaces of Personville are mapped as we follow the Continental Op’s malicious interference with the fluxing alliances of political and criminal power. In its employme nt of what Dennis Broe calls the ‘outside–the–law fugitive protagonist’, Martha Ivers maps the postwar urban landscape of Iverstown through Sam’s attempts to negotiate with the city’s corrupt power nexus. If Red Harvest dramatizes a brief moment of criminal anarchy in the aftermath of the violent suppression of a workers’ revolt, Martha Ivers updates the poisonous noir city to an era of capitalist triumph. Taken together, the novel and film present a grim chronology of workers’ fortunes under twentieth century industrial progress.

The Politics of Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest

Mosaic : a journal for the comparative study of literature.

Although Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest is often read as a Marxist novel, this essay argues that the novel's politics are much more ambiguous, reflecting Hammett's position at the time as between his earlier employment as a Pinkerton detective and his later sympathy with the Communist Party.

The Maltese Falcon = √-1: Lacan, Bentham and the Necessary Fiction of Noir

“Mr Spade, I have a terrible, terrible confession to make: that story I told you yesterday was just a story.” The Maltese Falcon (Huston, 1941) is concerned throughout with truth and lies; moreover, there is a willingness to treat certain lies as if they were true. Indeed, the falcon statue itself is the film’s proton-pseudos: it is a fake, an object that “does not exist” but nonetheless sets the narrative in motion. More than a lie, such a construction works as a fiction. This paper will suggest that Lacan’s much misunderstood references to the square root of minus one provide a useful way in which to approach the fictions that structure The Maltese Falcon. Referencing the necessity in mathematics of introducing an imaginary number (the fictional value i) for the square root of minus one, Lacan insists in “The Subversion of the Subject” upon the necessary fiction of signification for the functioning of the Symbolic order. Signification, imaginary number, falcon: none of which “exists” but all of which “function”. Each exercises an influence as a fiction, granting its respective field – language, mathematics, film – a certain consistency that would otherwise be lacking. Finally, through an examination of the film’s use of the figure of the “fall guy”, I will seek to draw Lacan’s discussion of the imaginary number into a relation with his (brief) references to Jeremy Bentham’s Theory of Fictions. I will explore the way in which The Maltese Falcon suggests a reconsideration (and expansion) of Lacan’s engagement – particularly in Seminar VII – with Bentham, to highlight a necessary, imaginary dimension of structure that is common to the work of psychoanalyst, philosopher and film alike.

A Necessary Fiction: The Maltese Falcon = √-1

"“Mr Spade, I have a terrible, terrible confession to make: that story I told you yesterday was just a story.” The Maltese Falcon (1941) is concerned throughout with truth and lies; moreover, there is a willingness to treat certain lies as if they were true. Indeed, the Falcon statue itself is the film’s proton-pseudos: it is a fake, an object that “does not exist” but nonetheless sets the narrative in motion. More than a lie, such a construction works as a fiction. This paper will suggest that Lacan’s much misunderstood references to the square root of minus one provide a useful way in which to approach the fictions that structure the narrative of The Maltese Falcon. In his commentary on the imaginary number in ‘Subversion of the Subject’, Lacan insists – in a comparison with the necessity in mathematics to introduce the fictional value i for the square root of minus one – upon the necessary fiction of signification for the functioning of the Symbolic order. Signification, imaginary number, Falcon: none of which “exist” but all of which “function”. Each exercises an influence as a fiction, granting its respective field – language, mathematics, narrative – a certain consistency that would otherwise be lacking. Finally, through an examination of the film’s use of the figure of the “fall guy”, this paper will seek to draw Lacan’s discussion of the imaginary number into a relation with his (brief) references to Jeremy Bentham’s Theory of Fictions. I will explore the way in which The Maltese Falcon suggests a reconsideration (and expansion) of Lacan’s engagement – particularly in Seminar VII – with Bentham, to highlight a necessary, imaginary dimension of structure that is common to the work of psychoanalyst, philosopher and film alike."