A class of their own: Sam Spade, Dashiell Hammett, and the the Hard-Boiled Detective

Two years after the last Sherlock Holmes story, “The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place” (1927) was published, an interesting new literary detective appeared: Sam Spade, protagonist of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon. While Sherlock Holmes would remain the quintessential fictional detective, the newcomer Sam Spade would represent a paradigm shift in the genre, turning the literary detective from the unique, virtuous consulting Holmes, to the shady private investigator.

Holmes boasted he's the only one of his kind. He is not a police investigator; he’s a consulting detective: a private individual to whom government and police officials go when their own skills are insufficient. Similarly, Holmes possess a certain classlessness: he is socially mobile, working for the wealthy, the noble, and the poor, demonstrating at varying times gentlemanly and bohemian traits: immaculate in attention to his appearance and yet Baker Street is a perpetual mess (from the few indications we receive); he enjoys attending concerts and, when bored, will generously partake of opium or cocaine, habits Watson openly detests. Holmes is therefore both rarefied and reified: unique, beyond the scope of normal people and minds, yet has Watson and other traits to ground him in reality. With no disrespect, Holmes is almost a cartoon character: the stories represent him in a believable way, until we really start thinking about it.

This is not Sam Spade. The only major similarities that emerge between Sam Spade, the man who looks “rather pleasantly like a blond Satan,” and Sherlock Holmes are their shared profession, and even there, it gets fuzzy. There's little resemblance between the two, and the same could be said for the other hard-boiled detectives who follow in Spade's wake: Spade and his hard-boiled fellows form a class of their own.

The hard-boiled literary private investigators are not the generous gentlemen of Holmes and Watson, liminal figures free to move almost with impunity. They belong in their own social sphere: Spade and his business partner, Archer, formed a partnership presumably not to split the rent but because they both share the same profession, and neither can claim to be its sole practitioner. They’re not anomalous like Holmes, existing beyond and between the societal norms: they’re just representatives of a certain class of individuals, a subculture that pokes its way through other subcultures and those who inhabit them.

Spade, Archer, and others of their ilk inhabit a class of snoops and sneaks, working for their clients and not necessarily for the social good. They’re frequently violent men who carry guns not in case they encounter something dangerous (as Holmes infrequently asks Watson to bring his revolver) but because they will encounter something dangerous. They drink and smoke habitually and are near constant loners. They generally live alone and work alone, a pest to the official forces rather than an aid. Social outsiders rather than social maintainers.

It can be said Spade and his literary compatriots take what Holmes represents and turn it down a dark, cynical, violent path. However, this is not simply an inversion of style or character, but is the result of social changes that set apart the rigid but precarious Victorian world with the more cynical and experimental post war era of Modernism. We can then turn to three different contributing factors that created very different worlds for the 1887 A Study in Scarlet and 1929's The Maltese Falcon to appear in.

• First of all, Dashiell Hammett was himself a Pinkerton detective, as opposed to Doyle's professional life as a physician and occasional police consultant.
• Second, Spade and Hammett are Americans, not British, meaning many of the philosophies about social hierarchy and class distinction that undercut much of Doyle's work are absent.
• Third, the The Maltese Falcon was published in 1929 – after the first World War, and after the Stock Market Crash.

All of these factors, which I'll address in more detail in the coming posts, all converge on the creation of a different kind of detective, and while Dashiell Hammett and Sam Spade may never eclipse Doyle and Holmes in popularity, they nevertheless form a progression in the development and solidifying of a significant literary genre.

Detective Fiction and Social Spheres: Sherlock Holmes and “A Jury of Her Peers”

Detective Fiction has an interesting social potential, something I alluded to in the posts about Sherlock Holmes, but is more pertinent with Glaspell's “A Jury of Her Peers.” Detective Fiction gives us a way to look at the different fears, concerns, and anxieties not just in general, but of specific social groups, and even how different social groups are anxious about one another. The juxtaposition of “A Jury of Her Peers” and Sherlock Holmes gives an interesting comparison.

Sherlock Holmes stories typically deal with a range of nationalities, racial issues, gender, and social classes. It has been strongly argued Holmes himself relies on these different social spheres to make his deductions, and it's his dependence on these that lets Irene Adler get away. Sherlock Holmes is almost always working to get people back where they belong, ultimately reinforcing Victorian standards.

“A Jury of Her Peers” works similarly: relying on social norms and expectations to identify where there's deviance, but to a different end than Sherlock Holmes. Rather than reinforce the social norms, “A Jury of Her Peers” works to criticize the social norms in the way it presents gender, marriage, and household dynamics. The gender dynamic is the main one here because gender determines social roles: men are farmers, attorneys, and sheriffs. Women are housewives. Men work outside the home in the serious business world. Women work in the home and kitchen, surrounded by, to use the men's term, “trifles.”

Bad men in Sherlock Holmes stories fail in their prescribed social roles: they are bad husbands, brothers, and lovers, and Holmes comes to remove the bad masculinity and replace it with Victorian normativity. “A Jury of Her Peers” features a bad husband but the other male characters make no suggestion they see him as a bad husband. If anything, they criticize the way Minnie has run her house, where Martha and Mrs. Peters are able to see how Mr. Wright made Minnie’s life miserable by being a bad husband. “A Jury of Her Peers” doesn't say “Here's an example of a man failing at his social role” but rather, “Here's a woman who suffered because she was caught in a bad situation with a bad husband.”

When we read “A Jury of Her Peers” as not about a murder but about the way women are treated and the bad situations women have, we stop looking just at Minnie Foster and look at how the other women in the story are represented. Martha Hale and Mrs. Peters may not suffer to the same extent Minnie Foster did, but they are more victims of social normativity than benefactors: Martha Hale is clearly more mature and rational than her husband, but she does as he says because he's her husband, and Mrs. Peters, “married to the law” is tacit and nervous, overshadowed by her husband. Martha Hale and Mrs. peters situation is most exemplified by the silence: rather than defend Minnie Foster, they hide the incriminating bird. To a modern reader, this can seem odd, but women in 1917 wouldn't have been listened to.

“A Jury of Her Peers” gives us a unique look of a woman's perspective on social situations from a century ago. Fiction’s ability to transport us to different lives is hardly a secret. Detective Fiction, though, does interesting things with this social dynamic. Specifically, by placing the detective in new, often unfamiliar situations. Doing so requires the detective have an outsider's perspective while still having to understand the culture if they're to solve the mystery. In doing so a detective may have to go from social sphere to social sphere getting a better understanding of customs and anxieties as they see how people behave appropriately and inappropriately in these various subcultures to solve the mystery.