Powers and Limitations: Polhaus, Dundy, and Bryan

In the course of The Maltese Flacon, Sam Spade periodically has to deal with the official police force; specifically, Detective Tom Polhaus, Police Lieutenant Dundy, and District Attorney Bryan. However, while each character is unique (Polhaus is much more willing to work with Sam than Dundy is; Dundy himself remains quiet and frustrated, and the District Attorney knows he has to save face as a public figure), they appear less often than Brigid, Cairo, Cook, or Gutman, but their roles in the novel are important in ensuring a satisfying outcome by enabling the civil justice Spade cannot.

The generic role of the official force when the protagonist is a private investigator (or really any competing detective) is to follow the wrong track. They provide alternative hypotheses about the case and sometimes even provide relevant information but have a tendency to misinterpret it, but are, never the ones to solve it. Because of this, the detective has a tendency to keep them in the dark about certain things, lest the police interfere in the investigation, especially when it's a private detective versus the official police. In some cases, not only will they compete with the protagonist but they will actively try to impede and harass the detective.

Sometimes, the official detectives' case is tangential to the protagonist’s. The Maltese Falcon is one such case. Once Spade gets caught up in the mystery of the Falcon, solving that mystery becomes part and parcel to discovering who killed Archer and Thursby, and his lack of sympathy makes us almost forget Archer until the very end when Spade reminds Brigid about it. For Spade, finding the Falcon meant finding out who killed his partner. Polhaus and Dundy never seek the Falcon. They don't even learn about it until the end.

Which begs the question: had they known, could they have done anything about the Falcon?

Polhaus, Dundy, and Bryan focus on Thursby's past as a gambler's bodyguard, an aspect of Thursby's background Spade learns from them, but it never directly affects Spade's investigation (that Thursby's Webley had killed Archer, though, Spade does use). Spade, on the other hand, does not reveal any of his investigation, conclusions, or hypotheses to them, As Spade himself says, “Mrs. Spade didn't raise any children dippy enough to make guesses in front of a district attorney.”

Of course, come the novel's end, Spade has discovered the murderers and found (or rather received) the Falcon, effectively doing Polhaus and Dundy's jobs for them while they were looking into Thursby's past. However, Spade can only do their job up to a point. As a private investigator, Spade does not have the power or authority to actually arrest, hold, or try the guilty party, and given Spade's double dealing, it would be difficult to tell whether he's an honest or dishonest man at the end. We may wonder on that point throughout the novel, but the inclusion of Polhaus and Dundy, the official policeman, means Spade has more options than to merely side with or betray Gutman and his gang. Spade has the option to side with law and order.

Polhaus and Dundy take Spade from an extreme and situate him in the middle. Ostensibly, Spade is like Polhaus and Dundy, but the range of his powers are different from theirs. He cannot incarcerate anyone, but can choose his cases. A case the police wouldn't take, he would. Similarly, where the official police are bound by their position, Spade is, like Gutman and his gang, a little freer to move around, engage in some more underhanded dealings, lie a little easier, or even be a little more honest. Spade is obligated only to his license (the revocation of which is threatened) and his conscience and only limited to the investigative powers his license affords him. Spade needs Polhaus, Dundy, and Bryan to ensure the villains' capture and to keep Spade from being one of them.

Playing with the rules, not by them: Irene Adler

Where Moriarty's interesting trait was his absence, Irene Adler is interesting because she’s too present. She’s on Serpentine avenue, turning men's heads; singing on the operatic stage; haunting Ormstein's past, present, and future; in the church getting married; in a young man's ulster coat; and, finally, in the infamous photographs (one as a tool for blackmail, the other as a memento). By being present in so many ways and so many places, Adler strains against and breaks the social codes that governed Victorian society.

In “A Scandal in Bohemia,”Adler has a photograph, evidence of an affair between Adler and King Ormstein of Bohemia, which she threatens to reveal shortly before his wedding to a Scandanavian princess. Ormstein gives no details of the tryst, but his association with someone who isn't nobility like himself is scandalous enough. This is more than an illicit love affair. It crosses social class and nationality as well. The social anxieties introduced in “Bohemia” deal with sexual, social, and international borders. If there's a line to be crossed, Adler crosses it.

This was, of course, at a simpler (and I say that with sarcasm, not nostalgia) time, when women were seen in one of two lights: the housewife or the harlot. It's easy to classify Adler as the harlot because of her illicit relationship with a king, whether or not it was sexual. However, there's more to it than that. The housewife, also called the “angel in the home”, was supposed to stay and keep the house in order while men went out into the world. The border-crossing Adler leaves the domestic sphere for the professional one, putting her femininity on display, “turning the heads” of the men on Serpentine Avenue and in the opera house as a professional contralto. Adler's threat is to social structure and hierarchy. Rather than adhere to the rules that maintain order, she toys with and passes right over them, just as she crosses the Atlantic Ocean from New Jersey to Europe or social boundaries by romancing a king.

So why not cross even more boundaries? While Holmes is trailing her, he witnesses Adler's church marriage to Mr. Norton, a lawyer. In doing so, Adler, technically, goes from the scandalous harlot to the domesticated housewife in the eyes of civil law, divine law, and, much to his chagrin, Holmes himself. Holmes changes the way he reads her and judges her behavior. Holmes relies on people to fit in rigid social codes and uses these codes to deduce where people came from and how they'll behave.

While most of the people Holmes encounters adhere to these expectations, Adler doesn’t. So, because she was married in a church, Holmes expects her to be a dutiful Victorian bride and so uses maternal instincts to justify his conclusion for where the photograph is. What Holmes does not anticipate is her crossing the gender barrier to confirm her suspicions she's being tailed by Holmes, Adler disguises herself as a young man by donning an ulster coat to follow Holmes and Watson to Baker Street, and, even though she wishes Holmes good evening, he doesn’t recognize her, allowing Adler and her husband to escape with the photograph.

Adler is pervasive. She appears on many different layers, crossing the finely defined social borders that governed Victorian society (and we're still dealing with today). She's like Moriarty in that people can be more, and even something quite contrary, to what they appear to be, but where we can take Moriarty and decide conclusively that he is a villain, Adler is harder to identify. Her pervasiveness makes her elusive because it is difficult, even impossible to assign labels to her, labels she is perfectly comfortable switching around to suit her needs.